After Louie and Agnes came back from their honeymoons in September 1866 (Scotland and Devonshire, respectively), they moved into their new homes. Poynter had taken a house at 106 Gower Street, not far from his old rooms in Great Russell Street, and in the heart of artists’ studio-land. Louisa moved to Bewdley, in Worcestershire, where Alfred had taken a ‘very large’ house, as her mother noted. After settling in, she travelled to Wolverhampton to visit George and Hannah and, of course, Edie.
Edie was now eighteen, unmarried and still living at home. Her position in the family was not initially very odd. She had been a bright, enquiring child – a characteristic family story had it that one day she rushed into the room where her sisters were talking, ‘saying, with shining eyes, “What about what?” ‘1 Nothing was taboo to her: after Louie said grace badly one day, Edie admonished her: ‘Say it again, O irreverent doggie!’2 She had her share of the family musical talent: some of the songs that she wrote were published, and won the approval of M. T. Marzials, who ran the music library at the British Museum.
With increasing age, however, things began to change. There was no obvious reason for her not marrying. Maybe it was that the with which was sharp in all her sisters had a razor edge in her case. Alice’s many entanglements had been a running joke to her: when someone enquired about a visit from which Alice had, unusually, returned un-engaged, Edie tartly replied that there had not been a cloud over it, ‘no, not so big as a man’s hand’.3 It does not appear to be just that she was sharp-tongued, however. Somehow she was always just overlooked. Hannah tended to mention her children’s birthdays in letters, but, whereas the others appear in the main body of the text, Edie’s are often scribbled in at the top, as an afterthought. When Alice got engaged to Lockwood, Hannah talked about ‘my two daughters at home’, referring to Agnes and Louie. When Louie returned from honeymoon and came to visit, Hannah told friends how grateful she was that ‘we have one child’ who was nearby. She had one child actually in her house, so what was happening?
In large Victorian families there was usually one child – often the youngest, almost always a daughter – who did not marry and stayed at home to look after her elderly parents. That this happened to Edie was therefore not abnormal; the fact that she was somehow invisible, of no account, is more peculiar. It was almost as if by being unmarried she had somehow failed, and was therefore to be tucked away at the back of the family’s minds. Georgie, towards the end of her life, noted that ‘it has been her lot to have no life of her own’.4 Fred writes about his travels in his memoirs, and particularly mentions a trip to Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, but he doesn’t say that Edie was with him; in fact he doesn’t mention her at all. There are no descriptions of what she looked like; she and Alice were the only sisters who were not painted by Poynter. Alice, in India, is an understandable omission. But Edie was there when Louie was sitting. It wasn’t that she was actively disliked by her siblings: on the contrary, they wrote of her (when they remembered) with great fondness. It was just that she was single and had no career or particular talents; she was therefore not a ‘success’ as they were.
They were successful, in their chosen careers as wives and mothers. Agnes and Louie had a son each within a month of each other, and within a year of their weddings. Stanley Baldwin was born six days before his parents’ first wedding anniversary, on 3 August 1867;* Ambrose Poynter arrived on 26 September. Their husbands were matching this with worldly success. Poynter had further acclaim at the next Royal Academy summer show: his painting Israel in Egypt, a vast monster showing the Hebrews building the pyramids, was bought for an astonishing 850 guineas.
Israel in Egypt is worth pausing at, simply because most people today have never knowingly seen a work by Poynter. The focus is on the historicity of the view: the architecture is all rendered with minute fidelity, although it ranges in date over three thousand years. It includes, among other things, Philae in Upper Egypt, the obelisk at Heliopolis, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the mountains at Thebes, the Temple of Seti I at Gourna, and the gateways of the temple at Edfu – a melange that could not possibly have occurred anywhere except in a Victorian’s fevered imagination. The picture was already old-fashioned when it was painted, belonging to the school of history painting becoming outmoded in the 1820s and 1830s. Ruskin approved of the ‘noble conventionalism’ of the lions, which seems to be damning with faint praise,5 yet this was no check to Poynter’s rise. Shortly afterwards he was invited to create the mosaics for the walls of the South Kensington Museum lecture theatre.
The Baldwins had made the older Macdonalds happy by suggesting that it was time they left Wolverhampton and moved permanently to Bewdley, where they could be near Louie. This they did, and found a pretty red-brick Georgian house on the High Street only a few doors away from their daughter, son-in-law and grandson. They were leading a comfortable life, Alfred going off to the works, Louie and Edie visiting each other daily. As the Baldwins had the space and time, their house became a meeting point for the sisters in England, who now began to visit regularly – at least twice a year, often more.
The Burne-Joneses’ finances were also improving at such a rate that, for the first time, Burne-Jones opened a bank account.* They were on the move again. They had wanted to stay put in Kensington Square, but their lease was up and the house was getting a bit small after Margaret’s appearance in June 1866. This time they wanted to stay in the same part of London: they were settled and happy, near friends – particularly George and Rosalind Howard, whom they had begun to grow close to in the previous year.
