The brusqueness of Annabella’s response to Charles Noel’s kindly offer to care for her rebellious grandson at Leamington owed much to the fact that it was penned on 15 August 1853, the day that Frederick Robertson died. Robertson was only thirty-seven. Overworked and depressed, he died of ‘inflammation of the brain’, a form of stroke. Local newspapers reported that Lady Byron had joined the mourners who followed the young clergyman’s coffin on foot in one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Brighton. (In fact, Annabella – always averse to any form of self-publicity – had watched the shuffling crowds from a discreet distance.)
The loss was devastating. Robertson had been her advisor, her confidant and friend. Rumours of a love affair between the pair were groundless, but an athletic build and exceptional good looks had added to the charismatic charm for the susceptible Lady Byron of a young preacher whose vivid and erudite weekly sermons at Holy Trinity, Brighton, were regularly attended by congregations larger than the church could hold.* (It was not uncommon for London worshippers to travel down simply for the benefit of listening to a man widely regarded as the finest preacher in the country.)
Privately, Annabella later admitted to her younger grandson that her chief regret about philanthropy was the obligation to deal with so many plain-faced men. None of them – certainly not kind, loyal, worthy Dr King, still living in Brighton and supporting Annabella in the world of good works – ever came near to replacing Robertson in her affections. The subsequent discovery that the admired cleric, married, and with two young children, had been dallying with one of Lady Byron’s own social circle, the respectably married Lady Augusta Fitzpatrick, was brushed off by his fondest admirer as a mere irrelevance.
Initially, Lady Byron had wanted Robertson to present her record of an ill-fated marriage to the public. The roles were now reversed. In September 1853, after providing funds to educate Robertson’s fatherless children, Lady Byron started to interview various people who might contribute to a biography of her brilliant friend. It would be modelled, so she told one of Robertson’s greatest admirers, Henry Crabb Robinson, upon the hugely successful recent life and letters of Margaret Fuller that she had (somewhat insensitively) presented to her daughter shortly before Ada’s death. Annabella’s failure to carry this ambitious project through owed more to her increasingly poor health than to any lack of commitment. Instead, Lady Byron became an assiduous circulator of the first published version of Robertson’s celebrated sermons. It’s highly probable that she also commissioned the death mask of Robertson which was taken by Robert Noel (now owned by University College, London).
Crabb Robinson, who had first met Annabella in that summer of 1853 at a party for the literary phenomenon of the year, Harriet Beecher Stowe, left their discussion filled with respect for this quietly dressed and unassuming woman. ‘I was much pleased with Lady Byron’, the savvy old gentleman noted that night. ‘I consider her one of the best women of the day.’ Such words were high praise from a man who had met almost every great figure of the age, including Wordsworth and Goethe. Annabella might lack the wit that had charmed Henry Crabb Robinson when he met Madame de Staël, but he was impressed by her rare combination of intelligence and integrity. Later, he would describe Lady Byron as the noblest woman he had ever known.
Thomas Noel – the illegitimately born relative who had presided over Annabella’s wedding to Byron at her parents’ home – died in the summer of 1853, aged seventy-seven. It came as a shock to Mr Noel’s family to learn that the cantankerous old man had excluded the third of his four sons from his will, seemingly out of pique at Charles’s readiness to manage the Kirkby Mallory estate as Lady Byron’s agent. (Thomas Noel Senior regarded all Wentworth property as rightfully belonging to himself.) Charles’s older brothers, Robert and Thomas Junior (author of one much admired poem, ‘The Pauper’s Drive’), promptly made over to Charles a generous share of their own bequests. Edward Noel proved less forthcoming.
Although it is not certain that Annabella came to Charles Noel’s assistance, the likelihood is that she did, especially since the news of Charles’s disinheritance came shortly after an unfortunate incident for which Lady Byron was partly to blame.
