t h e l e t t e r s of e li z a be t h r igby, l a dy e a st l a k e

(1)

t h e l e t t e r s of e li z a be t h r igby,

l a dy e a st l a k e

(2)

(3)

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake

Edited by Julie Sheldon

(4)

4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU

The right of Julie Sheldon to be identified as the editor of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available

ISBN 978–1–84631–194–9

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by the MPG Books Group

(5)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following libraries and archives for granting permission to publish letters: The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre; The British Library; The Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge;

Huntington Library; National Gallery Archive, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery; Manuscripts and Special Collections Department, University of Nottingham;

Nottinghamshire Archives and Southwell Diocesan Record Office; Pierpont Morgan Library; Powys County Archives Office; Royal Botanical Gardens Archives Kew; Bristol Record Office; the John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester; the Archives of the Stirlings of Keir; Special Collections, UCL Library Services; The Mistresses and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge; the Norfolk Record Office. I am grateful to Henry Ropner for his permission to publish the letters to Henry Sandbach and to Christopher Barker for his permission to include the letters to Hannah Brightwen here.

I have met with great generosity in all my transactions with librarians and archivists during the course of this research. I am indebted to Virginia Murray for her many kindnesses to me at Albemarle Street. I thank Alan Crookham at the National Gallery Archives for his prompt and patient attention. I also thank Rachel Beattie, Ruth Boreham, Elspeth Hector, Richard Knight, Sheila Mackenzie, Christine Nelson, Catherine Richards, Mary Robertson, and Norma Watt. I have been greatly assisted by the generous and unstinting attention of Christopher Barker whose family papers have been such an invaluable source of interesting and candid letters.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Susanna Avery-Quash for generously sharing her research on Charles Eastlake for her forthcoming scholarly edition of his travel notebooks. I have profited greatly in my research from Joan Gibbons, Alex Kidson, Suzanne May, Edward Morris, Sara Stevenson, and Monica Thorpe. I thank Penny Marney and Sue Wellings

(8)

for their kindness to me at Framingham Earl. I am indebted to my good friend Pam Meecham for her cheerful support and, with Neil Hall, for all their hospitality. Lynn Halliday is thanked for her help. Anthony Cond, Andrew Kirk and Helen Tookey at Liverpool University Press have been encouraging in the preparation of this edition and I thank them for their attention to detail. Rosemary Mitchell is thanked for her helpful comments.

I thank Colin Fallows for all his encouragement and support throughout the duration of the work.

Finally I acknowledge the support of the Getty Research Center for making me the fortunate recipient of a Library Research Grant and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art for a Research Support Grant.

(9)

Abbreviations

Standard reference works and bibliographical material relating to Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake’s publications are abbreviated thus:

J&C Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, 2 vols. (London:

John Murray, 1895)

LSB Letters from the Shores of the Baltic, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 2nd edn, 1842)

BL The British Library BRO Bristol Record Office

CLS Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre GC Girton College, Cambridge

HL Huntington Library

ML Morgan Library and Museum, New York

NASDRO Nottinghamshire Archives and Southwell Diocesan Record Office

NCM Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NG The National Gallery Archives London NLS National Library of Scotland

NOTT Manuscripts and Special Collections Department, University of Nottingham

NRO The Norfolk Record Office PCA Powys County Archives Office

RBGA Royal Botanical Gardens Archives Kew

SRA Strathclyde Regional Archives, Glasgow (The Archives of the Stirlings of Keir)

TCC Dawson Turner Correspondence, Trinity College Cambridge UNC General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill

(10)

(11)

Introduction

On his deathbed in 1851, the painter J. M. W. Turner was reported to have said ‘I saw Lady Eastlake’.1 The object of Turner’s hallucination was Elizabeth Eastlake, a 42-year-old reviewer, translator and essayist who had been married for nearly three years to the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Eastlake. Just why the President’s wife should appear to the most famous English artist as he drifted in and out of consciousness will never be known. Perhaps her statuesque physique left an impression upon the diminutive artist, or perhaps his mind was wandering back to dinner parties at which he had met the socially confident and opinionated lady with a reputation for being something of a bluestocking. Whatever the reason, by December 1851 Elizabeth had impinged upon the consciousness of most artists and writers in London society in one way or another – charming some and offending others – to become one of the most articulate and well connected women in the Victorian art world.

As the letters printed here demonstrate, Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake was happily situated in the Victorian literary and art worlds, linked by birth and friendship to an intellectual aristocracy of reputable artists, writers and influential figures. Although never a part of Bohemian or radical intellectual circles, she occupied a prominent position in conventional Victorian culture. Today her name is remembered, if at all, for one of three reasons. She wrote one of the first articles on photography, she reviewed Jane Eyre and Modern Painters, and she married Sir Charles Lock Eastlake.

The article on photography and the marriage to Eastlake bring approbation.

She continues to be credited in the history of photography for her acumen and foresight 2 and no account of Charles Eastlake fails to credit her part in his career. The reviews of Jane Eyre and Modern Painters, however, have cast her in a villainous bit part in the biographies of Charlotte Brontë and John Ruskin,3 and Elizabeth’s pert opinions have proven a rich source of quotations for scholars in need of soundbites representing the worst of Victorian opinion.4

However, Elizabeth Eastlake was responsible for much more than acerbic prose and a fortunate marriage and her reputation is in need of a thorough

(12)

overhaul. The biography written by Marion Lochhead in 1961 is now rather outdated.5 David Robertson provides more informative and erudite work on Elizabeth in his study of Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World of 1978.6 Beyond this there has been little scholarship on either of the Eastlakes; although, ironically, many scholars of the Victorian art world express their bewilderment about the collective amnesia that has condemned the Eastlakes to relative obscurity.7 In The Consort of Taste (first published in 1950) John Steegman expressed surprise that Elizabeth Eastlake had yet to receive ‘the recognition due to her’, warning that ‘the reader of this book will find [her] recurring so often that she becomes nearly as prominent as Ruskin’.8 In 1957 Bernard Denvir remarked upon the fact that both of the Eastlakes had ‘suffered an undue amount of neglect’.9 In 1980 Francis Haskell recommended Elizabeth as ‘one of the most articulate, representative, and influential figures of Victorian England’.10 However, while all parties are keen to point out just how significant the name of Eastlake is in the cultural life of the nineteenth century, with the noble exception of an article by Adele Ernstrom there has been little contibuted. While Elizabeth’s peers Anna Jameson, Emilia Dilke, Lucie Duff Gordon, Harriet Martineau and Maria Graham, Lady Callcott have had recent biographies,11 she remains without any significant interpretation, contextualization or discussion of her life and work.