George Howard was the heir to the Earl of Carlisle and in line to inherit Castle Howard in Yorkshire; his wife was a bluestocking from an aristocratic family. George Howard wanted to be an artist, rather than the politician or the landed proprietor his birth had arranged for him. They owned Naworth Castle in Cumberland, and were also planning a house to be built in Palace Green, an elegant new outcrop of Kensington. Georgie wrote to Rosalind, ‘we are very anxious not to leave this neighbourhood … I am sure you will believe that one of our chief reasons for wishing to remain in this neighbourhood is that we may not lose sight of you …’6
Self & Family by Burne-Jones
Finally the Burne-Joneses settled on the Grange, in Fulham, an eighteenth-century house with three-quarters of an acre of ground, big enough for a small orchard. It had once belonged to Samuel Richardson,* and, as it was too large, and too expensive, an arrangement was made that Wilfred Heeley, temporarily back from India, should take half of it. The size was a worry to Burne-Jones. He wrote to Howard:
William and Janey Morris by Burne-Jones
It is too grand and large and splendid for us: we have no right to such a place … I am frightened. It reminds me a good deal of Castle Howard – I should say rather it had the scale of that mansion combined with the more sympathetic aspect of Naworth: it is called the Grange, not moated however … there is a madhouse next door which is convenient, for I hate distant removes.7
By March 1868 the house was done up in showpiece Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. style. Soon a grand housewarming party was held, and Brown remembered:
the house, being newly decorated in the ‘Firm’ taste, looked charming, the women looked lovely and the singing was unrivalled, and we all luckily escaped with our lives, for soon after the guests were gone, the ceiling of the studio (about 700 lbs of plaster) came down just where the thickest of the gathering had been all night. Morris was to have slept on the sofa on which most of it fell, but, by good luck, he went home to sleep with Prinsep.8
There may have been practical reasons for Morris sleeping at Val Prinsep’s. But it was in Morris that the first cracks in all their youthful idealism were beginning to show. He and Janey now had two daughters, and some time after the birth of May, their second, Janey had retired to her couch, a permanent semi-invalid (or a semi-permanent invalid, as suited the occasion best). The diagnosis was vague: ‘spinal irritation’ was suggested, but nothing that would today be understood as organic disease. What is retrospectively implicit in this retreat is that she was unhappy. By the late 1860s she had started an affair with Rossetti, which was to continue until at least 1875.* Morris may have known; he may have refused to know – it is impossible to be sure. He certainly knew that Janey shared no interests with him, and that he was now more or less alone.† He as much as admitted this to various friends; he wrote to Louie, ‘I have been a happy man with my friends’ (my italics).11
Despite the domesticity that Georgie enshrined in her memoirs and implicit in the view that he liked to project of himself- always at home, unable to manage without his children, never going out, and having no interests outside the Grange and his work – Burne-Jones had a night life. It was not a particularly disreputable one by today’s standards, but it was one that was quite apart from his family circle. He continued to see Swinburne, whose drinking had now reached a stage where he was often, as Georgie delicately phrased it, ‘not quite himself’,12 and Simeon Solomon, who was well on his way to total disintegration.‡ (Oddly, Solomon had also been a friend of the strait-laced Poynter, and in 1865 a portfolio of his risqué drawings had been issued with a dedication to Poynter. As his behaviour became more erratic, and Poynter’s more Establishment, the friendship withered.) Solomon and Burne-Jones scribbled lewd illustrations to Swinburne’s more Sadean poetry, to themes, Burne-Jones wrote, ‘that Tiberius would have given half his provinces for’14 (although Burne-Jones was careful to destroy all these drawings and any letters to and from Swinburne he could get his hands on). Richard Burton, like Swinburne known for his interest in flagellation, was another bachelor friend, as was Luke Ionides, a patron of the Pre-Raphaelites. Together they visited pot-houses, music halls and theatres, including a trip to see Kate Vaughan perform her notorious skirt-dance at the Gaiety Theatre.
At home things were rather more settled. Georgie was ensconced in her new house. Alice, pregnant once more, was on her way back to England with two-year-old Ruddy to await the birth of her second child. In 1868 Poynter was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, the first step on the road to full membership as a Royal Academician, or RA, de rigueur for the successful conventional career in art. But somehow, even with that, nothing seemed to go right. Louie, in Bewdley, was beginning a situation similar to Janey’s. Hannah regularly reported Louie’s various ailments – inflammations, irritation of the ‘mucous membrane’, ‘neuralgia’ in her arms and legs – and from January to March 1868 she spent most of her time in bed, rarely coming downstairs: the beginning of a lifelong trend. In July, Georgie wrote Rosalind Howard an apology for not answering a letter, ‘but if you had known all my circumstances you would not wonder’:15 a precursor to a major crisis which would not come to a head for another year. Alice’s baby had been born at the Grange on 11 June 1868 in an unexplained atmosphere of tension and worry. It was not an easy birth – Louie referred to it as a ‘grimly’ incident, and hoped that Alice would never have another child.
