It took time to establish exactly what had happened. Entire streetscapes had been altered, first by the building of the huge barricades and then by their destruction and the hand-to-hand fighting. Houses and shops were burned out and deserted, and many Parisians were sheltering in cellars or attics, afraid to venture on to the streets for bread, far less to talk about antiques with English travellers. Eventually, though, through perseverance and with the aid of a few substantial banknotes, Charlotte began to get a trickle of information. And the news was not good. Two of her oldest and most trustworthy dealers, Mme Caillot and Mme Oppenheim, had, Charlotte noted sadly, ‘both died of fright’. Nothing was left of their stock, which had been burned or looted. For another of Charlotte’s contacts, ‘poor old Fournier’, the fear and confusion had proved too great: he had reportedly gone mad, and could not be found. The only dealer Charlotte could locate was Mme Flaudin, and the next morning she set out early for the small dark shop which she had visited many times before on happier occasions. Remarkably, it was open and largely unscathed by the fighting. Mme Flaudin was waiting with a jug of hot coffee and a table covered in things she hoped would tempt her intrepid customer. But even in the aftermath of revolution, Charlotte would not be rushed. She took her time browsing, and carefully examined any of the objects that caught her eye. She asked questions, and bartered fiercely. She was in her element; she had found what she was looking for, a surviving Paris dealer, and, better still, a dealer with things worth buying. Not even her walk back through the bloody wreckage of the city could blunt her joy at unearthing some decent china, a ‘matching old maroon Chelsea set’.6
Rescued from the rubble of Paris, Charlotte’s set of china was tenderly wrapped and given a temporary home in the big red bag. Produced in the eighteenth century by a factory founded around 1740 in the rapidly expanding but still rural town on the outskirts of London, Chelsea china was regarded as the very finest of English porcelain. Its famous claret-red tableware, daintily decorated with gilded borders and golden curlicues, was prized above everything. It had been popular since the day it was made and so demanded high prices, finding its way into the homes of the very wealthy. Charlotte admired the deep tones and fine shapes of the china, and was shrewd enough to recognize that what she was offered in Mme Flaudin’s was a bargain. The Chelsea set was to become one of her treasured pieces. Fittingly for such a glamorous refugee of the Paris violence, it was to end up in the refined cabinets at South Kensington, part of the huge collection that Charlotte donated to the museum – one of the finest, most detailed and most interesting collections of English china ever amassed.
A couple of weeks before arriving in Paris, Charlotte Schreiber celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday. It was a day like any other, spent hunting for collectables with her husband. Good wishes had been sent from some of her children in the letters which straggled into foreign post offices in the days running up to the occasion, but 19 May 1871 was passed quietly in Tangiers. The most special and welcome thing about the day was the quality of the Victoria Hotel, chosen by chance rather than as a birthday treat, but worth noting in Charlotte’s journal as ‘clean and comfortable, unlike any since leaving England’.7
Charlotte looked like any other elderly traveller, taking in the fabled and relaxed culture of the North African port. She was slightly plump and matronly; she was not, and had never been, particularly beautiful, and she dressed sedately and neatly in sombre colours, even in the African heat. Perhaps her one concession to vanity was that her grey hair was dyed. This was not an easy thing to achieve in the midst of so much travelling, and Charlotte may well have resorted to using Condy’s Fluid, a mixture of the mineral pyrolusite (largely magnesium dioxide) with potassium hydroxide that had been patented in the mid-nineteenth century and which could be conveniently carried as a disinfectant as well as being used to colour hair. Even with Condy’s Fluid, however, the process was not straightforward and would have given Charlotte’s maid a great deal of work: each hair had to be dyed individually. In addition, it was something that would have had to be done discreetly. While it became very popular for Victorian women to dye their hair, and magazines were awash with advertisements for products, it was not quite accepted as thoroughly respectable, especially among the middle and upper classes. ‘Above all dyes will be renounced’, proclaimed Baroness Staffe authoritatively, in a French etiquette manual that was influential enough to be translated into English towards the end of the century. ‘The natural colour of the hair will be kept and grey hair itself will not be powdered. . . At this cost the hair will remain abundant and vigorous, even in those of advanced age, and will allow of being prettily and gracefully dressed.’8
Even with the fashionable rebelliousness of dyed hair, Charlotte did not look like a woman whose name was becoming known across Europe. She looked ordinary; a woman of her class and time. And even she, as she admitted in her journal, was surprised at the way things were unfolding. She had not expected to be ransacking foreign lands for china. She had not planned to spend her days hurrying from one dealer to the next, excited by rumours of the rare and beautiful, exhausted and exhilarated by the chase. There was little in her earlier life to suggest that she was to become such a dedicated and inventive collector, and she was almost fifty when the obsession overwhelmed her. Her enthusiasm for collecting came late, and apparently out of the blue.