Elizabeth’s now rather obscure status appears to me to stem from the perception that she was a woman writer without being a women’s writer. By this I mean that she appears to have little to recommend her to historians in search of artists and writers validating a particular kind of female experience.

Elizabeth has been regarded as a ‘phallic speaker’, earning herself a place with Margaret Oliphant, Mrs Humphry Ward and Queen Victoria among those since dubbed ‘Eve’s Renegades’.12 Her apparently orthodox views were articulated with confidence and aplomb but seemingly out of alignment with the campaigns of the day. As her butler later put it, ‘though not exactly a freethinker or a New Woman, [she] had opinions of her own, and a will of her own’.13 In point of fact, although she did not contribute to important women’s issues of the day, neither did she oppose them. As the correspondence printed here shows, she had little sympathy for any cases of special pleading. For instance, she supported the Society of Female Artists, and she also patronized a Society for the Employment of Women, yet she was dismissive of women’s art education. Many letters testify to Elizabeth’s other philanthropic interests, in particular her promotion of the fortunes of single women: recommending nurses to Florence Nightingale and governesses to ladies of her acquaintance, or intervening on behalf of the indigent relatives of artists. She was an enthusiastic supporter of several charities, lending her name to the causes that appealed for sponsors

(13)

in the pages of The Times, and towards the end of her life she became an anti-vivisectionist.

The broadest biographical details of Elizabeth’s life can be traced through the Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, compiled and edited by her nephew Charles Eastlake Smith in 1895.14 Smith, as his aunt’s literary executor, compiled two volumes from an uneven collection of sources (a journal, an unspecified number of notebooks and miscellaneous correspondence with friends and family), extracting passages for what he calls ‘public interest’. The sources for the Journals and Correspondence are poorly distributed and only ten pages document the first thirty years of her life. Between 1840 and 1842 Smith quotes from what he calls ‘Miss Rigby’s notebooks’, a series of disconnected thoughts and aphorisms without specific reference to events in her life. The title Journals and Correspondence is misleading, since Elizabeth did not begin her journal until she was 33 and finished it shortly before she became engaged six years later. Her journal keeping was, at best, uneven, and Elizabeth views the gaps in her journal as her ‘besetting sin’.15 Moreover, her journal entries are often oblique and contribute very little to our knowledge of her life. Following the suspension of the journal towards the end of 1848, Smith tells his aunt’s story through letters to her mother and, following Mrs Rigby’s death in 1872, to a handful of close friends, most frequently to Austen Henry Layard. Smith provides continuity statements between sources and fills in the broadest biographical detail. However, as a family member Smith tends to be silent on personal aspects of the Rigbys. There were many portions of his aunt’s letters, printed here, that Smith would not have published, and there are a few instances of his bowdlerizing her letters that are uncovered here.

Elizabeth Rigby was the fifth of twelve children born to Dr Edward Rigby and Anne Palgrave. She was born at her father’s medical practice in St Giles Street in Norwich on 17 November 1809. The Rigbys divided their time between Norwich and a model farm, a 300-acre country estate at Framingham Earl, six miles outside Norwich, where Dr Rigby perfected the latest techniques of animal husbandry and crop cultivation.16 The term

‘gentleman farmer’ only partially describes Dr Edward Rigby (1747–1821).

He was also a noted physician and obstetrician, an advocate of public health measures and, for a time, Mayor of Norwich.17 Dr Rigby was a gregarious host, and his children were allowed to mingle freely with the many gentlemen-scholars and scientists who called at Framingham Earl Hall and St Giles Street. The picture that emerges from the very brief outline of her childhood in the Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake is a bucolic one of the Rigby children ‘climbing trees and haystacks, making fires in a dry ditch, and roasting potatoes’.18

introduction 3

(14)

Following the custom of the time, Elizabeth Rigby, along with her five sisters, was educated at home by a governess, while her brothers, Edward 19 and Roger, were sent to the local grammar school. The Rigby daughters, like countless other daughters of gentlemen, followed a prescribed programme of studies that included French, some German and Italian, piano lessons, conventional dance steps, needlework and drawing.

Dr Rigby’s death in 1821 substantially reduced the educational provision for the Rigby daughters. Mrs Rigby removed the family permanently to Framingham Earl and the ‘men of note in literature, agriculture, natural history, science, and other branches of learning’ ceased to call. In the move to Framingham Earl Mrs Rigby was pinning her family’s fortunes to land, at a time when the future of the agrarian economy was uncertain.

Economies were made to the girls’ education: the French governess was retained but the tutors in Italian, arithmetic and geography were paid off.