Ruddy had been left in Bewdley with his grandparents. It was not, to put it mildly, a successful visit. Countless biographers of Kipling have dissected his grandmother’s diary entries about his stay – he was wilful, spoilt, rambunctious, they conclude. It is hard to feel anything but sympathy for him. He was two years old, in a strange country, in a strange house, with strange people he was supposed to love. His mother was away, and his ayah, who had constantly attended him in India, had vanished, and no one had replaced her. In addition, his grandfather was dying. It is difficult to imagine in what way he could possibly have behaved that would have won the approbation of his distracted grandmother, who was rarely cheerful at the best of times. By November, Alice, baby Alice* and Rudyard were on their way back to India. Six days after the boat sailed, Alfred and Louie were woken in the middle of the night – George Macdonald, after an interminable illness, had died.
Hannah now went into mourning, a formal ritual with clearly defined rules. It was not something new for her. Four of her eleven children had died, three of them in infancy – a higher percentage than average, which was at this time 5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, or half of one per cent. But mourning for a child lasted only twelve months. For a husband it was more elaborate, with a dress code for the next two and a half years. For the first twelve months non-reflective black paramatta and crape were worn; then for nine months dull black silk trimmed with crape ribbons. For the following three months the crape could be removed, and for the final six months ‘half-mourning’ was required: greys, lavender, black or white only. In addition, apart from ‘commemorative pieces’, or diamonds or pearls set in black, no jewellery could be worn in the first year. After that, jet jewellery was allowable.16 This was the formal guidance, but in middle-class families women tended to make special mourning dresses only for ‘best’ wear. For everyday clothes they retrimmed old dresses, dyeing them black if necessary.
In addition, no invitations could be accepted for the first year, except from immediate family. Public gatherings were avoided. Mourning also had a community aspect.* It was considered ‘ill-bred’ to wear bright colours if someone in the house was in mourning. (After a royal death Queen Victoria said, ‘I think it quite wrong that the nursery are not in mourning, at any rate I should make them wear grey or white or drab and baby wear white and lilac, not colours. That I think shocking.’)17 So Edie, who officially came out of mourning for her father after twelve months, may well have worn black for longer, as an acknowledgement of Hannah’s loss. Music was not be played in the house for the first three months, and for a while after that family members limited themselves to religious works.
George’s death was only the beginning of a year of trouble. Louie miscarried early in 1869. She continued unwell, and Hannah began to tell friends that she had trouble with her spine – that worrying catch-all that had affected both George Macdonald and Janey. She may have had another miscarriage at the end of the year – it is clear that Hannah was worried once again, rather than continuing to be worried, but she is not specific, and it is hard to say precisely what happened. For the entire year Louie went back and forth to doctors, and in between suffered from a dizzying range of illnesses.
Alfred was not doing much better. He had been a stalwart of the local Liberal Party, canvassing door to door, taking part in the rough and tumble of a political scene that owed much to its Georgian ancestry: Victorian decorum was some years away, with the coming of the 1872 Secret Ballot Act. Until then, the war cry ‘Vote Early and Vote Often’ probably best described the mood of elections. The previous year Enoch Baldwin, Alfred’s cousin, had been duffed up by the Tories during a political scuffle.* In January 1869, amid Tory objections to ballot scrutiny, Alfred was arraigned for bribery and intimidation, while the local MP was unseated for bribery and corruption. (This sounds today much worse than it was – the charges were political rather than criminal, and were considered almost a routine part of the struggle for power.) By August there was more trouble: The Times reported that Stanley, Alfred’s brother, and the senior partner, had gone bankrupt, owing £20,000. The paper was forced to retract and print an apology within the week, but there was a small nugget of truth lodged inside the greater falsehood: business was not good. Stanley was not the head of company that could be wished for, and, as Alfred found his feet, a conflict between them grew nearer.
As a final touch, Harry suddenly showed up from New York. He arrived in the early spring, and appeared inclined to make a long stay of it. Hannah was delighted, Alfred rather less so. Harry’s business abilities were, to say the least, meagre. After his initial work as a proofreader for the New York Times, he had found various jobs in stock brokerages. He never stayed with any one company for very long, and, although there is no indication that he was ever booted out, there is also no indication that anyone tried very hard to keep him. In addition, he had become a heavy drinker. During his stay in Bewdley he fell and cut himself badly, and no one doubted that he had been drunk at the time. Louie had that Macdonald disregard for smoothing over the rough places which contrasted so oddly with their dislike of talking about unpleasant facts. She bluntly advocated the removal of his liver under anaesthetic. And so – with a grieving and widowed mother-in-law, an invalid wife, a charge of bribery pending, a cadging brother-in-law, and general business worries – Bewdley cannot have been a cheerful place for the Baldwins. That may be why they were not of more help to Georgie. The crisis that had been looming for the Burne-Joneses since the previous summer was now out in the open, and apparently unstoppable.
