by Gillian Gill
It rejoiced Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic soul to imagine that, before there had been Maria Pattle Jackson, a grandmother she had known only too well and who talked of dogs and digestion, not Pondicherry and Lucknow, there had been the Chevalier de l’Etang, galloping along the Grande Allée next to the queen’s carriage, sweeping off his hat, and daring to kiss his gloved hand.
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From the information we have, it seems that the child with whom Thérèse de l’Etang was most closely allied was her daughter Julie-Antoinette-Adeline, and it was the marriage of this daughter to James Pattle that would define the maternal ancestors of Virginia Woolf as quintessentially English, with only charming tinges of French. When, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Pattles decided to move their whole families out of the India where most of them had been born and brought up, they settled in Kensington and the Isle of Wight, not Versailles and Paris. The transformation of Julie-Antoinette-Adeline de l’Etang into Adeline Pattle, and of her sister Virginie de l’Etang into Virginia Beadle, illustrates the rapid Anglicization of a Franco-Indian family in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Julie, Antoinette, and Virginie are names deliciously redolent of the ancien régime, but Adeline could be said in a solidly English way and Virginie easily became Virginia, so these were the names passed down in the family to Virginia Woolf. She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen and, until her marriage to Leonard Woolf, she used the initials AVS to distinguish her from her older sister Vanessa, whose initials were VS.
A striking portrait of Adeline de l’Etang as a young woman has recently come to light. It shows an exceptionally beautiful woman, elegantly clothed and hatted, with a long, oval face, dark eyes, dark hair, and thick dark eyebrows she may well have inherited from her Bengali maternal ancestors. The portrait strongly supports the family tradition that, like her mother Thérèse de l’Etang, Adeline the first was very beautiful, and her beauty may well have attracted the attention of James Pattle. However, following the death of their two brothers, Adeline and her sister or sisters became joint heiresses to the estate of their wealthy parents, so the de l’Etang–Pattle marriage was as much an alliance as a love match. Two prominent colonialist families in India, the one equipped with the elegance and grandeur of the fading French aristocracy, the other solidly part of the rising English bourgeoisie, with serious money, were combining their assets. James’s father, Thomas Pattle, had been with the East India Company in the glory days when the company was taking over one Indian kingdom after another, and not incidentally earning fabulous profits for its shareholders. Thomas Pattle made a very large fortune, which he was able to pass on to his eldest son, James.
Adeline de l’Etang Pattle
Virginia Woolf, in her introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Women by Julia Margaret Cameron, states that James Pattle, Julia’s father, was one of those thorough bad hats that Great Britain happily bequeathed to her colonies. Woolf got this salacious story from the father of her good friend Ethel Smyth, who had heard it years earlier back in India, but this is another piece of Pattle oral history that turns out to be wrong. A recent contribution to the Wikipedia article on Adeline Pattle by her direct descendant Deborah Spooner establishes that Ethel Smyth’s father was confusing James Pattle with a rapscallion younger brother.
Far from being a drunken rascal, James Pattle was a highly respectable public servant and a pillar of the English administration in Bengal. He and Adeline were married in Murshidabad, where James was a presiding judge, but he had moved to Calcutta when he was promoted up the legal hierarchy. In Calcutta, the James Pattle family lived in the exclusive neighborhood of Chowringhee, in a house so magnificent that it subsequently became the episcopal palace. James also seems to have been quite the family man, since he and Adeline had eleven children, ten daughters and one son. Of these, seven survived to adulthood—Adeline Marie, Julia Margaret, Sarah (or Sara) Monkton, Maria Theodosa, Louisa Colbrooke, Virginia, and Sophia Rickett—all, it will be noted, girls.
The sex of the surviving Pattle children mattered. When it came to the inheritance of estates, English law endorsed male primogeniture, whereby the eldest or only son inherited all or most of his father’s estate. If there was no son, however, and no entail on an heir male, the daughters of a marriage divided their father’s estate equally among them. The Pattle daughters were thus heiresses, though just how large a fortune they jointly inherited is one of the hard facts about the Pattles yet to be established.
