by Gillian Gill
In the annals of Bloomsbury, however, George Duckworth’s social climbing played an important role. In 1904, following the death of Leslie Stephen, George was all set to move into 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury with his four Stephen half-siblings and continue in his in loco parentis role with Vanessa and Virginia. Then providentially, as it seemed to his half-sisters, Lady Margaret Herbert, the stepdaughter of the Dowager Countess of Caernarvon, agreed to marry George, and the two set up their own household. Had George Duckworth continued to live with his sisters, taking precedence over their brother Thoby, there would have been no Bloomsbury group.
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Virginia Woolf was contemptuous of her brother George’s social snobbery, but when she started to envisage a career in journalism, she turned for support to her intimate friend Violet Dickinson, who moved on the edges of high society, and to Violet’s close friend Lady Robert Cecil. As their correspondence proves, Nellie Cecil, herself a semiprofessional writer, did her best to get Virginia Woolf launched in the world of journalism in 1907. Relations between the two women cooled after Virginia’s marriage, but when Virginia’s second novel, Night and Day, was published to admiring reviews in 1919, Lady Robert invited Virginia (but, I note, not Leonard) to lunch to meet her highly aristocratic French relatives the Bibescos—“my first appearance as a small Lioness,” Woolf remarks.
Once she became a literary celebrity, Woolf was no more immune than her friend Lytton Strachey to the pleasures of being invited to exclusive parties or having intimate teas with titled ladies. She engaged in a warm, if guarded, friendship with Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose Cavendish-Bentinck ancestry could be traced back to a (male) lover of William III. More important, when the immensely aristocratic and extremely handsome Mrs. Harold Nicolson, alias Vita Sackville-West, invaded her world, Mrs. Woolf was, as we shall see in Chapter 17, ready to be seduced.
In December 1936, then at the height of her career, Virginia Woolf was asked to give a talk to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club on the topic “Am I a Snob?” The text we have of this talk shows Woolf at her charming and graceful best. Yes, she says up front, I am a snob and have been ever since girlhood, since the Stephen family of Kensington “had floating fringes in the world of fashion.” If she received a letter bearing a coronet, that letter was always displayed on her desk, which, Woolf admits, was a little pathetic of her, given that several of the male members of the Memoir Club had so much greater reason to advertise their friends in high places. Her dear friend Desmond MacCarthy, Eton and Cambridge, never boasted that his appointment book was packed with meetings scheduled with the noble and mighty. As for her other great friend Maynard Keynes, also Eton and Cambridge, he would happily discuss “pigs, plays, pictures,” but you would have to learn from someone else that Mr. Keynes had just been summoned to No. 10 Downing Street by Prime Minister Baldwin and begged, almost on bended knee, to join the cabinet and save the nation.
Having showered her friends Desmond and Maynard—both present in the room when she gave her speech—with delicate compliments and established the social eminence of Bloomsbury, Woolf gives a humorous account of a casual dinner she had had with her friends the Thynnes—the Marchioness of Bath and her daughters, the Ladies Katherine and Beatrice Thynne—and its contrast with a sumptuous lunch for forty close acquaintances given by Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford. For Woolf, Lady Oxford, gleaming in emeralds, brilliant of wit and spiteful of tongue, fell far below Lady Beatrice, who could not spell and dressed like a bag lady. “I want coronets,” writes Woolf, “but they must be old coronets that carry land with them and country houses; coronets that breed simplicity, eccentricity, ease; and such confidence in your own state that you . . . feed the dogs bloody bones from table with your own hands.”
After such opportunities to break bread with the top people, Woolf tells us, she would emerge onto the street and view “the butchers’ shops and the trays of penny toys through an air that seemed made of gold dust and champagne . . . If you ask me if I would rather meet Einstein or the Prince of Wales, I plump for the Prince without hesitation.” But having owned up to her own snobbery and absolved her friends of the same sin, Virginia Woolf steers her charming and apparently nonchalant talk into two directions designed to please those of her listeners who did not get regular invitations to No. 10 or Buck House. Snobbery comes in different shades, Woolf argues, and there is an aristocracy of writers that aristocrats recognize but fail pathetically to understand. And to end her talk and give her Bloomsbury friends the kind of red meat they expected from their Virginia, Woolf illustrates the absurd snobbery of so many in the aristocratic set by narrating the course of her own “friendship” with Lady Sybil Colefax.