What became known as the Mary Zambaco incident grew slowly. The Burne-Joneses had become friendly with various members of the Greek community in London. Alecco Ionides, Edward Poynter’s friend from Paris days, was descended from a clan of merchants and bankers who had moved to England years before. His father, Alexander, was the patriarch of a heavily interrelated group of families. Mary (or Maria) Zambaco was the daughter of ‘Hadji’ and Euphrosyne Cassavetti, and a first cousin to Alecco Ionides. She was a remarkably beautiful woman and, according to George du Maurier, a rich one. He had met her six years earlier, and described her and her behaviour to his mother:
Funny thing rather, there is a certain beautiful Greek girl of great talent and really wonderful beauty, with a small fortune of her own of 80,000£. She is supposed to be attached by mere obstinacy to a Greek of low birth in Paris and is of that rudeness and indifference that she will not even answer those who speak to her; and about 2 months ago when I met her for the first and only time, she and I had quite a talk to everybody’s astonishment … Well, the other day as I was walking through Kensington Gardens I saw a group of ladies and little girls talking and in one glance recognised the beautiful Cazaretti [sic], but pretended not to know her through her thick veil and walked on. What does Cazaretti do but leave her friends and with a little girl for a chaperone just follow me about the Gardens, I apparendy very innocent of it all, but dodging about everywhere, and she still following and passing me. The thing was evident, and from a girl of her position and peculiar indifference the performance was rather significative [sic].18
Clearly this was a woman who was rather more forward and open than was considered quite nice at the time. In 1863 she married the ‘Greek of low birth’ – in actuality simply a Greek doctor named Zambaco, who practised in Paris. By 1866 she had left him, with her three children, and was back in London. She was soon coming to sit regularly for Burne-Jones: she had wonderful red hair, and a skin so fair it was practically phosphorescent, said an infatuated cousin.* Burne-Jones was in retrospect clearly besotted, but at the time nobody noticed anything. He once sent George Howard, who often came to paint with him at the Grange, a muddled note: ‘the only two days at all engaged are Tuesdays and Saturdays when Mrs Zambaco comes. And there is no reason why you should not come then if you want except that the room would be so full and I can’t work so easily with many by’19 – in brief, you can come except you can’t.
Maria Zambaco and Self by Burne-Jones, c. 1870
In between periods of euphoria, his spirits – never terribly stable –veered alarmingly. Howard, his closest friend of the period, was on the receiving end of dozens of notes along the lines of:
dear fellow, Webb tells me bad unfaithful things of you – that you asked strange questions about me – don’t tell him I told you he told me – that you asked even if I cared as much for you – which was unfaithful of you I have been ill all the year – really ill, ill in head and every way, and have been poor comfort to any friend – all have been merciful and remembered me at my best and forgiven me – I have tried everyone this year – if I could have pointed definitely to heart disease, or cancer, or consumption or something clear and obvious it would have been bearable to my friends, but I have had no such luck – only I have felt intensely melancholy and depressed – the result of a good couple of years pondering about something …20
A remarkable letter, but no alarm bells rang.
Finally, things were brought to a head by the oldest means in the book. When tidying Burne-Jones’s clothes, Georgie found a letter from Mary in a pocket. It was clear from the letter that she and Ned were lovers, and had been for some time. This was when Alice had come to stay with Georgie to wait for Trix to be born. It is hardly surprising Georgie wrote to Rosalind Howard that she was sorry not to have written,
but if you had known all my circumstances you would not wonder. However, the worst is over now and I draw breath … [Ned] makes it a matter of difficulty even to go … to fetch Phil from Bewdley. The small man has been there for more than a month, and we want him back sadly, but he was obliged to go away whilst the house was so full.21
The line added at the end did not bode well: Ned ‘has not been working at all hard’.