James Pattle died in 1845, and according to Deborah Spooner, his dying wish was to be buried in the family plot in Saint Giles’ Church, Camberwell, alongside his mother. Adeline determined to honor her husband’s wishes and take his body back to England. Her teenage daughters Virginia and Sophia would go with her. The passage to and from India in the early nineteenth century was long, arduous, and full of risk, but the Pattle women had set sail for Europe before, and Adeline de l’Etang Pattle was a woman made of strong stuff. Within months of her husband’s death, she found a buyer for their magnificent house in Chowringhee, sold off most of its accoutrements, and supervised the packing of the rest, including James Pattle’s corpse, sealed up and preserved in a barrel of rum, as was standard for families who could afford it. Adeline and her daughters then set off on the arduous thousand-mile overland journey to the port of Pondicherry, whence they took ship for the even more arduous passage to France.
But if Adeline de l’Etang Pattle, age fifty-two, set sail with hopes of reuniting with her mother and making a new life in a new country surrounded by her children and grandchildren, those hopes were quickly dashed. It seems that the bung stopping up the cask of rum bearing James Pattle was not properly driven home. Thus, according to one version of the story, one night at sea, the cask suddenly burst and disgorged its contents. Adeline emerged from her cabin and, faced with the ghastly sight of her husband’s pickled remains, went mad and died. The sailors, who were not a fussy lot, scooped up as much of the rum as they could.
For many decades, variations on this story of Adeline Pattle and the barrel of rum made the rounds of Anglo-Indian society, and one was related, firsthand, to Virginia Woolf in 1918 by Lady Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s elderly mother. Lady Strachey had spent most of her early life in India, and she knew the Pattle family well. In a casual chat with Mrs. Woolf, she reminisced about “beautiful dead Pattles and Dalrymples . . . how old Pattle shot out of his tank and thereby killed his wife who thought him come back to life again, how the sailors drank him dry on the voyage to England.”
The story of James Pattle and the barrel of rum is so marvelous, you can see why his descendants told it, with embellishments, from one generation to another, but let us pause for a moment to consider the grievous plight of Virginia and Sophia Pattle in the middle of the Atlantic. These two teenagers now presumably had to find two empty, sound barrels for the bodies of both parents, plus, amid the wrath of the ship’s crew, enough rum to fill both casks. Then, on their arrival in England, after visiting Grandma in Versailles, they had to have both corpses conveyed to Camberwell for a decent burial under a proper headstone—all this before turning to the important business of finding husbands.
Sophia and Virginia Pattle were very young, but they coped, though, alas, we do not know how—revealing themselves worthy of their maternal heritage. The Pattle women, if you ask me, were pretty cool customers, and the more I think about Adeline Pattle, the less I am inclined to believe that she was terrified into madness and death. Confronted with the shattered barrel, the pool of rum, and the decomposing corpse of her husband, Adeline was a woman to curse the servant back in Calcutta who had not driven the bung home and demand another barrel of rum from the ship’s captain. Given the death of her husband and the hectic pace of her activities in the previous months, she may have taken sail in a state of mental and physical exhaustion and fallen victim to some stray infection—but that sort of run-of-the-mill death does not make a fun story. On my reading of the sparse evidence, Adel
ine the first passed on not only beauty but energy, determination, pragmatism, and managerial skills to her female descendants—among them the successful writer, real estate investor, and publisher Virginia Woolf.
2
Pattledom
VIRGINIA STEPHEN Woolf had always known that her mother was born in India, and a clutter of Indian carpets, tiger-skin rugs, brass thingamajigs, and elephants large and small formed a background to her childhood and would make an occasional appearance in her novels. Virginia’s adoptive aunt Anny Thackeray Ritchie had been born into the colonial diaspora of British India, and she would occasionally delight her Stephen nieces with stories of “Pattledom,” the vibrant little cultural center that their maternal great-aunts Sarah Pattle Prinsep and Julia Pattle Cameron had created in England after repatriating from Bengal. Having received a wealth of love and support from the Pattle sisters, Aunt Anny was eager to keep their legend alive for the new generation, and in the young Virginia Stephen she found an attentive listener. Yet the person who had known the Pattles best, the person who had most benefited from their cultural and social legacy, was someone much closer to Virginia—her mother, Julia Stephen. But of Pattledom, Julia never spoke.
