Portions of some of the letters to A. H. Layard appearing in this volume were originally published by Charles Eastlake Smith in the Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake. However, they were heavily edited and Smith tended to collapse letters together and occasionally to bowdlerize the text. Smith also loses his aunt’s conversational style, her liberal emphases and her customary salutations; and he is silent on any aspect that he regards as outside the ‘public interest’. A very small number of letters by Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake have been published outside the Journals
and Correspondence, in the main appearing in the collected correspondence of other Victorians.81
The most significant source for the Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake is within the John Murray Archive, now in the National Library of Scotland, containing letters dating from 1841 to shortly before Elizabeth’s death. The Archive includes letters addressed to three generations of John Murrays, as well as some addressed to Murray family members and some to successive editors of the Quarterly Review. There are gaps in the collection and only a very small number dating from the 1850s appear to have survived. In addition, the Archive includes a seemingly intact run of letters from Elizabeth to her friend and confidant Sir Austen Henry Layard and all of Layard’s letters to Elizabeth.82 Their correspondence is frequently lengthy and all the more interesting since Layard lived the itinerant life of an ambassador before settling in Venice and the two often corresponded at a distance. Consequently Elizabeth’s letters to Layard include her reports on domestic matters and her opinions on political and world events.
Other important manuscript sources are dispersed among various libraries and public record offices. The Bowerswell Papers at the Morgan Library &
Museum in New York include the correspondence of Euphemia (‘Effie’) Ruskin, later Millais. There are several lengthy letters from Elizabeth to Effie Ruskin and to her mother written during the annulment proceedings of the Ruskin marriage in 1854, and although portions of some have been previously published, they are included here in their entirety. The letters among the Dawson Turner papers at Trinity College Library, Cambridge are highly significant because they are among the earliest surviving letters, dating from 1834 to 1836, and provide a fascinating account of Elizabeth’s earliest work.83 The National Gallery holds letters written after Charles Eastlake’s death – in the main to her husband’s successor as Director, William Boxall. The University of North Carolina has more of Boxall’s letters, which, in combination with the National Gallery Archive, offer a unique picture of Elizabeth’s life immediately following Eastlake’s death.
Other smaller collections of letters supplement the larger archives, often providing continuity between letters or demonstrating the sheer range of Elizabeth’s concerns and interests.
This volume represents about two-thirds of the correspondence I have read. On balance the process of tracing and transcribing letters occasions more disappointments than fulfilments. Lady Eastlake was an inveterate letter writer (she called herself ‘an incorrigible scribbler’), although the letters that have survived and are represented here can only be a small part of her overall correspondence. In addition to her own letters she would have been the recipient of many letters, the majority of which she appears to have destroyed in 1891.84 The letters in this volume span 63 years and
introduction 19
they are printed in chronological order.85 The broadest biographical details of Elizabeth’s life, from 1830 to 1893, will be evident from the letters published here; I have annotated them with biographical details when relevant to the content of the letters. There is a general continuity to the letters, although there are gaps in the correspondence; for example, there are only two surviving letters to John Murray between 1848 and 1857, a regrettable gap that deprives us of correspondence about two of her most infamous Quarterly publications, the review of Jane Eyre and the review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters.
I have made every effort to transcribe faithfully the letters, adopting the policy of not deleting passages even where the text is repetitive or purely solicitous. The rare instances of my inability to decipher the text are marked with ‘[illegible]’. Most of Elizabeth’s letters can be read with ease, once the idiosyncrasies of her handwriting have been established, although proper names and foreign words can give trouble. All spellings, wordings and punctuation have been retained and sic is used sparingly, so that I have not added it to Victorian spellings such as ‘accomodation’, ‘favor’ or
‘surprize’. Because of Elizabeth’s tendency to drag her pen between words, leaving many connected by a thread of ink, it is sometimes not easy to tell whether words are connected or not: ‘to day’ and ‘to morrow’ occasionally appear unconnected and so I have transcribed them accordingly. The most difficult letters to transcribe have been those that are cross-written – that is, written vertically over horizontally written lines to save paper and postage costs. Particularly difficult are the cross-written letters on onion-skin paper addressed overseas (most often in the case of the correspondence with Layard), where the ink from the reverse side is visible and the process of determining which set of marks belongs to which side of the paper can be an arduous one.