The situation was impossible: Burne-Jones was unable to leave his mistress even to fetch his small son home; he was doing no work; Alice and her newborn baby were in situ, observing, as Georgie and Ned desperately pretended that nothing was happening. By September 1868 Georgie had fled to Clevedon with the children, and stayed for over a month, valiantly lying: ‘I was not well – but I was not ill either, but very tired with all I had gone through in the way of other people’s babies &c.’ And again, Ned ‘has nothing to shew for this year scarcely’.22
Nothing was resolved. Burne-Jones did not want to stay with Georgie, but he did not want to leave her either. Then in January 1869 everything blew up. Rossetti, who was now, with Ford Madox Brown, somewhat estranged from Burne-Jones, wrote to Brown with a certain relish: Private. Poor old Ned’s affairs have come to a smash altogether, and he and Topsy, after the most dreadful to-do, started for Rome suddenly, leaving the Greek damsel beating up the quarters of all his friends for him and howling like Cassandra. Georgie has stayed behind. I hear today however that Top and Ned got no further than Dover, Ned being now so dreadfully ill that they will probably have to return to London. Of course the dodge will be not to let a single hint of their movements become known to anybody, or the Greek (whom I believe he is really bent on cutting) will catch him again. She provided herself with laudanum for two at least, and insisted on their winding up matters in Lord Holland’s Lane. Ned didn’t see it, when she tried to drown herself in the water in front of Browning’s house &c. – bobbies collaring Ned who was rolling with her on the stones to prevent it, and God knows what else.23
Rosalind Howard was a little more coherent:
we hear that Mme Z. when Jones refused to fly with her produced a poison bottle and said she would drink it at once a struggle ensued – J. tried to take it from her – the police came up – at that same moment appeared Lucas Ionides – her former friend and he explained matters to the police and walked off with Mme Z. Jones walked away and then fainted – a regular drama – I suspect Ionides followed her to see what she was after and from anger and jealousy repeated the story.24
Burne-Jones had planned to run away from all the trouble he had created by fleeing to Italy, taking Morris with him to hold his hand. But, as on his honeymoon, he broke down, and had to return ignominiously from Dover.
As can be seen from Rossetti’s letter, within days the story was all over town. Rosalind was the only one who did anything practical. She and her husband drove over to the Grange and left £50 for Georgie, ‘thinking [she] might need it’.25* Georgie was holding herself together with difficulty: ‘Forgive my reserve the other day when you came, but I am obliged to shew it in time of trouble or I should break down.’27 By now Burne-Jones was back home, being nursed by his long-suffering wife. Finally she unburdened herself to Rosalind:
Georgy had a private talk with me – was very loving – seemed overdone and harassed in mind said she never could be unreserved because there were certain things in her married life she could not talk about because asking for sympathy would seem like taking part against her husband. I think she refers to his living apart which he does for her good so as to avoid many children; but it is a mistake.28
Georgie’s friends were all anxious – Agnes and Louie sent worried letters to each other about her; Agnes came and kept her company; the novelist George Eliot, a new friend, sent tactful enquiries via Rosalind – but she was determined to keep her misery to herself. Burne-Jones was more forthcoming: he wrote to Howard that their discussions must remain ‘a profound secret’, spoiling the effect more than a little when, after four repetitions of how secret everything must remain, he added, ‘I have written to the same effect to Morris, Webb, Rossetti, Howell.’29 Finally Georgie could stand no more. She took the two children and moved into lodgings in Oxford. She told Burne-Jones that she had taken them for a month, and then would see how things stood.
Once there, she was able to take stock. If Burne-Jones was prepared to try again, so was she. In a letter to Rosalind her self-renunciation is painful to read.
No words can explain any difficult relation of any human beings to each other and none but God can sum up a case and see it clearly. I know that you are generous enough to take me on my own terms, and to forgive me where you think them mistaken – reserving your judgment as to my mistake – and I am very thankful to you for this because I love you, but I hope you will be able further to bear with me if I appear as tiresomely reserved as ever on some subjects. I have made up my mind to this, long ago, and mean to keep to it. At the same time, please never be afraid of saying anything to me … or anything you think might help me, directly, or indirectly, for I need help. Indeed, my dear, I am no heroine at all – and I know when I come short almost as well as any one else does – I have simply acted all along from very simple little reasons, which God and my husband know better than anyone – I don’t know what God thinks of them.
Dearest Rosalind, be hard on no one in this matter, and exalt no one – may we all come well through it at last. I know one thing, and that is that there is love enough between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us …30
Georgie returned to the Grange in March, and in July went to Naworth to stay with the Howards for a much-needed break.* Given the circumstances, it might have been expected that she would be sympathetic to Mill’s On the Subjection of Women, which she read on its publication this year, but she found it ‘too exaggerated on the unpopular side of the subject’.32 ‘I do wish I cared a little more about the female suffrage question – it seems such a piece of indifference to the troubles of my “sister-woman”.’33 Eventually things at home settled down, with Burne-Jones deciding to stay. However, there were intermittent eruptions for another four years at least, and Georgie never recovered the pleasure and equilibrium she had experienced earlier in her marriage. Tellingly, in 1869 Phil was given a toy printing press, and with it he printed a story which began, ‘Once upon a time a little boy said to his mama, “Mama, why do you look unhappy?” ‘34 In 1904, over thirty years after the event, Georgie could not bring herself to discuss any part of the year 1869 in her memoir. The chapter covering 1868–71 is the only one in her otherwise year-by-year account to have any time unaccounted for, and its epigraph says everything: ‘Heart, thou and I are here sad and alone.’35
Agnes and Louie, paired off in childhood, married at the same time, were now finding that their married lives were moving very much in tandem too. Agnes spent a great deal of time at Bewdley with Louie, going regularly for visits of up to four weeks, three or four times a year sometimes. Their children – Stan and Ambo, as they were always known in the family – were of an age, and their mothers had much in common: ill health, consumerism, and ambitious, successful husbands.