Elizabeth was retrospectively critical of her education, complaining in later life about its deficiencies.20

In 1827 the Rigby family moved to Heidelberg – in Smith’s version of events, so that Elizabeth could convalesce from a severe attack of typhoid fever.21 Just why the family should move to Heidelberg to aid Elizabeth’s recovery when they already inhabited a model farm in the East Anglian countryside is a mystery. Smith only gives half a page to the two and half years that the Rigbys spent in Heidelberg and, as some of the letters reveal, Elizabeth preferred to draw a veil over the time abroad. The most likely explanation is that long-standing money worries caused the Rigbys to retrench. In a letter of 1824 to her sister Mary, wife of Dawson Turner, Mrs Rigby appeals for help in finding out about the ‘economy’ of living in Germany:

Dear Mary

I write to you, as to you I am indebted for all the information I have obtained on the subject of my expatriation, and beg you to accept my thanks for it; and to allow my further troubling you with further questions – would Mr. Turner write … for the purpose of learning those further particulars, concerning education of females, economy of living etc – which it is needful I should know before I quit these peaceful abodes … I am fully aware of the painful step I shall be obliged to take provided I left my house in the manner I have prepared; and that the increase of distance will serve only to extend the aggravation of my separation from home – but the inevitability of this necessary step loses of its horrors, when on looking at the other side of the picture, I see and feel poverty paralyses every effort I have to make. There I stand

(15)

between two evils, on examination, the former as more endurable, for a space, than the latter. I can encompass the former the better educating my children – with the latter they and their education must submit to every privation – and the term, three years, will I hope do much for them …22

The choice of Heidelberg was probably on account of Edward Rigby, who was at the start of a promising career in medicine. He matriculated from Edinburgh University on the day of his twenty-first birthday in 1825 and went to Berlin University in 1826 and then to the lying-in hospital at Heidelberg to study midwifery. There is little to be gleaned from the two and half years that the Rigby family spent in Heidelberg, although three of the Rigby daughters – Anne, Maria Justina and Gertrude – became engaged to Balto-German barons. The unhappy fate of her three expatriated sisters in Estonia came to colour Elizabeth’s view of Germans.

In a letter to her cousin Hannah Brightwen she describes a visit to the city years later in 1873, remarking, ‘Heidelberg is full of pathetic recollections.

Sisters sacrificed to a dream’.23 The ‘sacrifice’ of her sisters to apparently advantageous marriages that failed to live up to either material or marital expectations is hinted at in some of the letters. But her antipathy towards the Germans is a blatant and recurring theme in the letters, for example in those addressed to Layard.

The diminished Rigby family returned to Norwich in 1829. In the early 1830s Elizabeth made her first efforts at establishing a career for herself as a writer. Although I have been unable to find either piece, Smith informs us that she wrote a short story for Frasers in 1829 24 and a letter printed here confirms that she produced an article of unknown designation or description on Passavant early in the 1830s.25 Throughout her youth, Elizabeth entertained ambitions to be an artist, claiming ‘my pen has never been a favourite implement with me; the pencil is the child of my heart’.26 She continued to draw regularly, leaving two thousand drawings to a niece on her death. Those that survive date mainly from the 1820s and 1830s and illustrate something of the young Elizabeth Rigby’s world – a portfolio of unnamed portraits of friends and family in comfortable surroundings: women seated, women sewing, elderly women asleep in their chairs, sleeping children, men in profile and three-quarter views of elegantly dressed young women. In Norwich Elizabeth and her sisters were taught drawing by John Sell Cotman 27 and the artist E. T. Daniell also appears to have been co-opted into her art education.28 According to Smith, Elizabeth was talented enough to warrant the short-term investment of a year in London from July 1832 to July 1833, in order to study under the tutelage of Henry Sass.29 Although she was never to be a professional

introduction 5

(16)

artist, the pencil remained the ‘child of her heart’ and she even published some engravings after her drawings in her various books.30

The obstacles to women’s writing were arguably relatively fewer than those that prevented women from becoming professional artists in Victorian England. For instance, literary success was not predicated on entry to an academy. Elizabeth, in common with other women writers, began her literary life as a translator, electing to translate Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in England with Notices of Private Galleries, and remarks on the state of Art.

In common with other women, she was employed on translating standard reference works into English.31 Translating was an area of expertise in the family,32 although it was still relatively unusual for women to be fluent in German.

In 1838 Elizabeth made her first journey to the Baltic to visit her two elder sisters Baroness Maria Justina de Rosen and Baroness Gertrude de Rosen. ‘Justina’, as her family called her, and Gertrude had married into one of the old established families of the ‘Balto’ overlords, members of the Teutonic aristocracy who had the governance of the Estonian peasantry under the Russian government. This extended visit was recorded in her first book, Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (hereafter referred to by its title in subsequent editions, Letters from the Shores of the Baltic). In distilling the narrative thrust of Letters from the Shores of the Baltic readers followed a vague topography as Elizabeth moved between various country estates in Estonia and the elite Toompea district of the capital, Reval (now Tallinn).

In her bulletins home, she created vignettes of daily life in the Baltic, dwelling on what was distinctive in the habits of the Baltic German nobility and the native Estonian peasants. English readers were regaled with anecdotes about substandard living, quaint customs, strange meals, and the idiosyncrasies of the Lutheran faith. Readers would also learn about the petty tyranny of the Estonian nobility, and the iniquities of its government. The attribution of the experiences and views of the writer to a lady were important to the reception of the book. Lady travellers were acquiring a reputation for insight that their male counterparts lacked, and Elizabeth’s authorial posture is an interesting blend of affinity for her Balto hosts and pity for the Estonian peasants.33

A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic was published by John Murray in 1841. Following the success of the book, she was invited to write for the Quarterly, an arrangement that was to last, on and off, for the rest of her life.

It is not certain whether it was John Murray or John Gibson Lockhart, the editor of the Quarterly, who gave her the first commission to write a review.

Both men seemed to have a flirtatious relationship with her; in particular Lockhart. Lockhart gave Elizabeth at least three soubriquets (‘Lofty Lucy’,

‘Miss Esthonia’ and ‘Queen Bess’) and some observers expected him to

(17)

propose in 1844.34 Harriet Martineau wrote to Jane Carlyle in 1844: ‘For these two years nearly I have been hoping she wd marry [John] Lockhart.

