by Tim Jeal
Before she left for America, May introduced Stanley to her rich friend Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceuticals millionaire, who was already fascinated by the explorer's career and hoped to supply him with tropical medicines. Stanley co-opted Wellcome into helping him with his search for a wife. But when the chemist urged him to take some young ladies boating, the great navigator of the Congo decided he would do better to make his own plans." He accepted an invitation to stay at Newstead Abbey, after his friend Alexander Bruce had predicted that the elder daughters of the Webb family would be interested in him. Once there, Stanley found that they had eyes only for young aristocrats and he `could scale the moon before making any impres- sion'.'2
When May Sheldon returned to London from America in June 11885, Stanley had still not found a woman whom he even wanted to get to know. His only involvements had been a brief correspondence with an anonymous Austrian woman, and a period being pursued by a crazed female who seems to have claimed that he was the father of her child." Small wonder that at this juncture Stanley wrote to Mrs Sheldon in her new lodgings in Earl's Court, asking if she could find him a house close to her.14 `Bless your heart, my dear friend,' she replied, `it is no trouble.' She then promised that if they should ever be neighbours again, she would not `drag [him] out to places or dinners [he did] not care to go to'." Within days she found him a house in Earl's Court - but at this point fate served up to him, at a private dinner party, Dorothy Tennant, an Englishwoman who was single, intelligent, attractive, well-connected, rich and thirty years old - so a potential mother. This introduction had been effected by the editor of the Daily Telegraph - Stanley's friend, and former sponsor, Edwin Arnold. `What a charming lady Miss Dorothy is!' Henry told Edwin the following day, unaware that the venerable editor was himself a former suitor.
On that same day, 25 June, Stanley wrote to May Sheldon telling her that he was in `a miserable state of uncertainty' and could not make up his mind whether or not to take the Earl's Court house. He gave as his reason the fact that, any day, Leopold might send him back to the Congo. But really he now had another cause for being uncertain what to do.i6 Quite soon he concluded that if he were to have any chance with Dorothy, he ought to see less of Mrs Sheldon. So a few weeks later he moved to another flat, 116o, New Bond Street, rather than to Earl's Court.
In most ways, May would have been the perfect wife for Stanley. Unlike Dorothy, she was not interested in `high society'. Being a journalist, she was never prissy or over-fastidious, and could stand up for herself in any situation. Formal social occasions meant as little to her as they did to Stanley. She enjoyed travelling as he did, and actually became an explorer. But of course she was married, and even if she had decided to divorce her husband, she might not have been able to have children - after all, she was childless after eight years of marriage. So Stanley's best bet seemed to be the younger, unattached Dorothy.
On the evening Stanley had first dined with the Tennants at their house in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, other guests had included Mr Gladstone, who had resigned as prime minister only days earlier, and Joseph Chamberlain.'' The hostess was Gertrude Tennant, the widow of Charles Tennant, the former Liberal MP for St Albans and a large landowner. He had died a dozen years earlier, leaving his wife a rich woman. Charles had been fifty-eight when Dorothy - Dolly to the family - had been born, and in childhood she had lived in dread that he might suddenly die.' Although he had survived until she was nineteen and he seventy-seven, Dolly was inconsolable after his death. Until the 118gos, she would keep a regular, though not quite daily, diary in which entries would begin, typically, `Dear Father', or at more highly charged moments, `My own Darling', and end `Good night my beloved Father'. The diary itself was not as eccentric as the above might suggest. Though volatile, Dolly was a highly intelligent woman with impressive intuitive and intellectual powers. Most diaries act as their writers' confidants, and Dolly's was no exception, helping her to cope with emotions she could not discuss with her mother, to whom she was oppressively close. Dolly was a more complex woman than the bright, socially adept person she often appeared to be. `What contradictions we are. Outspoken - and yet never speaking of oneself to anyone - ambitious to succeed and yet caring nothing for oneself. Joyous and pleasure loving and yet so sorrowful in oneself that happiness seems unnatural."9
The ambitions she referred to were for her painting career, and also for an exalted social life, to which she gave as much energy as to her art. The subjects of her paintings included romanticized `street urchins' and allegorical female nudes. She had been taught at the Slade and had then studied in Paris.z" (Although verging on sentimental kitsch, Dolly's most famous painting, At Play, in which four urchins swing on a rail with the Thames in the background, has stood the test of time and can be bought online as a print.) Dolly exhibited fitfully at the Grosvenor and the New Gallery in Regent Street. Watts had painted her portrait with a squirrel in her arms, and Millais had depicted her pondering a letter, in a painting entitled No!. In fact the men she fell for tended to be father figures, ten or even twenty years older than herself, and usually married and famous, so she may not have turned down any proposals before she met Stanley.