Louie, within striking distance of Birmingham, and Agnes, in London, were enjoying the advantage of the new ‘stores’ that were opening up to meet the demands of the newly prosperous. In 1841 Manchester had had one shop for every 146 people; by 1871 it was one for every 83.36 Burberry’s, Deny & Toms, Whiteley’s, Marshall & Snelgrove, Barker’s, Harrod’s, John Lewis, Bentall’s, Liberty, the Army & Navy all opened within twenty years of each other. Shops were now a place where finished goods were sold, rather than a place where craftsmen created individual pieces. There was no legislation to regulate their hours, and in the cities they often opened at 7.30, for people on their way to work, and did not close until the pubs and theatres closed, after ten at night. They were accessible to all – putting things ‘on account’ was the norm, and the more prosperous were billed only once a year (although the careful housewife paid in cash, for which she received a discount). Debenham & Freebody, which opened in the prosperous town of Cheltenham in 1870, offered five different services for its women customers: they could have their clothes made to measure, in the ‘high-class dressmaking salon’; they could buy part-completed clothes, which were either taken to a dressmaker for finishing or completed at home; there were ready-to-wear dresses; there was a dressmaking service which supplied fabric and patterns for home sewing; and there was a mail-order facility for the whole country. Agnes and Louie participated keenly in the new shopping rituals. Louie went regularly to Birmingham, as well as to London more rarely, and they sent each other notes about ‘a good French dressmaker’ and suggesting places for materials and other items.
Such activity was becoming easier as they became more prosperous. In 1870 Alfred bought out his brothers George and Stanley and started, with enormous success, to drive the family business forward on his own. Stanley had not proved to be a good businessman, while Alfred was the exact opposite. Where the money came from to buy out his brothers (and, apparently, pay off the outstanding debts) is not clear, but Alfred had been appearing on the Birmingham Exchange for some years, and it is probable that one or two Midlands businessmen saw him as the powerhouse he soon became, and backed him.
As befitted his new status, Alfred was now ready to move his family into a larger house, and one that was more convenient for the works. For years he went every morning from Bewdley to Wilden, a matter of three miles, either in a local fly or on foot. Now he proposed to relocate entirely. Wilden House was across the road from the works, and was traditionally the home of the brother who ran the family firm. It was larger than the Bewdley house, and had a big garden that ran up to a coppice on a hill at the end. The less attractive side of the move was that they were now virtually living ‘over the shop’. If the wind blew from the wrong direction, smoke from the works covered the house and its contents with black smuts. But, Alfred said, ‘it was their bread and butter, and they accepted the dirt along with the fortune it carried’.37 By November 1870 the move was completed and, although Hannah and Edie mourned the loss of their neighbours, the distance was small enough to make very little change in their visiting habits.
In 1871 Poynter was made Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College London. This was a new professorship, and when in March the appointing committee met they decided that few would qualify for the post, and the few who might had not applied. Poynter was approached, and, in typical Poynteresque fashion, by the time he was interviewed he had already drawn up a memo on how he would run the school. Weighing heavily in his favour was that he had taught at neither the Royal Academy nor the Government School of Design – both of which disliked the idea of the Slade, as diluting their control over how art and design should be promoted. Two years later he was also made principal of the National Art Training School at the South Kensington Museum, consolidating his grip as arts administrator extraordinaire, although he later admitted privately, ‘I feel I have rather cheated Univ: College who hoped to rival South Kensington through me.’38 However he didn’t let this – or anything else – stop him.
Agnes was valiantly bobbing along in his wake, although Rosalind Howard had noted that she was only ‘clever in a way’.39 In 1870 a move had been called for. Gower Street might be all right for an up-and-coming artist, but now he had reached a certain eminence Poynter deemed a house in the newly developing suburbs more appropriate. As the recently enriched middle classes built themselves new houses to match their affluence, so they needed to decorate them, and art (and art advisers) were increasingly important further along the social scale. In turn, those artists and advisers rose. So Gower Street was left behind, and the decorously named Beaumont Lodge, in Shepherd’s Bush, was taken. It was one of only a single line of new houses on one side of Wood Lane, all with large gardens backing on to meadows and orchards.* The Poynters were very much part of a mass expansion. The population of the suburbs grew by nearly 50 per cent in every decade between 1861 and 1891.40 This was due partly to the overground railways (which most people took to, unlike Ruskin, who referred to travelling by train as ‘screaming along at the tail of a big tea kettle’),41 and partly to the new underground railways. The first line had opened in 1863, between Farringdon Street in the City and Paddington on what were then the western edges of town. On the first day it carried 30,000 people. By the 1860s the underground was extended further west from Paddington to Shepherd’s Bush, and both Shepherd’s Bush and Kensington, which had once been rural, were now conveniently connected to the West End.