Learning that Sir Arthur Colefax, Lady Sybil’s husband, had suddenly died, Virginia was full of sympathy and hurried off to pay a condolence call. She found the Colefax townhouse empty and its mistress stripped of pretense. It was all too clear that it was the loss of her house and the auctioning of her furniture and silverware that Sibyl mourned, not the husband who had paid for them all. She was taking the opportunity of her move to dismiss her maid Fielding, who, after thirty years of service, was going blind and dared to shed tears for her dead master.
In Virginia Woolf’s last glimpse of her former friend, Lady Colefax ventures out in her Rolls-Royce, her facial color restored, her shell intact, ready to do battle if not with the wealthy hostess Lady Curzon, a former vicereine of India, then at least with the ambitious Mrs. Ralph Wigram. As she steps into her car, Sibyl seeks to impress her literary friend Virginia one last time, by remarking how she had once met Henry James—whom she refers to as “dear old “H.J.”
Virginia Woolf had, of course, known Henry James as a beloved family friend when she was a girl. She knew that nobody who knew “the Master” ever referred to him by his initials. Henry James, and before him her adoptive grandfather William Thackeray, and implicitly Woolf herself, were all aristocrats in the illustrious world of letters, a world to which literary snobs like Lady Sibyl could only aspire.
Part II
Virginia Woolf and the Thackerays—A Legacy of Literature, Money, and Madness
Virginia Woolf and Her Seven Siblings
Three Duckworths, One Thackeray-Stephen, and Three Stephens
4
Finders Keepers
OH DEAR, surely not Thackeray, my Woolf-loving readers will be exclaiming! If we must go all stuffy and venture into literary influence, why not Jane Austen or George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë, whom we have actually read? Woolf wrote brilliantly about so many Victorian writers, especially the women, but she barely makes even a passing reference to Thackeray. And surely, to speak of a legacy from Thackeray is far-fetched. There was, after all, no blood relationship between Woolf and Thackeray, and he died almost twenty years before she was born.
But a legacy did come down to Woolf from Thackeray, part legal-financial, part literary-cultural, and part psychological-medical, and it inflected the course of her life in subtle structural ways. To illustrate how the legacy worked, and how easy it is to miss, I want to take a careful look at something apparently random and inconsequential—some old pieces of paper at the back of a closet.
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In the New Year of 1906, the tall, narrow house at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, where Virginia Woolf had been born and had lived her whole life, lay deserted. She and her brothers Thoby and Adrian and her sister Vanessa had fled the parental ghosts and, in defiance of their smarter friends, rented 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. The new place was roomy, with high ceilings and windows that let in some light, and it was blessedly affordable for four young people who lived the upper-middle-class life on inherited money but felt in no way rich. If a Bloomsbury address signaled downward mobility, so be it, said Vanessa Stephen, who had engineered the move.
Thoby Stephen had for several years been enjoying a bachelor’s life in London under the guise of studying the law, and he was now charged by his older sister with finding
a tenant for the old parental home. It was one more piece of drudgery Thoby had to shoulder in his post-Cambridge existence, and he was gloomy but unsurprised when no eager lady appeared waving her husband’s check in response to his advertisement. No one, it seemed, was keen to occupy a house with so many stairs, so little garden, and sub-basement servant quarters calculated to scare off even the lowliest of scullery maids.
And then it happened, the find of a lifetime, or so it seemed to the excited Thoby. At the back of a closet at Hyde Park Gate, he came upon ten dusty old sheets of paper covered with writing and drawings—and suddenly Apollo drove his chariot through the Kensington drizzle, scattering golden guineas down on his obedient English devotee. The paper, Thoby was quick enough to recognize, was part of “Lord Bateman,” a poem by William Makepeace Thackeray, a writer and illustrator whose fame had only grown brighter in the years since his untimely death forty years earlier.
In great excitement, Virginia Woolf wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson: “Thoby made £1000, one thousand pounds, by selling 10 pages of Thackeray’s Lord Bateman. George [Smith, of publisher Smith & Elder] sold it to Pierpont Morgan. So all bar [that is, Thoby’s expenses to train as a barrister] and Greek expenses [see below] are more than paid for.”