Until she married Herbert Duckworth at the age of twenty-one, Julia Jackson had spent much of her year with her Pattle aunties—Sarah Pattle Prinsep, at Little Holland House in Kensington, and Julia Pattle Cameron, at Dimbola Lodge in Freshwater, Isle of Wight. These were the two main poles of Pattledom, and, shuttling between them, young Julia Jackson had been loved and petted and admired, and very, very happy.
But, as we shall see in a later chapter, Pattledom was an Eden from which Julia had found herself cruelly exiled when she was only twenty-four. By the time her daughter Virginia was growing up, memories of her youthful happiness were one of the many pleasures that Julia Stephen denied herself. The self-sacrificing mother to eight ill-assorted children, living in a tall, dark house draped in red plush and smelling of boiled cabbage, Mrs. Leslie Stephen kept the images of her golden youth sealed away tight. Pattledom was too precious and too sad to be put into words—certainly for her husband, who hated to be reminded that she had been happy before she married him, and even for her daughters.
But on one occasion, not too long before she died, Julia Stephen did let slip a memory of Pattledom, and Virginia Woolf stored it away for future use. “Once when we were children,” Woolf recalls in “Sketch of the Past,” which she began in late 1939, “my mother took us to Melbury Road: and when we came to the street that had been built on the old garden, she gave a little spring forward, clapped her hands, and exclaimed, ‘That was where it was.’” Not until the early 1920s, when she began researching her mother’s family for a book, could Virginia Woolf put a name to that “it”—Pattledom.
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As we saw in the previous chapter, the women of the Pattle family began to make their move from Bengal to southern England during the 1840s. Their husbands had been born in Great Britain and made their careers in India, but the women had all been born, lived their lives, and had their children in India. Once they found themselves settled in the new place they had been told to call home, it did not take them long to discover that there was a foreignness about them that did not please many of their monocultural, monolingual, stay-at-home compatriots; in fact, it set their teeth on edge.
For four or five generations, England had sent her surplus sons to India to head up the bureaucracy and standing army of the East India Company. Ofcourse, ruling in India was no easy billet, as Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s husband, was to discover for himself as late as 1903. There was the heat and the bugs and the incessant noise so alien to the taciturn English, and not a few of the men who shipped out to the subcontinent died from disease, loneliness, and despair. All the same, Mughal India in the early eighteenth century was perhaps the richest empire the world has ever known, and it was like a giant piggy bank for the company’s private shareholders and the English government.
At first the young colonialists in India, which then included today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, found mistresses and even wives among the local peoples. Monsieur Blin de Grincourt, as we have seen, was one of these, as was William Thackeray’s father, Richmond Thackeray, of whom more later. By the 1820s, however, such interracial relationships had come under censure at home. English men in India could still satisfy their desires with local women or, in not a few cases, local boys, but they needed wives and, luckily for them, after the long wars with Napoleon, England was awash with women. By the 1820s, many a rebellious daughter and surplus sister found herself on a slow boat to Pondicherry, and a new caste of Anglo-Indian women, the memsahibs, made notorious by twentieth-century writers like Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark, came into being.