Beaumont Lodge had much more space than Gower Street, and when the Baldwins visited London they could now be accommodated here as easily as at the Grange. Louie and Agnes continued to visit back and forth, drawn even closer by their increasing ill health. They went together to the seaside on short trips with their children, always looking for that elusive cure. This was the age in which the seaside town came into its own (Brighton pier was erected in 1866), and for the first time hotels began to cater there for the middle classes. Louie and Agnes followed the older style of taking an apartment for themselves and their children. They would buy their own food, which the landlady and her servants would cook for them. As they became better off, a house was rented, and Alfred and Edward would join the women and children for a short break and for weekends. The sea air never did much good, and the sisters continued to exchange letters suggesting remedies for their ailments. Louie once wrote to Agnes that to stave off collapse she had had a whole bottle of champagne that day, and the following day she would follow a regime that included eggs beaten in wine. She also drank stout, for the iron. Agnes reported that Stan was so used to seeing his mother in bed that, aged three, he brought her cushions for her back and, imitating her, sat in a chair with another cushion and announced, ‘Stanley poorly back.’ Meanwhile the same phrases occur again and again in their letters, and in others’ comments on them: Louie is a ‘great invalid but wonderfully cheerful considering that character’; she is in ‘continued collapse’ and ‘of course’ too ill to go out. She has varyingly tic, neuralgia, a bad back. Agnes needs a month at the sea to ‘build her up’; she is recommended blisters for ‘counter-irritation to the spine’; she is ‘crushed by the sudden pain’.
One diversion in all this woe was that in the spring of 1871 the Kiplings were back in England. Alice had had a third pregnancy in India the year before, which had ended in a stillbirth. A respite from the hot weather was needed, and, now that Lockwood was writing regularly for an Anglo-Indian paper,* money was not stretched quite so tight. It was time, according to the prevailing wisdom, that the children were taken back to England to start their schooling. The plan was for Alice and Lockwood to take them ‘home’ and settle them in, after which Alice could recuperate a bit.
Alice and Lockwood had seen a newspaper advertisement placed by a couple in Southsea named Holloway, who boarded the children of expatriates. They decided that Southsea would be the best place for Rudyard and Trix to spend their primary-school years. No one has ever come up with a reason for sending the children there rather than to their many relatives. Hannah offered to take them, but, perhaps remembering their previous visit, this was rejected. Louie, Agnes and Georgie all had households with children of roughly the same ages. Besides Alice’s family, Lockwood’s mother in Yorkshire lived quietly with two of her daughters, whom afterwards Trix remembered with affection, but staying there also seems not to have been an option. The only surviving comment on why none of these relatives was regarded as suitable was that, said Alice, staying with them led to ‘complications’.42
Quite what these complications might have been may be imagined. Louie and Agnes were semi-invalids. The last time Alice had visited the Grange, Ned and Georgie had been in the middle of the Mary Zambaco crisis. And, it must be considered, Alfred, Poynter and Burne-Jones were all much more successful than Lockwood: Alfred ran a prosperous business; Burne-Jones was fast becoming one of the leading painters of the day; Poynter was a university professor. Lockwood, although busy and well liked, was only an art teacher in a vocational training school. Was there a sense that, if their children grew up in these houses, they would start to make unfavourable comparisons? That they would have expectations that could not be met at home? It is possible. In the event, we simply do not know why Alice and Lockwood chose to send their children to stay with strangers; but they did.
Years later Rudyard wrote a short story about his time in Southsea. ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ is a horrifying account of the systematic abuse, both physical and mental, of a child sent from India to an English seaside town. The raw pain, the trauma unburied, is terrifyingly portrayed. The question of what was real and what was emotional truth, as well as those details imaginatively recreated for the purposes of the story, needs to be explored. The facts are these. In May 1871 the Kiplings arrived in England. The spring and summer were spent between Worcestershire and London, with Lockwood visiting his family in Yorkshire for a short time. In October their parents took Rudyard and Trix to Littlehampton. They stayed two weeks, then, without warning, Alice and Lockwood took the children down the coast to Southsea and left them with the Holloways – for the day, Rudyard and Trix thought. However, Alice and Lockwood returned to London, and within a month they were on their way back to India. The children were to remain with the Holloways for the next five and a half years.