Elizabeth tends to use em-dashes very liberally and sometimes I have had to judge between a full stop and an em-dash where the intention is not obvious. The other notable feature of her letters is her underlining of certain words or phrases for emphasis. In her early letters this conceit is rare but by the 1850s she is using the underline frequently. This gives a certain animation to the letters and some indication of how she might have modulated her speech, as does her use of exclamation marks. We know very little about how she sounded in conversation but a report by Beatrix Potter in 1886 describes her conversational emphases when she talked about Gladstone: ‘“I don’t think I’ve ever met him at dinner when he had not his cuffs all frayed; that’s Mrs. Gladstone. Oh yes, no doubt she’s a terrible slut” (said Lady Eastlake with emphasis). “I believe Hawarden is a very dirty place, no punctuality, the meals any way. Mr. Gladstone would not mind it if she hadn’t her stockings on!” Lady Eastlake talks rather slowly
and at times mumbles a little. I should think she soon gets tired. Her voice is rather deep’.86 The artist Catherine Maud Nichols recalled that her voice was ‘measured and distinct’.87 Elizabeth’s underline is not only used for emphasis; foreign names (particularly artists’ names) are underlined, as often are dates. I have retained her spelling of foreign names. Where Elizabeth used superscript letters in abbreviations, I have lowered them. I employ the customary square brackets for editorial insertions, but I have endeavoured to minimize these. Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed. All brackets rendered () are Elizabeth’s.
There are inevitably some stylistic changes to the format of Elizabeth’s letters over the 63 years represented here. For example, in early letters the address and date appear at the bottom of the letter. This is changed between 1846 and 1847 to the top of the letter. Similarly, in August 1867 she starts to invert the day and the month in her dating of letters. In the 1860s she begins to write ‘FitzRoy’ instead of ‘Fitzroy’. I have preserved her formatting of the date and address, on the basis that these details may be of some significance to someone, somewhere and at some time.
Finally, annotations are provided with a view to contextualizing Elizabeth’s correspondence and providing information that will contribute to a picture of the events or matters described or discussed. The first intention of the annotations is to identify, where possible, named (and sometimes unnamed) individuals, to give brief biographical details or to make suggestions for further reading. The annotations also give citations for bibliographical references and to works of art where possible. Significant events are verified where relevant, particularly in reference to the reports in The Times.
Notes to Introduction
1. There are two sources for this story. In the Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake Smith reports that ‘he [Turner] suddenly looked steadily and said he saw “Lady Eastlake”’ (J&C1, p. 273). The second source is Millais’
Life and Letters, which states that Turner took rooms at an inn in Cheyne Walk under an assumed name: ‘at last, one day he became seriously ill, and it was only by his constantly calling out for Lady Eastlake … and on her being sent for, that his identity became known’; J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 2 vols. (London: Methuen & Co., 1899), vol. 1, p. 158. This version is corroborated, in spirit at least, by Jack Lindsay, J. M. W. Turner: A Critical Biography (London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1966).
It is unlikely that Elizabeth visited Turner on his deathbed; she thought that the circumstances of his life were ‘sordid in the extreme’ and that the terms of his will were ‘stupid’ (J&C1, p. 273). They had met at John Murray’s in 1844, and in May 1846 she visited Turner’s studio, where she saw a painting
introduction 21
‘with all the elements in an uproar, of which [she] incautiously said: The
“End of the World,” Mr. Turner? “No, ma’am; Hannibal Crossing the Alps”’
(J&C1, p. 188).