Richard Realf had just turned eighteen in 1852, when Annabella first heard about the handsome son of a Sussex blacksmith, an admirer of Lord Byron who was hoping to publish his own poems. Guesses at the Beautiful reads today as dreadfully as its dismal title might suggest. Perhaps Annabella, who was financially responsible for shepherding Realf’s slim volume into print before proudly circulating it among her Brighton friends, was recalling her youthful patronage of Joseph Blacket, the penniless bard of Seaham. Early in 1853, mindful of the fact that poetry alone is no way for any young man without means to support himself, she packed her protégé off to the Midlands, to study agriculture with Charles Noel. Perhaps, too, she sensed an absence in the life of Charles, whose son and namesake had recently left home to work for a firm of silk merchants in London.
By the end of the year, unwelcome news reached Lady Byron’s Brighton home. Richard Realf had fallen in love with the Noels’ 15-year-old daughter. Alice, a quiet girl blessed with large eyes and long, strikingly beautiful blonde hair, was infatuated. Her parents were horrified, not least by the violence of Alice’s passion. (A letter from Charles Noel’s wife, Mary Anne, informed Lady Byron – who promptly passed the news along to Mrs Cabot Follen, her favourite American confidante – that at last the poor child’s eyes had stopped glaring like the headlights of a train.)
Reprehensible though Lady Byron’s indiscretion might seem in spreading family gossip, she was seeking advice. Advised by Mrs Follen, Annabella arranged for Alice’s sweetheart to be despatched to America and given a teaching post at the new Five Points Mission in New York. Realf was accepted without question; Lady Byron had, after all, contributed £6,500 (in excess of £3 million in today’s currency) towards setting up Five Points. By 1858, the young man was out in Kansas, fighting alongside John Brown and writing to bless Lady Byron, herself an ardent abolitionist, as his generous benefactor.
This ill-starred love story had no happy ending. Alice, adopted by her uncle after her parents’ death of smallpox in 1857, became Edward Noel’s eerily intimate companion. Seduced at one point by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – seduction was a rite of passage for female guests at the future marital home of Ada’s daughter – Alice never married. Richard Realf, despite a rackety existence abroad that included a bigamous marriage, never forgot his first love. When he took his own life, aged forty-six, in Oakland, California, one imaginative biographer has claimed that Realf was still wearing a locket that contained a strand of Alice Noel’s bright yellow hair.*
Annabella had struggled against ill health ever since the traumatic marital separation that marked her transformation from an active young woman into a semi-invalid whose condition – a hardening of the arteries – worsened progressively with age. On 2 February 1854, Dr King explained to her new Brighton friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, that, although often confined to working from her sickroom, Lady Byron’s mental state was never impaired. She had been at her most impressive, Dr King considered (and Stephen Lushington agreed), when forced to undergo the daily agony of witnessing her daughter’s slow and painful death.
King was a devotee. William Howitt, a Quaker reformer and author, offered a harsher portrait of his wealthy patron. Howitt would deliver his recollections to the popular Daily News in September 1869, nearly a decade after Lady Byron’s death. Rankling in Howitt’s mind after all those years was the memory of Ephraim Brown, a Nottingham man whose services he had once recommended to Lady Byron as a teacher in one of her Leicestershire schools. Trained up by her at Ealing, Brown had been given a post for which, according to Howitt, Brown sacrificed other opportunities. Lady Byron had then sacked him, casting both the teacher and his penniless family adrift. While it remains unclear in what way Brown had offended his employer, his banishment did not discourage Howitt from submitting further educat
ional projects to the same hard-hearted patron.
It was during one such discussion that Howitt (as he later reported) witnessed the shocking change that ill health could wreak upon Lady Byron. Speaking with him over the dinner table at her home, and in the best of spirits, she had agreed to support and help fund Howitt’s latest school proposal. Coming down to breakfast the following morning, he entered the presence of an altered woman. White as paper and cold to the touch as the North Pole (in Howitt’s striking account), Lady Byron spoke only to whisper a withdrawal of her promise. No explanation was given, no apology made. The subject was closed.*
Untypical though Howitt’s account sounds – Lady Byron was known and widely praised for the exceptional generosity of her philanthropy – it fits with the adamantine side of Annabella’s nature that had been experienced with such pain by William Lovelace and by Anna Jameson. Undeniably, Annabella could be both harsh and unforgiving. Even her devoted granddaughter, finally listening to her father’s side of the story of their terrible quarrel (this conversation took place many years after Lady Byron’s death), began to wonder about the way Lord Lovelace had been treated. Annabella’s own godchild, Emily Leigh, seeking help to purchase herself a home in 1855, was dismayed to receive only a bleakly pragmatic recommendation to economise by going into lodgings. Such acts of coldness were not forgotten.