[John] Murray is far too good for her. She & Lockhart will match exactly;

& the whole world will be saved from the peril of marrying either of them.’35 A candid letter written to Margaret Outram in 1844 tells of her unchaperoned meetings with Lockhart in London while she was visiting the Murrays between February and April:

I have many friends to see here, among them the redoubtable Mr.

Lockhart, who is a kind friend to me. I shall see how he pleases me this time, for I have seen much of men and manners since I last saw him, but entre nous the impression he left on my mind was that there were few men who could win so much by their warmth, as he by his coldness. I know you won’t approve this, but this is only an observation in the abstract. I am as safe from him as he from me. Our mutual situation however is odd and piquant – a man of such mental power and extraordinary personal beauty, and a young woman to be closeted together to talk of Quarterly Reviews, strikes me sometimes as thoroughly absurd, and is a new leaf in my many-leaved book of experience …36

In October 1842 Elizabeth, her mother and her two sisters Jane and Matilda moved to Edinburgh. Mrs Rigby sold Framingham Earl, unable to maintain the rambling estate any longer. Again, it is not entirely certain why the Rigbys should have chosen to live in Edinburgh. Perhaps the city’s reputation for intellectual society suited Elizabeth’s literary aspirations, or perhaps it suited the family purse. Elizabeth arrived in Edinburgh equipped with letters of introduction from John Murray to the city’s society, and the Journals and Correspondence show that she was swiftly admitted into the best drawing rooms, a distinction that was unprecedented: ‘No one can more enjoy the kind of society with which we here mix, and which, except abroad, we had always been debarred from’.37 From the Rigbys’

rented house in St Bernard’s Crescent, in the New Town of Edinburgh, Elizabeth made a concerted effort to assume a literary life and she published numerous articles and stories in this period. The Jewess: A Tale from the Shores of the Baltic appeared first as a slim John Murray publication in 1843, followed by ‘The Wolves of Esthonia’ for Fraser’s Magazine in 1845 and a collection of Livonian Tales in 1846. She also began to write for the Quarterly Review, contributing on topics such as ‘Books for Children’, ‘Evangelical Novels’, ‘The Lady of the Manor’, and ‘Biographies of German Ladies’. She complained mischievously about her allocation to John Murray III: ‘I see that you and the Editor of the Q:R: persist in keeping me to the articles about “women on women”’.38 Of her first article on children’s books in

introduction 7

(18)

1842 Lockhart writes to her that he has ‘read it with more pleasure than I can well express. It seems to me one of the most admirable specimens of review-writing I ever met with – full of sense and taste, equally instructive and interesting.’39 And again in 1843 Lockhart praised her contributions:

‘You seem to have it in your power to render the “Q.R.” an instrument of great improvement among classes of readers that have hitherto probably given no attention to its contents. You are the only lady, I believe, that ever wrote in it except Mrs. Somerville, who once gave us a short scientific article; and I had long felt and regretted the want of that knowledge of women and their concerns which men can never attain, for the handling of numberless questions most interesting and most important to society’.40 The judgements she expressed in her Quarterly reviews reveal her confidence in the quality of her opinions and the certainty that she is articulating the shared values of Tory society. Their tone occasionally caused offence.

Harriet Martineau measured Elizabeth’s articles as evidence of her distant cousin’s character; citing her review of German women in the Quarterly she warned her friend Jane Carlyle:

Learn her from her own works: but, my friend, beware of her. She is dangerous … As for Elizth’s talents … her feelings will never rise above a superficial sentimentality, nor her wit above smartness:

while her virtue will always consist of mere got up invective agst whiggish religion and politics. Be sure, dear, not to trust her, not put yourself in her power in the least thing, till you are satisfied yourself of my being mistaken in all this. My very heart wails over these literary women who are not true to their womanhood – to responsibilities far far exceeding those they spend themselves on.41 The journal shows that Elizabeth generally took around two months to complete her articles and that she was in more or less constant employment.

The journal fails to illuminate her emotional or intellectual life in Edinburgh, instead painting a sociable picture of Elizabeth as a benign flirt, escorted into dinner by a succession of Edinburgh men and taking an immodest delight in recording the comments of attentive dinner guests.

There are several photographic images of Elizabeth from the mid-1840s by the Edinburgh partnership of Hill and Adamson that corroborate this bookish and yet vivacious sense of self, some showing her contemplative and others showing her posing in her best apparel, in the manner of contemporary fashion plates.42 Elizabeth was often described by her contemporaries as a ‘handsome’ woman, code perhaps for her striking but not conventionally beautiful features. Her unusual height (she was almost six feet tall), combined with her rather Roman nose, made her ‘imperial looking’, in the words of her nephew. From the very few images we have

(19)

of Elizabeth in later life we can see that she retained her fondness for styling her hair in two braids, fixed with pins, around her ears. The photographer David Octavius Hill certainly found her attractive, recalling years later that his ‘old sweetheart Elizabeth Rigby’ was ‘the tallest, cleverest & best girl of these parts’.43