Edwin Arnold had not been a great passion, though he was the ideal age (twenty years her senior). He was also well known, being the editor of a famous newspaper and the author of a famous poem, `The Light of Asia', which had sold in over thirty languages, creating an immense interest in Buddhism. In 11885 Dolly was depressed that he rarely came to see her any more. A few years later he would marry, as his third wife, a twenty-year-old Japanese woman.Z" The great Comedie Francaise actor Constant Benoit Coquelin she had known since her period as an art student in Paris, and she still enjoyed his visits to London, and receiving his letters to `Ma Cherie'. But though he had visited her quite often in the early 1188os, he too was falling away now. She flirted a bit, these days, with the forty-seven-year-old Sir George Trevelyan, the former Chief Secretary for Ireland, now Secretary of State for Scotland, occasionally giving him paintings, about which he wrote admiringly, but he rarely visited her." As Dolly put it: `I have mother, my all, and no one else ... I feel desperately lonely.' And this was despite being an acknowledged beauty, with her auburn hair and creamy complexion." So, in the summer of 11885, the auguries looked reasonably good for Stanley who, besides being famous, was mature enough to appeal, being fourteen years older. His only obvious disadvantage was that he was four or five inches shorter than the statuesque Dolly.14
She seemed interested from the start. Despite describing him in her diary as: `A very short ... determined man', she found `his bearing dignified', and wrote after their first meeting: `I felt I cared for him. I know he cared back for me.' She also told her diary something very significant: Stanley reminded her of Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, with whom she had been infatuated in 11883.2' Dorothy wrote to Stanley the very next day, asking him to call on her. So a few days later, Henry returned to z, Richmond Terrace to take tea. He was admitted by a footman (one of a pair) wearing a yellow coat, knee breeches, pink stockings and powdered wig. Eight servants, including a cook and a butler, looked after Mrs Tennant, Miss Tennant and Master Charles Tennant in London.z6 The whole house had the air of a Louis Philippe salon with white and gold furniture and marbletopped tables.
As a child and young woman, Gertrude had lived in Paris and taken holidays in Trouville. Her father was said to have been a naval attache at the British Embassy, but in fact Admiral Collier had been obliged to live in France to escape his creditors. In the r 84os, Gertrude and her sister, Henrietta, had met Gustave Flaubert, who had soon been attracted strongly to each in turn. Even after they returned to Britain, he corresponded with the sisters for the rest of his life.z7 Through Flaubert, Gertrude had also made friends with Alphonse Daudet and developed a lifelong admiration for writers. But her early experience of poverty and exclusion from fashionable society caused her to admire the wealthy and the powerful too. Her daughter, Dorothy, inherited both these t
raits. Since Henry had no idea that Gertrude had suffered youthful privations, it must have been daunting to be led through these opulent rooms. Certainly, he felt sure that his workhouse years ought to be concealed.
The day after Dolly had received him, she offered to paint his portrait. `I would let you be very comfortable, you shall smoke, and feel just as though you were in your own tent.' She modestly disclaimed any great experience as a portraitist, merely saying that she had 'succeeded before once or twice'.z8 Henry's sittings began in mid-July, and on the first day Dolly wrote a remarkably clear-eyed artist's description of him.
His thick grey hair lies flat and smooth, rather thatch-like ... near silver white; his thick throat supports a splendidly shaped head, broad ... and well-developed ... His forehead is square, his eyes are very remarkable ... they make you sincere, they demand of you your very self ... His mouth is partly concealed by a grizzly moustache ... the nether lip is masterful and determined ... His face is somewhat marked by exposure to the sun, by fever, by responsibility, by anxiety ... His eyes look tender and sorrowful ... He uses his hands very much when talking ... What seized me when I first saw him ... is his powerfulness ... Mother also felt it.
