NEITHER MRS CAMERON NOR G. F. WATTS produced an ‘Absence of Hope’. But Watts’s curiously pessimistic painting ‘Hope’ – in which a blindfold figure on a buoy listens to the last string on a broken lyre, and doesn’t look especially cheered up by it – became his best-known work. At one time, it was as famous as Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’, and it brought solace in unlikely places. After their defeat in the 1967 war, Egyptian troops were distributed with reproductions of ‘Hope’. What they made of this peculiar choice of consolation prize is not recorded.
Mrs Cameron, meanwhile, decided that the phrenological route to perfect abstract expressions was not the only one, and to generate the right demeanour for her picture ‘Despair’ she simply locked the sitter in a cupboard.
JESSIE FOWLER became a famous phrenologist in her own right. She continued to help her parents in their lifetimes, and then pressed on alone, back in New York, writing widely on such arcane matters as ‘The Psychology of Arkansas’. She became an expert on child psychology. She never married.
Meanwhile, Lorenzo – that ‘prince of mental scientists’ – lived to his eighties. Despite a stroke three years earlier, he accepted a model skull at the Phrenological Centenary in Queen’s Hall, during a programme which included music from the Aeolian Ladies Orchestra, and a blindfold examination by Jessie. Back in Boston, Orson Fowler continued to hoe a lonely row, and was publicly reviled for such publications as Private Lectures on Perfect Men, Women and Children, in Happy Families, which included chapters on ‘Just How Love-Making Should be Conducted’ and ‘Male and Female Electricity’. His Sexual Science at the Boston Public Library today has the obscure shelf-mark ‘Inferno’, and cannot be traced. Presumably, it was burned.
THE MARRIAGE of Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts did not survive many months. Ellen returned to her family home, where she received many visits from C. L. Dodgson. In the divorce proceedings, some years later, a difference of temperament was mentioned. In her chirpy memoirs, however, Ellen suggests that ‘a difference of occupation’ would have been nearer the mark. Bumping into Watts one day in a street in Brighton, she records, ‘He told me I had grown!’ Outside a jeweller’s shop in Bond Street, she once saw Tennyson in his carriage. ‘How very nice you look in daytime!’ he remarked. ‘Not like an actress.’
ALFRED TENNYSON sat for umpteen portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron. She took over 1,200 images in all, and is rightly regarded as a great pioneer photographer. In terms of exposure and aesthetic composition, her solemn big-head pictures are unparalleled.
Dimbola Lodge still stands, with its view of the sea intact, and is currently under renovation as a museum. Of her portraits of Tennyson, the poet’s favourite showed a profile, in which the full glory of his unwashed neck is visible for the world to gaze on in perpetuity. He named it ‘The Dirty Monk’, and once wrote beneath it a characteristic imprimatur, ‘This I like best of all my portraits, except one by Mayall.’
FARRINGFORD also still stands, as a hotel, with a pitch-and-putt on the lawn and croquet mallets in the hall. On Saturday nights is held a dinner-dance, to be avoided at all costs. Through some meteorological mishap, the Garibaldi tree is a gaunt bare trunk, but it is still sturdy and very tall, and pierces the horizon like a needle. Until recently, Alfred’s study was reached by way of an entertaining sign in Gothic script, ‘Tennyson’s Library and Colour Television’. The base of his spiral staircase was blocked by a fruit machine.
MARY RYAN, though not a natural actress, appeared in photographs after this time, and made an amazingly good marriage as a result. Henry Cotton spotted her in Mrs Cameron’s ‘Prospero and Miranda’ at the Colnaghi Gallery, and fell in love. They were married in 1867. Henry Cotton was later knighted. Mrs Cameron celebrated their love by posing them, rather thoughtlessly, as King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.
ENOCH ARDEN sold extremely well, as did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. One of these works has survived rather better than the other in the national memory, but no simple moral is to be deduced from this. A late flurry of bad feeling between Dodgson and Tennyson took place in 1870, when Dodgson applied to the poet – with extreme niceness – for his permission to read a bootlegged copy of a poem called ‘The Window’.
There is a certain unpublished poem of yours, called ‘The Window’, which it seems was printed for private circulation only. However it has been transcribed, and is in my hands in the form of MS. A friend, who has had a MS copy given to him, has in his turn presented me with one. I have not even read it yet & shall do so with much greater pleasure when I know that you do not object to my possessing it. What I plead for is, first, that you will make me comfortable in possessing this copy by giving your consent to my preserving it – secondly, the further permission to show it to my friends. I can hardly go so far as ask leave to give away copies of it to friends, tho’ I should esteem such permission as a great favour.
This is an extract from the whole letter. A shorter reply came from Emily Tennyson.
DEAR SIR,
It is useless troubling Mr Tennyson with a request which will only revive the annoyance he has already had on the subject & will add to it.
No doubt ‘The Window’ is circulated by means of the same unscrupulous person whose breach of confidence placed ‘The Lover’s Tale’ in your hands.
It would be well that whatever may be done by such people, a gentleman should understand that when an author does not give his works to the public he has his own reasons for it.
Yours truly,
EMILY TENNYSON
Dodgson insisted on an apology, but did not receive one. The friendship was at an end.
DAISY (Margaret Louisa) grew up to be a prolific novelist. She became Mrs Woods, and was seen by Dodgson in 1833, acting Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Her father, the Dean of Westminster, officiated at Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1892.
WATTS was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Tennyson after his death, and it stands in the Close at Lincoln Cathedral. It shows a stooped figure with a big dog, looking down at his open hand with a puzzled expression. It is known to locals as ‘The Disappointed Cabbie’.
After his separation from Ellen Terry, Watts continued to paint excellent portraits and bad walls, still perversely preferring the latter. In the 1870s he bought a house of his own at Freshwater, which presumably surprised everyone. His second marriage was to another energetic woman, who built him a stunning Arts and Crafts chapel at Compton in Surrey. Mrs Cameron took a photograph of the second Mrs Watts with her sisters, all in their shifts. As if to make up for the Maud reference hidden in ‘Choosing’, the subject for the photograph was ‘The Rosebud Garden of Girls’.
Despite his general good luck, Watts’s most famous statement remains ‘Often I sit among the ruins of my aspirations, watching the tide of time’, and photographs show a man who appears to have had his backbone removed. He is due a revival, however, especially since he missed out so badly by not joining the Pre-Raphaelites (who didn’t want him). On hearing that Watts was about to tackle the walls of a country house, William Morris is supposed to have commented, ‘A coat of whitewash would soon set that right.’
In 1875, THE CAMERONS departed from Freshwater Bay. Mr Cameron announced a desire to see his estates in Ceylon, possibly to check that Julia had not given them away. Mrs Cameron died in Ceylon in 1879, looking at a sunset from her deathbed. Her last word was ‘beautiful’.
Mr Cameron, twenty years her senior, miraculously survived her. Surrounded by his sons as he lay dying, he declared himself happier than Priam. A minister, waiting outside, sent in a message, offering to read the Bible to him. Mr Cameron considered the proposal. His last words therefore were, ‘If you think it would be any comfort to him, let him come in.’