The deaths of Ada Lovelace and Frederick Robertson, together with her estrangement from Anna Jameson and William Lovelace, left Annabella in a position of emotional isolation. Philanthropy, assuredly, brought many acquaintances and admirers into her life. Her relationship with Parthenope and Florence Nightingale had deepened to the point where Lady Byron would become a recipient and proud transmitter of what amounted to Nightingale’s news bulletins from the frontline, at the height of the Crimean War. But professional colleagues – women like Arabella Lawrence in Liverpool, Mary Carpenter in Bristol, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Jesser Reid (founder, in 1849, of Bedford, London’s first women’s college) – were themselves energetic reformers with lives of their own. These collaborations were of a warm but practical nature, focussed upon ways to rectify injustice and improve social conditions.
It was, then, a rare treat for Annabella to find that her plans with Henry Crabb Robinson to found a new magazine, The National Review, were assisting the development of a friendship that allowed her to speak freely about the one subject of which she never grew tired. Discussing Lord Byron with his widow, an intrigued Robinson enquired about the poet’s own dark brand of religion. If only she could have turned her husband away from his Calvinistic beliefs and towards her own faith in a forgiving God, Annabella sighed. Did Robinson wonder that she still, after all these years, shrank from reading Byron’s 1822 play (it was partly based on Goethe’s Faust), The Deform’d Transformed? The play distressed her, she explained, because she read into it her superstitious husband’s belief that lameness marked him out – from the first moment of his birth – as cursed by God.*
Byron Ockham’s period of tuition by Lieutenant Arnold proved to be short-lived. In the summer of 1855, the young man headed north from Brighton to take a job screening coal in Sunderland. (As a child, Ockham had been greatly excited by the descent into a Midlands mine arranged by Charles Noel and his tutor.) By December, he had returned to London and signed up to a five-year contract riveting metal plates on to the iron flanks of the Great Eastern, the massive steamship being built at Millwall under the direction of Isambard Brunel and his engineering partner, John Scott Russell.
To an anxious grandmother, the last hope for establishing Ockham in a respectable life lay in ensuring that he had proper lodgings. Conscious that Louisa and Robert Noel were returning from Dresden, Annabella offered them her grandson as a paying lodger for three months. The case was becoming a desperate one, she confessed to Louisa on 26 June: ‘now or never will he form desirable connections. The ball is thrown into the air – who is to catch it?’
The Noels did not step forward to catch it, and it is unlikely that Byron would have accepted such a restricting proposal. By 6 September 1856, only the viscount’s sister and faithful confidante knew that he was living on the Isle of Dogs, where J. Aker’s favourite pastime was to run up different flags in front of his lodgings – Russian one day, American the next – in order to cause a bit of a stir. He was saving hard with a friend, in order to buy a small schooner. He also had plans – shades of his grandfather! – to buy a bear cub. Nothing, however, was said to Byron’s sister about the fact that her brother was hoping to marry Mrs Low, the divorced daughter of his East End landlord. (Conscious of his title and responsibilities, Mrs Low turned him down.)*
Unsurprisingly, Lord Ockham’s twenty-first birthday was not marked at Horsley by the traditional family celebrations for an eldest son.