It is not known exactly when Elizabeth first met the painter, former Keeper of the National Gallery and Secretary to the Fine Arts Commission, Charles Lock Eastlake. Eastlake was a frequent guest at the Murrays’ and it can be deduced from a letter of 5 May 1843 that the two had first met shortly before, thereafter sporadically renewing their acquaintance at various dinner tables. John Murray observed enough to think that Eastlake was ‘a little in love’ with Elizabeth as early as 1845.44 The feeling may have been mutual since Eastlake is mentioned gratuitously in some of her Quarterly reviews and flatteringly in her journal.45 Charles Eastlake and Elizabeth Rigby became engaged in January 1849. We can only speculate, albeit with some confidence, that theirs would have been an utterly punctilious and protracted courtship. Eastlake’s personality does not present itself very clearly in the letters but his contemporaries remarked variously on his circumspect behaviour, courtier-like bearing and methodical habits. His reputation as a painter was founded on rigorously academic views of the Roman campagna and history paintings. However, he was painting less frequently and increasingly acting as an administrator, in which role he was equally thorough and workmanlike. At the age of 56, Eastlake was qualified to present himself to Elizabeth Rigby. He was an established Royal Academician, public servant, writer and, more reliably, a land-owning gentleman, capable of supporting a family within the socially acceptable limits of his class.46 Following his engagement he wrote to Elizabeth’s uncle, Dawson Turner, ‘You who know the worth and excellence of Miss Elizabeth Rigby can well estimate the prospect of rational happiness which is before me’.47 His hopes of ‘rational happiness’ are entirely in character and not without foundation. Miss Rigby was a measured risk.

Eastlake brought his new bride back to his home at 7 Fitzroy Square, a solid Georgian house on the east side of the square, in an area of eighteenth- century property development that had become unfashionable and often bypassed by Victorians who headed west to Mayfair and Belgravia. Inside number 7 the Eastlakes lived on the light and airy first floor, which was divided into a front drawing room with its large windows facing the square and what Elizabeth called the back drawing room. The rooms were large enough to accommodate music parties and they frequently entertained the Royal Academicians. The Eastlakes quickly became a social fixture of the London season, although the first appearances of a tall, striking-looking bluestocking on the arm of a shorter, slightly built, confirmed bachelor

introduction 9

(20)

aroused some short-lived comment and there are some irresistibly comic sketches of the couple among the recollections of various Victorians.48 Soon after their marriage Eastlake became President of the Royal Academy and, as was customary, he was knighted in recognition of his services.

The Eastlakes’ new position and responsibilities put the pair at the heart of the London season, which was unofficially opened by the Private View at the Royal Academy in May each year. They presided as gregarious and companionable hosts of what Elizabeth described as ‘the most exclusive meeting of rank and fashion, intermingled with artists and their wives’.49 The London season was over at the start of the grouse shooting season, when the Eastlakes usually left town to start their continental tour of Europe.

Many letters printed here testify to Elizabeth’s feelings of ‘dissipation’

each summer, as she managed both her ‘At Homes’ and a busy schedule of evening parties. Her circle of friends extended in this period to literary and artistic residents of London, and included Euphemia (‘Effie’) Ruskin. As the letters document, Elizabeth was Effie’s close friend and confidante during the period leading up to the annulment of her marriage to John Ruskin.

The letters demonstrate how Elizabeth used her position to campaign for Effie among her large circle of acquaintances, in particular marshalling the ladies to prevent her friend from becoming a social outcast.

Fixed to the outside of number 7 Fitzroy Square since 1985 is a blue plaque which records that Charles Eastlake lived there for 22 years (1843–

65), not mentioning that Elizabeth lived there for 44 years. This is a particularly contemporary oversight and not, perhaps, one which would have been made in the 1850s and 1860s. The married life of the Eastlakes is one of many distinguished Victorian partnerships that contravene the early feminist indictments of ‘separate spheres’.50 To be sure, Eastlake was a public man and Elizabeth would have had dominion over the private sphere of home, but her career as a writer between 1849 and 1865 was as productive as that she had had before her marriage: she wrote nine reviews, translated three volumes of Waagen and completed Anna Jameson’s History of Our Lord. It could be observed that Elizabeth diverted her interests to those of her husband and that she concentrated her efforts on more art-historical material, as she acquired a reputation as an authority on art, although she regarded her knowledge of the history of art as ‘small’.51 Nonetheless, she was at the outer edges of the scholarship that contributed to the formation of the discipline we call the history of art. Knowledge about art history was generally in the orbit of literary people or of gentlemen artists; and despite her demurrals, Elizabeth’s credentials in the history of art, and particularly in connoisseurship, were exceptional. She had a sound practical knowledge of art, albeit one whose technical expertise was limited to drawing and watercolour; and an extensive knowledge of European art collections.

(21)

As the letters printed here show, her main art-historical concern was with connoisseurship. Elizabeth’s life straddled important changes in what constituted knowledge about art, based upon the systematic and scientific study of art and of attribution. Her connection to European connoisseurship was made through Charles Eastlake but maintained beyond his death through her friendship with Austen Henry Layard. Charles Eastlake became the first Director of the National Gallery in 1855. The few commentators on the history of the National Gallery have treated Elizabeth very kindly, unanimously arguing that Eastlake’s successful tenure as Director was very much the result of a partnership with his wife. John Steegman writes: ‘“Eastlake” really means “them”, a perfect and wonderfully fruitful partnership’ or ‘rather a joint personality’.52 Holmes and Baker in an early history of the National Gallery give Elizabeth all the credit for Eastlake’s successful transition from Keeper to Director, crediting the difference between the Eastlake who had resigned as Keeper in 1847 and the Eastlake who took on the Directorship in 1855 entirely to his wife: ‘The single external cause to which we can assign a share in this development was Eastlake’s marriage. Lady Eastlake was one of the most remarkable women of her time … every autumn, from 1855 onwards, this talented lady accompanied her husband on his travels in search of pictures for the Gallery, and the extraordinary improvement in the quality of Eastlake’s purchases can hardly fail to have been assisted by her companionship’.53 Winslow Ames credits the couple with the fortunate purchases at the National Gallery: ‘he and his wife, with their remarkable expertise, mobility, and knowledge of private sources, worked as one to build up what was already an important gallery’.54 Denys Sutton describes Elizabeth as making a ‘major contribution to Eastlake’s assured position in the London art world’.55