In her small studio, known as the `Birdcage', Dolly got to know Stanley as he sat for her. He usually came at eleven and stayed till two. `He speaks so frankly ... so confidingly,' she wrote after a month. `He tells me about himself, his hopes, his ambitions, his struggles.'29 He admitted that although he ought to be sent to Africa as Governor-General of the Congo, this might never happen. `The Belgians murmur at an American, or rather an Englishman, becoming the head of the Congo.' Henry was honest about his job prospects, but not about being Welsh. He spoke of `simple sights' that gave him pleasure, such as `seeing children playing on the sands'. On another occasion, he said: `I am a man of action, a man who must struggle forward to do and to be ... My happiness lies in contending against difficulties.' Yet he conceded that there were `kinds of happiness unguessed at by [him]'. Dolly then asked if he had ever loved and was rewarded with the story of Alice Pike. `I felt so sorry for him,' she wrote in her diary; `there is a loneliness and disappointment about his life, which he will not allow, but which I see ... People touch me very much; more and more I think as I grow older.'3°
By the end of July, Stanley was dining quite often with the Tennants, having tea, and coming for his sittings. Yet he dared not feel optimistic. He told Alexander Bruce, glumly: `Further than Platonism I doubt my affair will go ... it is so very innocent ... I am easily rebuffed & very sensitive. If she proposed to me, it might be very different, but if I have to propose to her, do you know I rather think I will not have the courage.'3'
In the summer of 11885, he also sat to the portrait painter Robert Gibb, best known for his military scenes. While Henry never commented on Dorothy's very competent likeness of him, he showered Gibb's portrait with praise. `It is my very self,' he told Bruce, showing considerable self-awareness. At first glance, this fine painting merely seems to depict the dour and masterful man of contemporary posed photographs, but a closer look, especially at the eyes, reveals not only a more reflective and sensitive person, but one haunted by a desolating sadness. All the loneliness of his early life seems present in these wary, fearful eyes.3z
By the time Dorothy went away for a series of summer visits to friends' country houses, including her own family's in south Wales, she had become fascinated by Stanley. And yet a basic incomprehension remained. `I admire your undaunted courage. The only thing I cannot quite understand is your incentive. What is the fuel which makes the water boil, the steam rises and the paddles move? Why do people do the things they do?'3i That this puzzlement was mutual became apparent when Dorothy wrote to Henry after she had stayed in Newcastle with the ex-miner Thomas Burt, who had become the first workingclass MP in 11874. She described going down a mine and visiting the face, where she saw `in the darkness, the little twinkling lights ... and the fine strong men hewing away at the walls of coal'. She also described the ships being built along the Tyne and the forest of chimneys and cranes, and explained that she had `felt intuitively that the future of England depends upon the working classes ...'.34 Since, over the years, an immense intellectual and emotional gulf had opened between Stanley and his narrow-minded working class relations, Henry could not take seriously Dolly's romantic view of harsh lives. He replied to her letter from Switzerland, saying that the contrast between the `roar of mechanical Newcastle' and `the tranquillity and awful calm of the snowy ranges' was too great even to write about, and probably of no interest to her while she was `surrounded by gaieties'. He was entering a phase in his life when he longed for `the quiet happiness' of living, he wrote, `in harmony with my surroundings ... [with] ambitions and dreams laid by'. And yet duty could not be avoided, and he would go on, he told her, `preparing myself against the contingencies of new labors [sic] in Africa, since as far as I know I am destined for nothing more'.35
Hurt by Stanley's supposing her incapable of understanding his love of nature, and also by his apparent determination to return to Africa, Dolly wrote: `What undiscovered countries we are to each other. And yet you are a great explorer. How is it you have not understood me better?' Yet she was honest enough to admit that her social pleasures were indeed important to her, and that she found `politics dangerously fascinating'.36 This exchange of letters marked a new realism, a recognition of real differences, but the continuation of deep affection. Much of October Stanley spent cruising in the Hebrides on William Mackinnon's yacht, but in November he and Dorothy resumed their regular meetings, and at this time Henry gave her a silver map of Africa as a memento.37