2. See my entry for ‘Lady Eastlake’ in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth Century Photography (New York: Routledge, 2007).
3. See Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin, 1997 [1857]), pp. 281–82; Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 242.
4. There are innumerable instances of Elizabeth’s review of Jane Eyre being quoted in Brontë studies. Kathryn Hughes uses Elizabeth’s phrase ‘a tabooed woman’ as a chapter title in her book The Victorian Governess (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1993).
5. Marion Lochhead, Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1961). Lochhead’s work retells the narrative established in the Journals &
Correspondence, adding some supplementary description of Elizabeth’s published writings and drawing upon the writer’s knowledge of material from the John Murray Archive.
6. David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
7. Dictionaries of Victorian literature usually give Elizabeth Eastlake a perfunc-tory credit; see e.g. Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1988); John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (London: Longman, 1988).
8. John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture, 1830–1870 (London: Century in Association with the National Trust, 1970 [1950]), p. 7. In fact, consulting the index of this book, the two are virtually equal for print inches. Steegman published sporadically on the Eastlakes over his career, including ‘The Eastlakes and Lord Lindsay’, The Listener, 14 July 1949, pp. 61–62, and ‘Sir Charles Eastlake: 1793–1865’, The Architectural Review, vol. 138 (November 1965), p. 364.
9. Bernard Denvir, ‘The Eastlakes’, Quarterly Review, vol. 295 (January 1957), pp. 85–97 (p. 85).
10. Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), p. 19.
11. Namely: Katherine Frank, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994); Shelagh Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism (London: Scolar Press, 1995); Judith Johnson, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (London: Scolar Press, 1997);
Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (London:
Oxford University Press, 1999); and Susanne Knecht, Flora Tristan und Maria Graham Lady Callcott. Die zweite Entdeckung Lateinamerikas (Gebundene Ausgabe) (Hamburg: Europäische VA, 2004). Vernon Lee has had two recent biographies: Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003) and Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003).
12. Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (London: Routledge, 1996).
13. Stephen Springall, That Indomitable Old Lady: A Romance of Fitzroy Square (London: Henry J. Drane Ltd, 1908), p. 21.
14. Charles Eastlake Smith was the second child of her youngest sister Matilda and James Smith, a brother of Marion Murray; hence a mutual nephew of both Elizabeth and John Murray. See Obituary, The Times, Friday, 2 February 1917, p. 9, col. E.
15. J&C1, p.57.
16. These are described by Dr Rigby in his book Framingham, its Agriculture, &c., including the economy of a small farm (Norwich, 1820).
17. For details of his agricultural innovations see A. M. W. Stirling, Coke of Norfolk and his Friends, 2 vols. (London: John Lane – The Bodley Head, 1912), vol. 1, pp. 291–300.
18. J&C1, p.5.
19. See letter, 10 November 1830, n. 3.
20. See letters, 5 September 1843.
21. J&C1, p. 6. In the first half of the nineteenth century the terms ‘typhoid’ and
‘typhus’ were used interchangeably, although strictly referring to pathologi-cally different diseases. It was most probably typhoid fever, since the disease was most commonly caught in the summer from bacteria in food and drink and is marked by intestinal inflammation.
22. TCC, July–December 1824 (92).
23. See letter, 23 July 1873.
24. Smith states that her first work was ‘My Aunt in a Saltmine’. It is not in Frasers and despite intermittent efforts over the years to locate this short story, the piece eludes me.
25. See letter, 25 November 1834.
26. J&C1, p. 10.
27. Letter from Cotman to Dawson Turner, 30 October 1841, Norfolk Record Office: ‘…Yesterday we carried Madam Du Wall [Wahl] & her two Children to Framingham, where we saw Miss E. Rigby’s very, very fine Portraits of Russian Nobility &c – they really are exceedingly beautiful,
& they appear to be her strong points of excellence. Mrs R. I was glad to find looking well & in fine health. The family, saving Dr R – & Roger – & the two Russian Ladies, were all at home. They were all once my pupils – & expressed their pleasure at seeing their old Master. – Madam Du Wall is a delightful creature but a less observer than I own myself to be – must see with pain that a Canker lurks in the beautiful Rose that still damasks her lovely cheek! …’. I am very grateful to Norma Watt for this information.