Lockwood and Alice had decided not to tell them that they were to stay in Southsea when their parents returned to India. The first Rudyard and Trix knew of it was when, at the end of their first day there, their mother failed to return to collect them. Alice may have not known how to tell them; she may have been too upset; she may even have thought it would be easier for the children (Rudyard was nearly six, Trix was three) not to have this incomprehensible event hanging over them. But, as Trix noted later,
Looking back I think the real tragedy of our childhood days … sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us. We had no preparation or explanation; it was like a double death … everything had gone at once … They doubtless wanted to save us, and themselves, suffering by not telling us beforehand that we were going to be left behind, but by so doing they left us, as it were, in the dark with nothing to look forward to … We felt we had been deserted ‘almost as much as on a doorstep’ and what was the reason? … they had gone back to their lovely home, and had not taken us with them.43
The standard account of this period says that Mrs Holloway terrorized Rudyard; her son viciously persecuted him; they made his home life unbearable, and his school life too. He was beaten, isolated, made to appear in school wearing a placard marked ‘Liar’. Trix was petted but, young and powerless, was unable to help her brother. Some of this was undoubtedly the case, but just how brutal the Holloway regime was is difficult to assess. Rudyard neither forgot nor forgave; he took his wife to see the house fifty years later, and ‘talk[ed] of it all with horror’.44 There is no question that the children were desperately unhappy. But two things need to be set against this. One is a comment of Trix’s to her cousin Stan, nearly seventy-five years after the event. Stan was preparing Kipling’s entry for the Dictionary of National Biography (which in the end he did not write), and Trix warned him not to attach too much importance to Rudyard’s version of events:
if you remember Loughton [where the children were taken after they left Southsea in 1877] you will agree with me that he was no drooping lily then, but distinctly a soaring boy – special with devilry. Very much between ourselves, dear Coz, I think that in some ways ‘Auntie’ [Mrs Holloway] saved his soul alive. He was about as spoilt as he could be when he came home in 1871. Six and a half years old [sic] and he had never been taught to read! I don’t know what the parents were thinking of … Mother had a very strong will – but there were curious streaks of sand in her marble – I still suffer from some of her foolishly fond concessions granted in 1878!45
She also noted elsewhere that in ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ ‘Dramatic licence added some extra tones of black to intensify our grey days.’46 This is likely, but it must be noted that Trix also left an undated typescript which was less convinced of the redemptive nature of their time in Southsea. Particularly worrying, in light of her later life, was the comment ‘anything that hurt or frightened [me] could not be forgotten … pain or terror, especially terror, seemed to dig a groove into [my] brain’.47 It seems that, after all, terror was a part of her life as a child.
The second point is that child-rearing is one of those areas that has changed so radically in the last hundred years that it is almost impossible to look back, with our values now, without feeling that much of what happened then verged on the criminal. A few examples of Victorian childhoods, all from stable and loving homes: Lady Frederick Cavendish had a governess who was ‘over-severe and apt to whip me for obstinacy when I was only dense … At Brighton I used to be taken out walking on the parade with my hands tied behind me, terrified out of my wits by Miss Nicholson’s declaring it was ten to one we should meet a policeman.’ Lord Curzon wrote that his governess
practised on us every kind of petty persecution, wounded our pride by dressing us … in red shining calico petticoats (I was obliged to make my own) with an immense conical cap on our heads around which, as well as on our breasts and backs, were sewn strips of paper bearing in enormous characters, written by ourselves, the words Liar, Sneak, Coward, Lubber and the like … She forced us to confess to lies which we had never told, to sins which we had never committed, and then punished us savagely, as being self-condemned. For weeks we were not allowed to speak to each other or to a human soul.
Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky was punished for lying ‘by being imprisoned with tied hands’.48
If these appear to be the privileges of the upper classes, Dickens describes a very similar situation in Little Dorrit. Mrs Clennam, from a lower-middle-class background very like that of Mrs Holloway, says:
You do not know what it is … to be brought up strictly, and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us – these were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of evil-doers … My father impressed upon me that his bringing–up had been, like mine, one of severe restraint. He told me that besides the discipline his spirit had undergone, he had lived in a starved house, where rioting and gaiety were unknown, and where every day was a day of toil and trial like the last…49
This is not to say that Rudyard created the story out of thin air; nor that therefore the Kipling children’s childhood was happy; just that it was not unusual. Which may, at least, be a partial answer to the question always asked in Kipling biographies: Why did Alice’s family notice nothing, do nothing?
Alice, in India, was pining for her children, but conventional wisdom said that it was better for them in England, and she felt that Lockwood needed her with him. She left a poignant verse reminder of this dilemma. (The fact that it barely scans in places somehow makes it more, rather than less, moving: Alice was perfectly capable of writing competent verse at other times.)
Once there was a little Boy,
(Mother’s darling treasure,)
Always laughing, full of joy,
Everybody’s pleasure –
He would shout, and about
All the house, run gaily:
In and out, such a rout
Little Boy made daily.
Once there was a little Girl,
(Mother’s bonny baby.)
Pretty darling, pink and pearl,
Sweet as a child may be!
She was fair and her hair
Framed her face completely,
And her eyes, like the skies,
Bright and blue shone sweetly.
Little Boy and Girl are gone,
Leaving Mother lonely:
What they shout and run about
Now remembered – only –
He and she, o’er the sea,
Finding other pleasures,
Scarcely miss, Mother’s kiss
Rich in childish treasures.50