Much of December was spent by Stanley and his friends, Mackinnon and Hutton, in Brussels, trying to hammer out a definite agreement over the railway concession. But by now, Leopold was furtively raising Belgian capital - his fear being that Stanley's syndicate, besides demanding a substantial share of the railway's profits, would lead to British domination of the Congo. When, just before Christmas, the king declared himself only prepared to sign an agreement `in principle', Stanley was outraged. He and his friends had received promises of £400,000 of the necessary;( r,ooo,ooo from a large number of rich investors; and thanks to Stanley's several visits to North Wales, they had settled on the Ffestiniog slate railway, with its unique twin-boiler locomotive, as being the perfect steam combination for the Congo." On 116 January, Stanley wrote telling Leopold that unless he published a denial of rumours that he (Stanley) had lost the king's favour, it would destroy the British syndicate. This was because major investors, like Mackinnon, would only commit capital if Stanley were placed in charge on the ground.39 Still unsure of his ability to raise adequate Belgian funds, Leopold was obliged to award Stanley the highest rank in the Order of Leopold and to make a fulsome denial of all rumours that he had fallen out with his former Chief Agent.4°
While they were in Brussels, Henry told Mackinnon about his desire to marry Dolly. His friend responded by offering to help in any way he could. One problem, Stanley explained, was his lack of family - a problem with which the childless Mackinnon sympathized. On their return to England, Stanley managed to persuade Dolly to come to his New Bond Street flat, with her mother and her sister, Eveleen. `I have succeeded for a wonder,' he told Mackinnon. `She will come tomorrow ... and therefore you must come, & stand as a kind of amiable friend of established repute to be benignant and good to all of us.' The occasion went so well, with Mackinnon in the role of adoptive father, that two weeks later Stanley was able to tell him: `I have an invitation for you. Mrs Tennant invites you to dinner & Miss Dorothy seconds ... and they say they will be delighted to lunch on one of your big ships.'41
At this time, Dolly gave Stanley a tiny silver token for his watch chain, with her personal emblem, a triangle, and superimposed letter `T', for Tennant, cut into it and the words 'Bula Matari tala' painted in enamel. Tala means remember in Swahili; so Stanley was being asked to remember Dorothy. He was thrilled by this l
over's gift.42 Soon after making it, Dolly confided to her diary her confused state of mind:
It would be such wonderful happiness to love very much and be loved, if only a little by the hero, whoever that may be. The wise good hardworking, undertaking man ... but perhaps the good man is not the strong man, or the hardworking man is not wise and understanding, and so I care for no one, and invite no one to care for me ... I just cling to men who can be nothing to me, and if they could I should not cling to them, Mr Stanley, Edwin Arnold, Monsieur Coquelin ... I feel a fierce longing to be understood and cared for, and perhaps because I feel safe in the friendship of some few men, I give over much of myself to them. I daresay they are puzzled, possibly flattered, but I do not think they misunderstand me.43
Dorothy's most serious reservation about Stanley remained her suspicion that she hardly knew him. The Belgravia Magazine had just published a short story called `Talbot the Traveller', whose eponymous hero was plainly based on Stanley, with similar African achievements and an American past, in which a female friend, like Annie Ward, played a conspicuous part. `Talbot is a marvellous resemblance to myself,' admitted Stanley.44 Dolly told him that although she knew a lot about his `life's work', the Talbot story reminded her that she could `only guess at what you are'. What she wanted was for him `to write his biography' [sic].45 Given Stanley's fear of exposing his workhouse background, this was a worrying letter. Yet though she had written coolly about him in her diary, Dolly now penned a meticulous description, showing just how intrigued by him she still was. There is some repetition of her earlier physical delineation, but many details are new and portray the living Stanley as a moving, breathing personality.
When Stanley enters a room full of people, he holds his head rather tilted backwards, in a self-conscious attitude. He is thickly, strongly built, with a deep broad chest and thick short arms ... His look has something intense and penetrating ... giving a sort of earnest grandeur to his expression ... The eye shines out clear, with the observancy of some keen-sighted bird, who is watching you, listening to you rather with the eye than with the ear ... When he is telling us some thrilling adventure in Africa, he conveys his meaning as often by gesture as by word. He raises the imaginary gun to his shoulder, puts his finger to the trigger ... and as he speaks his eyes flicker as though some spirit flame leapt behind the crystaline lens .... When he is very much interested ... he sits on the very verge of his chair ... When he is pleased, he softly rubs his hands together, with invisible soap ... But this is Stanley `intime'. The better known usual Stanley is cold, silent, rather disdainful, slightly chilling people by his silent observant attitude, making them feel uneasy ... He says `good day' to you with great solemnity and ceremony, bowing when you offer him a chair. He speaks slowly and most decidedly ... Sometimes with strangers he is rather tense, but his voice is most agreeable, and his slightly American accent ... is interesting ... He has many laughs. The pleased, self-conscious laugh he gives when you flatter him ... and he can laugh vociferously, but he seldom forgets himself enough for that. He has in common with all great men, a great simplicity, shall I call it a kind of innocence? He is proud of himself, but somehow it is partly a not ill-placed consciousness of worth, and partly a kind of simple open vanity, which in Stanley is not offensive.