28. See letter, 15 March 1891.
29. Henry Sass (1788–1844) ran a drawing academy on Bloomsbury Street to prepare entrants for the Royal Academy. Frustratingly, details about Sass’s academy are scant and there is no evidence to connect Elizabeth to his
introduction 23
school. However, Sass did take female students. See Caroline Davidson, The World of Mary Ellen Best (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985).
30. Engravings after her drawings were published in Letters from the Shores of the Baltic, The Jewess and most notably in her jointly authored work on The History of Our Lord. She also illustrated two volumes of Recueil de meubles et d’ornement intérieurs, composés et dessinés dans les differents styles depuis l’epoque Louis XIII, jusqu’a nos jours par E. Eastlake, 2 vols. (Brussels: C. Muquardt;
London: Williams & Norgate; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1866–69).
31. Many standard reference works of art history were translated by women in this period: Mrs Merrifield translated Cennino Cennini’s Treatise on Painting in 1844, Mrs Jonathan Foster translated Vasari from 1850, and Mrs Margaret Heaton translated the first English edition of Kugler’s Handbook in 1842.
32. Her father Dr Rigby translated from the French Jacob Frédéric Lullin de Châteauvieux, Italy, its Agriculture, etc. from the French of … Chateauvieux being letters written by him in Italy, in 1812 and 1813. Translated by E. Rigby (Norwich, R. Hunter, 1819) and wrote a medical book in German, Versuch über die mutterblut flüsse. Her brother Edward Rigby translated Carl Naegele’s
‘Lehrbuch der Geburtschülfe für Hebammen’ in 1836.
33. Around 200 Baltic-German families had the governance of 800,000 Estonian peasants.
34. In fact Lockhart proposed instead to Letitia Mildmay and was refused.
See Marion Lochhead, John Gibson Lockhart (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 256.
35. Kenneth Fielding and Ian Campbell, ‘New Letters of Harriet Martineau to Jane Carlyle’, Women’s Writing, 9.3 (2002), pp. 379–93 (p. 389).
36. Mary F. Outram, Margaret Outram 1778–1863, Mother of the Bayard of India (London: John Murray, 1932), pp. 324–25.
37. J&C1, p. 45.
38. See letter, April 12 1845.
39. J&C1, p. 29.
40. J&C1, p.51.
41. Fielding and Campbell, ‘New Letters of Harriet Martineau to Jane Carlyle’, p. 389.
42. Colin Ford and Roy Strong (An Early Victorian Album: The Hill and Adamson Collection [London: Jonathan Cape, 1974]) have compared her poses to those found in fashion plates for Heath’s Book of Beauty, pp. 74–75 and pp. 61–62.
43. Letter from D. O. Hill to his sister-in-law, Jane Macdonald, July 1853, NLS, Acc 11782. I am very grateful to Sara Stevenson for bringing this letter to my attention.
44. George Paston, At John Murray’s: Records of a Literary Circle 1843–92 (London:
John Murray, 1932), p. 193.
45. His name appears in her review of ‘Modern German Painting’ (Quarterly Review, vol. 77, 1846, p. 330) and he is even flattered in her ‘Art of Dress’
(Quarterly Review, vol. 79, 1847, pp. 391–92). In her journal she calls him the
‘Raphael of England’ (J&C1, p. 118).
46. Eastlake inherited (in 1845) St Mary’s Hill, a small country seat at Plympton.
See Elizabeth Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts by Sir C. L. Eastlake: with a memoir by Lady Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1869), p. 181.
47. 27 March 1849. TCC, January–June 1847 (77).