By 1858 the tide of imperialist fervor was running high. After the English army savagely put down a major insurrection of the “native” troops, the East India Company was dissolved, India came under the direct rule of the British government, and England’s queen could cock a snook at her German relatives by signing herself Victoria RI—Regina Imperatrix. But when the men who had sweated in starched collars and pith helmets to fashion England’s “jewel in the crown” returned to the British Isles with their wives, and were reunited with the children they had sent “home,” they got little praise or credit. Like the elephant-foot inkwells and mass-produced Benares brassware that by the early twentieth century marked the dingy middle class for novelists like Agatha Christie, those who had served the empire as proud pukka sahibs, “true gentlemen,” all too often found themselves treated as second-rate citizens, their tanned, lined faces signaling that they were no longer quite English. The families of old India army colonels and district officers who had not managed to siphon money from Indian villagers tended to flock together in places like Brighton, a town that had once been trendy, or Hampstead, which was still hoping to become so.
Virginia Woolf captures that sense of second-class-ness in a passage in her 1916 novel Night and Day. The protagonist, Katharine Hilbery, lives in a house full of Indian memorabilia and asks her aunt, Mrs. Milvain, why she always refers to one cousin as “poor John.” Mrs. Milvain replies: “He was the fool of the family. The other boys were so brilliant and he could never pass his examinations, so they sent him out to India—a long voyage in those days, poor fellow. You had your own room and you did it up. But he will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe, only it is not England.”
This was the social challenge facing the older Pattle sisters as they began to make a new life on a new continent for themselves and their families, especially for their younger sisters and their daughters. It would take vision, determination, hard work, and lashings of Indian cash to convince England’s intellectual and political elite that the term “Anglo-Indian” had connotations of the exotic and sophisticated, the artistic and witty, the quirky and charming. The name Pattle was no help. With its plebeian echoes of “cattle” and “kettle,” “rattle” and “wattle,” or worse, the troublesome Indian homonym Patel, Pattle clearly signaled the mercantilist bourgeoisie. It was a name Dickens might have come up with for a comic supporting character, like Miss Flite in Bleak House, but certainly not for a heroine. It should not surprise us that, within one generation of returning to England, the name Pattle disappears, while the aristocratic French name de l’Etang is carried forward.
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The first to arrive in England to settle was the Prinsep family. In India, Thoby Prinsep had been a high official in the East India Company, but when he was appointed to the company’s supreme council in London, he and his wife, Sarah Pattle Prinsep, and their four teenage children returned to London. After a Grand Tour of Europe, the Pattles took out a long-term lease on Little Holland House, the rambling dower house surrounded by cow pastures on the Holland estate in Kensington.
In 1845, following the death of Adeline de l’Etang Pattle, the youngest Pattle sisters, Virginia and Sophia, joined the Prinsep household in
Kensington. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron took an early retirement from the Indian judiciary, and he and his wife, Julia, and their daughter, also named Julia, came back to England, leaving their sons to manage the family’s coffee plantations. After some years in the Home Counties around London, the Camerons settled at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, and Julia Cameron rapidly transformed the modest house into a rambling group of buildings complete with tower, which they named Dimbola Lodge, after their Sri Lankan estate.
By the 1850s, Sarah Prinsep in Kensington and Julia Cameron on the Isle of Wight had created a little mid-Victorian haven of European culture mixed with Indian allure. In its heyday Pattledom was a meeting place for some of England’s most distinguished men—Tennyson, Thackeray, and Browning; Charles Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and William Gladstone; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and John Ruskin. As Virginia Woolf was to discover in the 1920s, Pattledom was in many ways an early avatar of Bloomsbury. Such complex pieces of cultural machinery tend to seem effortless in retrospect but, on top of a genius for social relations and a generous entertainment budget, they require a lot of hard work and they are usually the work of women. Pattledom was set in motion and kept purring by Sarah and Julia, whose abundant energy galvanized friends to the point of exhaustion.
So, what was Pattledom actually like? In some respects, it was an English version of the French salon of Madame de Lafayette in the seventeenth century, or of Madame du Deffand in the eighteenth, a place where artists, musicians, and writers, scientists, industrialists, and politicians could regularly come together and talk. But instead of sitting in a circle on spindly gilt chairs drinking tisanes of an evening, the Pattle guests walked about the house and gardens on summer Sundays and ate casual meals at odd hours—alfresco, if weather permitted.