In some ways the idea of a partnership presented by Steegman, Holmes and Baker and Sutton is overstated. What the letters seem to show is that the practicalities of their partnership were clearly devolved along private and professional lines. There are many letters (not reproduced here) written by Elizabeth on behalf of Sir Charles – sending replies to dinner invitations, allocating tickets, writing letters of introduction for private art collections and, more significantly, acting on his behalf when absent from town. Sir Charles authorized Elizabeth to open his mail in 1861 when he was on the Continent alone.56 The real question of partnership, however, is that of her influence over his professional activities. Was her influence merely one of providing secretarial support or can it be traced in the actions of Sir Charles as the Director of the National Gallery? In a letter of 6 April 1861 she appears to be more than her husband’s companionable helpmeet, suggesting to Layard that she will accompany Eastlake on his inspection of Piero

introduction 11

(22)

della Francesca’s Baptism and remarking that ‘what influence I have will probably be excecuted in favour of trying to obtain it’. The extent of her putative influence over Eastlake’s purchases for the National Gallery is still a matter of conjecture. However, it seems that she gave her unequivocal support to her husband in his professional activities. Adele Ernstrom has written on the working and married lives of the Eastlakes and has argued cogently in favour of ‘their professional as well as personal solidarity’.57 And perhaps ‘solidarity’ is the operative word. There are several letters in which Elizabeth takes up the cudgels in defence of her husband. For example, in one letter to Layard she pulls him up for an article in The Times questioning the progress of the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, overseen by Sir Charles’ Fine Art Commission;58 and in a set of letters to John Blackwood she beleaguers the publisher into printing a retraction of a remark in his magazine about Sir Charles’ alleged policy of glazing pictures.59

Elizabeth did not make her first tour of the Continent with Eastlake until 1852, and she accompanied Eastlake on all or part of his travels except in 1853 and 1856. Eastlake went to Europe for five weeks each year to view and purchase paintings for the National Gallery collection. In their packed itinerary, Elizabeth often accompanied her husband to view the disassembled panel paintings and detached frescoes in dealers’ shops or in private collections. To what extent her presence influenced Eastlake in his judgements about the eligibility of purchases for the National Gallery is unclear. For example, was she consulted over the purchase of works for Eastlake’s own collection? The letters are inconclusive in this respect.

Eastlake had formed a decent collection of old master drawings and some paintings – including a Rembrandt – before his marriage. However, the salaries that came with his new posts gave him a discretionary income to spend on art; and he was in an excellent position for picking up bargains.60 The overwhelming majority of works purchased by the Eastlakes were quattrocento paintings of the virgin and child, including work by Botticelli, Bellini, Mantegna and Ghirlandaio. The quality of the Eastlake collection is summarized by Robertson when he observes that ‘of the Eastlakes’ 67 old pictures and drawings, 26 are now in the National Gallery, and a dozen more are in other galleries open to the public’.61

The Eastlakes made their last journey abroad together in August 1865.

Almost as soon as they had crossed the Alps Eastlake became ill, suffering from familiar respiratory problems, and the pair remained at Milan, waiting for his health to improve sufficiently to return home. Eastlake attempted to carry out his business with Elizabeth acting as his secretary, writing most of his correspondence and coordinating his visitors. A few weeks into this regime it became clear that any plans to return to England would have to be postponed and that they would have to winter in Italy. By the end of

(23)

October the weather in Milan was too cold and wet for Eastlake’s health and the pair headed to Pisa, hoping for a better climate and believing that they would be well placed to return home via Leghorn and thus avoiding the Alps.

They lingered at Pisa for six weeks. The letters written by Elizabeth give successively encouraging and discouraging reports, as Eastlake alternately rallied and then relapsed. Eastlake made out his last will and testament on 22 December, and died two days later on Christmas Eve.

Elizabeth returned to England in January 1866 to live out what she called ‘the altered remainder of my life’.62 As she assumed the prescribed pattern of mourning followed by Victorian widows,63 Elizabeth channelled her grief into a number of literary outlets, including a slim volume entitled Fellowship: Letters Addressed to my Sister Mourners, a perceptive pathology of grief that charts the stages of bereavement before consigning all suffering to the inscrutable will of the Almighty. The letters written in the late 1860s show her efforts to keep Sir Charles’ flame burning, through his literary legacy and the future of the National Gallery. Her proprietorial interest in the National Gallery is thoroughly documented in the letters to the new Director William Boxall and to one of the trustees, Austen Henry Layard. The letters generally concern the disposal of Eastlake’s art collection and library, although many also comment upon Gallery business.

Elizabeth probably had little direct influence on the affairs of the National Gallery but she was certainly indulged by Boxall and Layard, both of whom courteously or diplomatically allowed her to imagine her importance. For example, in one letter to her cousin she confesses ‘I grudge that the “talent”

– i.e. the knowledge of art lies so useless with me. I had such an exceptional education in connoisseurship at my beloved One’s side – & there is scarcely a creature with whom I can share it. I feel that I shd have been his best successor in the direction of the Nat: Gallery … Without vanity I know I shd have been the right person, tho’ the world wd be astonished at such an idea’.64 Following Boxall’s resignation the letters are mainly critical of the new Director, Frederick Burton, and of his purchases for the nation, and some of her letters try to promote the career of her nephew Charles Locke Eastlake as he followed his uncle into the post of Keeper at the National Gallery.