48. Bessie Rayner Belloc remembered: ‘In middle life she was an unusually tall, fine-looking woman, and her distinguished husband … looked extremely small and frail by her side’. See Bessie Rayner Belloc, A Passing World (London: Ward & Downey, 1897), p. 11. Beatrix Potter reported the gossip that Lady Eastlake ‘used to be able to lift up her husband under her arm’;
The Journals of Beatrix Potter from 1881–97, transcribed from her code writing by L. Linder (London: Warne, 1966), p.55. Isobel Violet Hunt reported that he was known as ‘Little Eastlake’, while she was known as ‘Lago Maggiore’;
Isobel Violet Hunt, The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death (London: John Lane, 1932), p. 107.
49. J&C1, p. 227.
50. For the ‘separate spheres’ thesis see Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), Joan N. Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980), Martha Vincinus, Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), and Martha Vincinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).
51. See letter to John Murray, 14 March 1868.
52. Steegman, ‘Sir Charles Eastlake’, p. 364.
53. Sir Charles Holmes and C. H. Collins Baker, The Making of the National Gallery, 1824–1924 (London: The National Gallery, 1924), pp. 32–33.
54. Winslow Ames, Prince Albert and Victorian Taste (London: Chapman & Hall, 1967), p. 126.
55. Denys Sutton, ‘Aspects of British Collecting Part IV’, Apollo, 123 (1985), pp. 84–129 (p. 92).
56. See letter to R. N. Wornum, NG02/4/2/57/2.
57. Adele M. Ernstrom, ‘“Equally Lenders and Borrowers in Turn’: The Working and Married Lives of the Eastlakes’, Art History, 15.4 (December 1992), pp. 470–85 (p. 482).
58. See letters to Layard, 31 December 1859 and 21 January 1860.
59. See letters to Blackwood, 3, 10, 20 December 1853.
60. So much so that there was some suggestion that Eastlake had dishonestly acquired his collection, a suggestion that Elizabeth was anxious to dispel by disposing of the works he had collected privately during his time as Director of the National Gallery. See letters to Boxall, 1867.
61. Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake, p. 275.
62. See letter to Boxall, 10 May 1866.
introduction 25
63. See John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London: Studio Vista, 1971), pp. 63–79.
64. See letter to Hannah Brightwen, 14 October 1875.
65. Charles Eastlake Smith, letter to John Murray, 18 May 1895, NLS Acc 12604/2104.
66. For example, see Potter, The Journals of Beatrix Potter, p. 167.
67. Charles Kegan Paul, Memories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1899), p. 345. Because Paul’s account is not a diary, there is no date for his recol-lections, except that they appear in a chapter dated from 1874.
68. Belloc, A Passing World, pp. 11–12.
69. The Times, 13 October 1893, p.5, col. f.
70. See letter to Layard, 1 January 1891.
71. Morning Post, Thursday 5 December 1895; Glasgow Herald, Wednesday 4 December 1895; Manchester Guardian, 4 December 1894; London Quarterly Review, April 1896, p. 98.
72. Daily Chronicle, Wednesday 4 December 1895.
73. In point of fact Elizabeth had been known as the author of the review since 1873. I have documented reactions to the publication of Lady Eastlake’s name in full in ‘“In her Own Metier”: The Quarterly Review of Jane Eyre’, Women’s History Review, forthcoming 2009.
74. Daily News, Wednesday 4 December 1895.
75. Speaker, ‘A Literary Causerie: Lady Eastlake by A.B.’, Saturday 14 December 1895, pp. 647–48.
76. Illustrated London News, Saturday 14 December 1895, p. 722.
77. The Times, Wednesday 4 December 1895, p. 7, col. A.
78. Copy of a letter from Springall to W. S. Carver, 15 November 1893, NLS uncatalogued.
79. Gregory Murphy, Countess (New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 2000). The character of Lady Eastlake also featured in a previous play in the West End,
79. Gregory Murphy, Countess (New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 2000). The character of Lady Eastlake also featured in a previous play in the West End,