At last, after two long years watching his father yield to a malady too terrible even to be spoken aloud, all was sunshine in Thoby Stephen’s life. After the lotus-eating of his Cambridge years and a spell of wild oats in London, he felt ready at last to follow in the footsteps of his uncle Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Baronet, Queen’s Counsel. Now at last, thanks to the Thackeray find, without laying out any part of the meager three thousand pounds left him by his father, he felt all set financially to start on the risky but prestigious life of a barrister. He could also finance a summer expedition to Greece and Turkey for himself and his siblings, a scheme he had long nurtured.
If we are to believe the portrait of her brother that Virginia Woolf offers in Jacob’s Room, a dozen years of ancient Greek at school and university had barely equipped Thoby Stephen to stumble through Agamemnon or Oedipus Rex in the original, and he knew little of ancient civilizations. All the same, he and his friend Lytton Strachey were convinced that they understood the old Greeks better than anyone and that if he, tall, broad, magnificent Thoby Stephen, were to stroll the agora in Athens, the ghost of Socrates would appear and hail him as a “fine fellow.”
Now these gratifying assumptions were to be tested on Greek soil—and in between serious tours of the ancient sites on the Peloponnese, Thoby thought he would make a marital scouting trip to the Euboean peninsula. There, at Achmetaga, her family’s Greek estate, pretty, vivacious Irene Noel was spending the summer. Irene was her rich father’s heiress and was being pursued by several young men, including Thoby’s good friend Desmond MacCarthy, but Thoby thought he stood a good chance with her. He was by now quite aware that his strong, silent brand of masculinity had just as devastating an effect on young women as on young men—women just felt unable to say so straight out.
In the same letter in which she told the great news to Violet Dickinson, Virginia wrote, “By the way, don’t say anything about Thoby’s sale of the Ms. Or his price. It is rather a secret I think.” The secrecy was not surprising. Thoby Stephen was not related to the dead Thackeray and had no inheritance rights to any of the writer’s private papers. At the time of his death, William Makepeace Thackeray’s estate had been split in half between his two daughters, Anne and Harriet (Minny) Thackeray, and they both married and produced legitimate children. In 1906, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and her two children, Hester and William Ritchie, along with Laura Makepeace Stephen, Minny’s daughter with Leslie Stephen, all had a better right than Thoby Stephen to claim their grandfather’s writing and reap the profit.
But the legal status of William Makepeace Thackeray’s private papers had never been clearly resolved, and none of the Thackeray heirs came forward to exercise their hereditary right. The copyright of the writer’s published work belonged to his publishing house, Smith & Elder—that much at least had been determined. After William Thackeray died unexpectedly, in December 1863, his friend and publisher George Smith paid the Thackeray daughters the very considerable sum of ten thousand pounds for the copyrights to all of their father’s work. This earned the gratitude of the two women, but purchasing the rights to Thackeray’s literary estate was also a smart business investment on the part of Smith & Elder. Thackeray continued to sell well and, perhaps conscious of this, George Smith allowed Anne and Harriet Thackeray to keep in their possession all of Thackeray’s manuscripts and private papers. After the death of his wife, Minny Thackeray Stephen, Leslie Stephen was given the pride of the collection, the manuscript of Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s most famous novel, plus another illustrated manuscript. He also became the trustee of what his biographer Noel Annan describes as “a dowry for Laura [the child of his marriage to Minny Thackeray] which later reverted to his family [that is, the children of his second wife].” Of this “dowry,” more later.
Given how much money a few sheets in Thackeray’s hand could obtain in 1906, one can only speculate on what Leslie Stephen got for the Vanity Fair manuscript, and after receiving these generous gifts, Stephen did not contest the right of his sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, to the rest of the Thackeray papers. Over the years, these rose markedly in value and, with the tacit approval of the copyright holders, came to constitute a kind of piggy bank for the Ritchie family. By putting some of her father’s less important documents up for sale, Anne Thackeray Ritchie was able to afford some important luxuries for herself, such as travel abroad, and also pay the boarding-school fees for her son.