Elsewhere her mandarinism wielded a traditionalist influence in the opinion-forming press. She continued to write for the Quarterly and, following a temporary rift with the Murrays, for the Edinburgh. Her topics were generally related to art and, when viewed in combination with the correspondence here, her articles help form a picture of the spirited and outspoken Lady Eastlake, who used her position to contribute to the cultural controversies of the period, illuminating the part that a confident and well-connected woman could play in debates about art scholarship.

introduction 13

(24)

Long after Eastlake’s death, many prospective sellers of art works continued to approach her for verification of an artist’s name, and she was regularly invited to comment upon paintings for descriptive notices and periodical reviews. As her nephew recalled, ‘She was considered one of the best connoisseurs of Old Masters, and well known people came to her daily to talk pictures and art, and to get her advice thereon’.65 Her correspondence with connoisseurs and historians including Austen Henry Layard, Rawdon Brown and William Boxall shows not only how much positive agency she wielded in their respective careers but also the extent to which she promoted the interests of friends in her writing.

Elizabeth ventured abroad periodically but she passed most of her time in London, punctuated by visits to family and friends, and she spent most summers out of town, frequently with her closest friend Harriet Grote in Surrey. Mrs Grote destroyed all her correspondence before her death and we are deprived of the letters that might have animated their friendship.

Conversely, the correspondence with her great friend Austen Henry Layard is intact and the letters here reveal the scope of their shared interests, while some of the playful banter that passed between the pair gives colour to their relationship. The letters to Layard disclose the partisanship of the pair in the debates about connoisseurship at the end of the nineteenth century, showing the convivial relationships among their friends – Gustav Waagen, Giovanni Morelli, Jean Paul Richter and Bernard Berenson – as well as their common enmity towards J. A. Crowe, G. B. Cavalcaselle and Wilhelm von Bode.

By the 1880s the grand dame at number 7 was an oddity to the younger visitors to Fitzroy Square. Elizabeth had inherited the family condition she called rheumatism, and she became increasingly less mobile. She was still able to make house calls until 1883 but after that became more or less housebound, until she obtained a new carriage that could accommodate her wheelchair. Thereafter she still called at friends’ doors and they obliged her disability by coming down to her in the street. At home she was virtually confined to her rooms on the first floor, receiving guests in her front drawing room and in her final years sleeping in the room at the rear. She was attended by five servants, and a succession of young friends and nieces. Visitors to her home usually found Elizabeth next to the fireplace, working at a writing desk on top of a great round table covered with manuscripts and periodicals, surrounded by unfashionable furniture covered in faded chintz.66 She arranged what remained of the Eastlake collection across her two drawing rooms: two Veronese paintings over the chimneypiece, on the opposite wall various quattrocento paintings of the virgin and child intermingled with Sir Charles’ views of the Roman campagna. She had too many paintings for the walls and kept some on

(25)

easels, and others propped on chairs. The publisher Charles Kegan Paul recalled Elizabeth as ‘a complete survival of a lady of the last generation.

I never saw her wither sitting on a sofa or in an easy chair, but she sat up at a table with a little slanting writing-desk before her, surrounded with the stiffest of furniture, although priceless works of art hung upon the walls.’ 67

Bessie Rayner Belloc paints a graphic image of the elderly Elizabeth, loyally inhabiting Fitzroy Square despite its decline as the surrounding roads were filling with fish and chip shops and rag and bone men:

During the last years of her long life she spent her days sitting between the window and the fire-place, at the convenient edge of a comfortable round table of the old-fashioned sort, littered over with new books and periodicals; and though she moved with difficulty, and had renounced her ceremonious habit of accompanying her visitors to the door of the room, she always apologised with stately politeness, and, except in that one particular, wholly declined to admit the infirmities of age. This room at number 7 Fitzroy Square, where the President had dwelt with persistent dignity, ignoring the western march of London, was inhabited to the last by ‘Dame Elizabeth Eastlake’. It was large and handsome, with very high old windows, and the walls were covered with a profusion of fine pictures, many of them of great value; and intermingled were works by Sir Charles Eastlake, which although weaker in conception, did not jar at all with those of the Italian masters; and this was exactly what his widow intended to express by the arrangement. It was a delightful room, with a refreshing absence of any attempt at decoration, and exactly suited its imposing mistress.68

This view of the dowager Lady Eastlake is corroborated by a number of her visitors. G. E. Flower remembered, ‘it was an intellectual treat to sit with her in her old house in Fitzroy-Square, surrounded by her splendid pictures and other works of art, enjoying her refined and elevated conversation, piously resigned to bodily sufferings, but bright in mind and warm in heart to the last’.69

The last two articles that Elizabeth published were, fittingly enough, reminiscences. ‘Reminiscences of St. Petersburg Society’ and ‘Reminiscences of Edinburgh Society Nearly Fifty Years Ago’ were published in Longman’s Magazine in 1892 and 1893 respectively. In the new year of 1891 she began destroying her papers in order to save her executors trouble.70 By the summer of 1893 it was evident to her friends and family that Elizabeth was dying. She remained conscious throughout her illness but suffered

introduction 15

(26)

from breathlessness and restless nights and she ceased her correspondence in September. She added a codicil to her will on 30 August 1893, revoking some legacies and reducing others.

Elizabeth Eastlake died on 2 October 1893 and was buried beside her husband and their stillborn daughter at Kensal Green Cemetery four days later. She left £27,945 13s 4d to be divided up between a considerable number of family members and friends, giving proportionate sums to old friends, faithful servants, cousins and numerous nephews and nieces.