Lady Byron’s generosity was legendary among those whom she loved. Always on the move, Annabella looked upon her various homes chiefly as useful places in which to provide a refuge for any friends who were poor, unhappy or simply undergoing a time of crisis. In the autumn of 1855, the hard-up De Morgans were offered the loan for as long as they wished of a country house. Making a similar proposal in 1856 to another, much younger couple, Annabella offered George and Louisa MacDonald part of Aford House, her new residence at Ham Common, out beyond Richmond. They should have their own entrance and come and go as they pleased, she promised, but they must never feel excluded from her personal domain. ‘When socially disposed, you will invite yourself,’ their new friend instructed them. ‘My house has often been called Liberty Hall.’*
Annabella was writing primarily to George, the 31-year-old author of ‘Within and Without’, a poem that Lady Byron admired for its intimations of an afterlife. MacDonald went on to write a book – if a personal intrusion can be excused – that held me spellbound when I was a child. ‘I have been asked to tell you about the back of the North Wind,’ the book began.† I doubt if I was the only reader who wept when I reached the moment when Diamond, the boy-hero, is found, stretched out upon his little bed in the hayloft from which the capriciously beautiful North Wind used to carry him away on extraordinary adventures. ‘I saw at once how it was. They thought he was dead,’ MacDonald wrote (as the tale’s narrator). ‘I knew that he had gone to the back of the north wind.’ And that, as MacDonald’s admirers learn to accept, was the best place that any moderately unhappy and imaginative child could hope to be.
The friendship began in 1855, when Annabella wrote an admiring letter to the author of ‘Within and Without’. Soon after this, Lady Byron confessed her personal longing for a spiritual reunion with a reformed and Augusta-free husband. MacDonald, as he came to know Annabella better, never doubted that – until the end of her life – she always had and forever would love Lord Byron.
Poor, lively, warmhearted and high-principled, George and Louisa MacDonald brought as much to their new friend in pleasure as Lady Byron returned to them in munificence. At the time Annabella met him, George MacDonald had exchanged his life as a country parson for badly paid teaching work in Manchester. An active frame belied MacDonald’s lifelong ill health; the following year, Annabella funded the couple’s three-month visit to Algeria, where a dry climate helped the invalid to regain his energy. In 1858, she commissioned Augustus De Morgan’s exceptionally artistic son, William, to do up the MacDonalds’ home, instructing him to combine elegance with every possible comfort. It’s likely that she also engineered MacDonald’s 1859 appointment to lecture at Bedford, the pioneering London women’s college with which Lady Byron had been closely involved for a decade.
This late-flowering friendship was one of which Lady Byron’s closest friends warmly approved. Mary Montgomery, meeting them at Lady Byron’s last London home in 1858, thought the MacDonalds were delightful. Crabb Robinson, encountering the couple there during the following spring, was impressed both by the boldness of MacDonald’s religious views, and by (Lady Byron always favoured a handsome man) the former clergyman’
s arresting good looks.
George MacDonald would later become famous, prosperous and a towering influence upon other writers, notably Lewis Carroll. (Tolkien and C. S. Lewis freely acknowledged the Victorian author as their first teacher in the world of fantasy fiction.) He never forgot Lady Byron’s kindness to him in more straitened times. To their children, the MacDonalds always spoke of Lady Byron as the woman who had given George hope and practical help when he most needed it. (Help included an unexpected £300 legacy in her will.) A decade later, at the absolute height of the posthumous public attack upon Lady Byron’s reputation, George MacDonald made a point of dedicating his latest novel to her memory.
Another and more significant friendship was formed around this time. In this case, it was generated by one of the most burning topics of the day. Abolitionism was the common cause that united Lady Byron’s friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain had abolished slavery in 1834; nevertheless, by 1850, over three million African slaves in America, and in other parts of the world, remained in bondage. In 1850, Ellen and William Craft were among the tiny group who escaped from the slave-owning Southern states in America and avoided recapture in the North under the draconian terms of the new Fugitive Slave Act. The Crafts began their new, free lives in England as teachers at Lady Byron’s Ockham school. In that same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the story through which its young author would help to change the course of American history.
By April 1853, when Mrs Beecher Stowe and her family arrived in London for the beginning of a four-month lecture tour, Stowe had overtaken even Dickens, to become the world’s best-known living writer. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold 300,000 copies in America during its first year of publication, despite being a banned book throughout most of the Southern states. In London, one year later, ten different dramatic adaptations of Stowe’s novel were being staged. Everybody wanted to meet and pay tribute to its celebrated author.
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