Lady Ritchie was known in the Stephen family to be generous to a fault, and when and if she heard of Thoby’s windfall, she was probably happy that the Stephen children should share a little in the inherited Thackeray loot. As for Laura Stephen, locked away in an asylum, where her “dowry” conveniently paid for all her expenses, she had neither the literacy nor, by reason of her attested insanity, the legal authority to make any claims to any part of her grandfather’s literary estate.
Thus, on the surface, the discovery and sale of the valuable Thackeray autograph was simply a case of finders, keepers. The sheets had at some point drifted into the possession of Thoby’s father, Minny Thackeray’s widower, Leslie Stephen. They had been found and kept by Leslie’s oldest son in Leslie’s house, or, more precisely—since in this book I am being a stickler about who inherited what from whom—the house Leslie had inherited from Julia, his wife and Thoby’s mother. As a widow, Julia Duckworth had purchased the house (under a different street number), and after Leslie married her, he moved into his new wife’s house with his daughter, Laura. The renumbered 22 Hyde Park Gate then became the family home for all eight Duckworth and Stephen children. After Julia’s death, Leslie, as her widower, took complete possession and ownership of the Hyde Park Gate property, and on his death, the house formed part of his estate, its rental and eventual sale value presumably, like the rest of his assets, to be divided equally among Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian.
The year 1906 was indisputably a landmark year in the life of Virginia Woolf. As we shall see in Chapter 12, somewhere on his dream tour of Greece and Turkey, Thoby Stephen contracted typhoid, and he died of the disease upon his return home. Free of their older brother’s control, and with his sorrowing friends from Cambridge clustering around them, Vanessa and Virginia both achieved a new autonomy and, eventually, chose husbands, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, who had been Thoby’s close friends at Cambridge. Those two men, while interpreting marriage in very different ways, would last Thoby’s sisters a lifetime. So you can say without exaggeration that, if that Thackeray manuscript had been thrown unread into the dustbin by some efficient housemaid, Bloomsbury might never have bloomed, and Virginia Stephen might never have become Virginia Woolf.
And once you start putting the names Thackeray and Stephen together, a pattern i
n the family carpet begins to emerge. Far from being a random, one-off, serendipitous event, Thoby Stephen’s discovery in the closet was a final, dramatic instance of the way that the fortunes of Leslie Stephen and his second family were shaped by their connection to the Thackerays. Over two generations, money flowed from the Thackerays to the Leslie Stephens, making possible their primary residence at Hyde Park Gate and at Talland House, their summer retreat in St. Ives, Cornwall. These two properties constituted the two contrasting worlds of her childhood that Virginia Woolf would etch into English literature.
The money originated with William Makepeace Thackeray, who earned it with his writing and drawing. As a young man, Thackeray had inherited a large fortune from his Anglo-Indian father and then gambled it away. His subsequent drive to succeed as a writer was fueled by his determination to win back the affluent lifestyle that had been his as a boy and ensure that his daughters, Anny and Minny, should never experience the financial problems that had weighed him down in his twenties and early thirties. Thackeray succeeded, but at great cost to himself. He died intestate and unprepared at fifty-two but leaving an estate that, divided equally between his daughters, guaranteed them a financially secure future. He also left them an immense legacy of affection and goodwill, not only in England’s literary community but in the world of European culture at large. That cultural legacy would, in his lifetime and after his death, promote the success of his writer daughter Anne, who proudly carried her father’s name with her even after she married. It would also advance the career of the man whom, after Thackeray’s death, his daughter Minny chose to marry—Leslie Stephen.
As Leslie’s daughter Virginia would note decades later in A Room of One’s Own, for someone struggling to make it in English publishing, an unearned income of, say, five hundred pounds a year could make all the difference between success and failure. When he began his career as a writer, her father, Leslie Stephen, did not have anything near that sum. As he admitted in a letter to his second wife, Julia, during their courtship, in his first years in London after resigning from his Cambridge fellowship, he had gotten something of a reputation around London of being a “notorious penny-a-liner”—that is, a writer who received as little as one penny for each line he put in print. To any young man eager to be a journalist, Leslie wryly remarked to Julia, he would recommend taking over the management of a pub instead.