The death of Lady Eastlake generated a handful of perfunctory obituary notices but, by and large, collective amnesia had relegated her to the status of a widow of a distantly remembered public servant. However, following the publication of The Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake on 4 December 1895 there was a belated press interest in her contribution to Victorian literature. The first crop of reviews were generally enthusiastic and adjectives such as ‘charming’ or ‘delightful’ are recurrent.71 The Daily Chronicle called it ‘one of the books of the season’ and stated that it ‘deserves, and cannot fail to secure, a permanent place in the libraries of all who have learned to understand that lively and just observation of men and manners, places and pageants, is seldom so valuable as when the observer is a shrewd, amiable and witty woman’.72 However, the publication of the Journals and Correspondence also revealed Lady Eastlake’s identity as the Quarterly reviewer of Jane Eyre and aroused more press interest.73 The Daily News admitted that while ‘happy in her intellectual gifts and inclinations, she was not less happy in her opportunities’.74 Augustine Birrell in the Speaker hotly contested her reputation as a ‘woman of letters’: ‘Accident threw open to her the “pulpit” of the Quarterly Review, and from that pulpit she preached many a sermon, inflicted many a wound, promulgated much mischievous nonsense without a tremor or a misgiving’.75 James Payn writing in the Illustrated London News also queried Lady Eastlake’s credentials: ‘her style was admirable, and her opinions would have been valuable if only she had been right … The past loomed before her eyes, like a hill in mist, while the present was a mole-hill’.76 The Times appeared to sum up her contribution with acumen: ‘The truth is that the note of Lady Eastlake’s character was a robust commonsense which brought with it all its usual accompaniments of intolerance for sentiment and the tendency to hate what she could not sympathise with.

Such a type of mind does not excite the highest kind of admiration, but in a woman who, through long life, makes such strenuous use of her endowments and opportunities, who does so much in the world, and who writes so much and so well, it arouses an admiration that is, after all, very real and very warm’.77

A final interesting footnote to these early considerations of Lady

(27)

Eastlake is the attempt by her butler, Stephen Springall, to contribute his own memoir. Stephen Hatcher Springall entered Fitzroy Square around 1870 and left service some time before 1891. Springall alerted ‘the Eastlake Family’ to his intentions shortly after the death of his former employer:

It probably is known to you that I have written considerably about her and hers in the shape of ‘Reminiscences of Lady Eastlake’ and

‘Facts and Fiction of Painters’ Diction’. I have taken good editorial opinion concerning them, find they are up to the popular mark, and am advised as to where to plant them. Before making this venture I wish to bring the matter before the ‘Eastlake Family’.

I have been associated with the old House at Fitzroy Square for over a quarter of a century and consequently my writings exhibit much intimate and personal knowledge connected with persons and things about it of present and bygone days. This put together in an entertaining manner would doubtless please the popular mind, and bring me some remuneration for my trouble.

It would also undoubtedly cause much displeasure and disapproval in the ‘Eastlake Family’ for while I have found much in my old mistress to laud and honour somethings [sic] there are I am forced to adversely criticize. This would hardly be relished by many members of the Family, but as I have taken the greatest pains to be strictly truthful and accurate I am not disposed to tone them down or to make any alteration whatever. But I am disposed to give the ‘Eastlake Family’ the first chance of possessing my ‘Fitzroy Writings’ should they care to do so.78

Charles Eastlake Smith put the matter in the hands of a solicitor and Springall capitulated; but in 1908 he published a novel entitled That Indomitable Old Lady: A Romance of Fitzroy Square. In Springall’s thinly disguised but bizarre version of her life (told twice; once in prose and again in verse) ‘Lady Lisbeth Simpson’ is the titled daughter of the Earl of Haroldover. The Haroldover family consists of one daughter who marries a Norwegian, Herr Bjorsen; two brothers, the younger of whom (‘Burly Jack’) is a shady character who is murdered in Australia; and Lady Lisbeth Simpson, a ‘stately and Brobdignagian’ [sic] painter living in Fitzroy Square with her housekeeper, Mrs Sanderson. Boating at Regent’s Park one day Lady Lisbeth falls into the water and is rescued by a young man, whom she never quite forgets. Her early career as an artist is enabled over a twenty- year period by her friends, Professor Vargon and Sir William Roxhall (evidently Waagen and Boxall), the latter an ageing painter who dies and leaves Lady Lisbeth all his possesions. On the proceeds, she and Mrs Sanderson make a tour of Germany and Italy, meeting a Welsh sculptor

introduction 17

(28)

in Rome, John Gibson. Gibson gives her a letter of introduction to his friend the sculptor Henry Lockyer, whom she recognizes as the young man who had saved her years earlier following her dunking in Regent’s Park.

They subsequently marry and Lockyer becomes curator of an unnamed museum. Following Lockyer’s death his widow becomes an active hospital visitor. The narrative is embellished with petty details about life in Fitzroy Square, particularly about Mrs Sanderson’s management of the household.

Springall’s attempt to blackmail the ‘Eastlake family’ suggests that he may have had an unsavoury view of events, but at worst this appears to be the view of his employer as bellicose and the suggestion that her brother Roger was involved in some scandal in Australia. Springall settles his scores by making his former employer a little comical and putting her in demeaning situations (particularly her mud bath in Regent’s Park).

Recently, Elizabeth Eastlake has been brought to life in two semi- fictional works. In Gregory Murphy’s play based upon the annulment of John Ruskin and Effie Gray’s marriage, The Countess, Lady Eastlake is a strident and sharp-tongued bluestocking friend of Effie. Her presence on stage, in a couple of key scenes, has her volleying barbed comments with Ruskin’s parents.79 In James Wilson’s book The Dark Clue Lady Eastlake is cast as a bookish, untidy and rather slippery London hostess who may be a possible conspirator in a plot to discredit J. M. W. Turner’s will.80 The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake presented here offer a clearer picture of Elizabeth’s character. Her chief personality traits are remarkably consistent – strident, punctilious, proper, stern, judgemental, loyal. She liked Mendelssohn, fresh flowers, early Italian art, good food, and handsome men. She disliked Germans, ‘fast’ women, racy novels, and Gladstone. Her opinions remain fairly fixed and steadfast. There are, to be sure, some shifts in the authorial voice, from the confident young woman of the 1830s and 1840s, playfully communicating with John Murray, to the elderly Lady Eastlake, sometimes brittle and full of dowager importance, but capable of humour and great loyalty.

A Note on the Letters

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

(29)

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

(30)

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

(31)

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