But, while there may have been few clues in Charlotte’s first fifty years to suggest she would become such a significant and respected collector, the energy, determination and curiosity that characterized her collecting were clearly evident in the range of activities to which she dedicated herself as a younger woman. She was born in 1812 with a title, Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie, the daughter of Albemarle Bertie, the 9th Earl of Lindsey, an army general and an MP. She was the first of three children, but her father was already sixty-eight years old when Charlotte was born, and he died just six years later. By the time Charlotte was nine, her mother had married again and her new husband, the Reverend Peter Pegus, had moved into the family home at Uffington House in Lincolnshire; a year later, Charlotte began the journal which she was to keep candidly and faithfully until she was seventy-nine years old and almost completely blind.
Charlotte hated her new stepfather. Pegus was a bully and a drunk who was once so desperate for beer that he downed a mug of lamp oil instead. Unpredictable and violent, he was quick to flare into a rage; passionate about the most trivial of domestic habits, on one occasion he sacked the entire household of servants on the spot. Family life was stormy and miserable, and Charlotte was lonely. The house at Uffington was isolated and there were no suitable friends for Charlotte nearby. Her eldest brother suffered from what would now be regarded as a mental disability; her younger brother was baffled by her bookish tastes; and she was never close to her mother, who sank into decline after her second marriage. Charlotte spent hours alone in the garden, particularly among the avenue of lime trees, and she immersed herself in her studies. She was serious, literary and fiercely bright. She worked with her brothers’ tutor whenever she could (falling in love with him at the same time) and studied hard outside the hours officially allocated to her schooling, rising each morning to begin work by four, setting herself strict routines, devouring the books in the library and reciting poetry in her garden walks. She taught herself a variety of languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and Persian; she worked diligently at her mathematics; she practised her drawing skills until she became an accomplished draughtswoman; she played piano and harp, she read Chaucer and Ariosto for pleasure – and she played a mean game of billiards.9
By the time she was sixteen, Charlotte had a reputation for learning and culture. She followed contemporary affairs closely from the newspapers and her journal was full of her thoughts on politics. In contrast, she found the demands of fashionable society – the dress fittings and the long afternoons, the predictable parties and the ‘gazing at each other in listless indolence’ – tedious and unsatisfying, prefer
ring the company of scholars to the chatter of female acquaintances.10 This may have done little to impress the pleasure-loving young men of the Regency, but her title, and a not insignificant personal fortune, more than made up for her unfortunately thorough education. She was something of a catch, and society was not slow in conjuring up all kinds of potential matches for her. Terrified of being trapped in a miserable alliance to satisfy her family’s ambition, however, she refused a marriage arranged by her mother in 1832 to the sixty-seven-year-old Robert Plumer Ward, a politician and novelist who was already twice widowed, and instead enjoyed a brief, but chaste, flirtation with the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Disraeli was handsome and dashing, described by Charlotte’s cousin as ‘wearing waistcoats of the most gorgeous colours and the most fantastic patterns. . . velvet pantaloons and shoes adorned with red rosettes. . . his black hair pomatumed and elaborately curled and his person redolent with perfume’.11 Not yet elected to even the most minor of political offices, he was instead writing novels which Charlotte admired, and he took her to a series of fashionable concerts and bought her flowers. He even wrote enthusiastically to his sister about her fortune. But the relationship came to nothing (Disraeli later married one of Charlotte’s closest friends), and in April 1833 Charlotte left Uffington for London.
Almost immediately upon her arrival in the capital, at the age of twenty-one, she met the forty-eight-year-old Welsh ironmaster and MP Josiah John Guest, known simply as John. Already a widow, John Guest was a handsome, curly-haired, practical man who, like Charlotte, was a rather diffident outsider amidst the glamour of London society. After a whirlwind romance, Guest walked with Charlotte in Kensington Gardens on 12 July 1833 and proposed to her. Charlotte accepted.
Most of Charlotte’s family seem to have been pleased to be rid of her to a wealthy man. Although he was in trade, they could console themselves with the knowledge that it was no ordinary trade – the rail tracks made at Guest’s factory in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil were to criss-cross the globe, opening up lands from Russia to India. They celebrated at Uffington with a ball and an ox roast. Her stepfather Pegus, however, was horrified. He objected vociferously to the marriage and continued to detest his new son-in-law, even calling him out for a duel on one occasion, which, Charlotte duly noted, ‘is too absurd an idea’.12 He was habitually rude and dismissive of Charlotte’s new husband, and he was not alone. London society in general was offended at the thought of a daughter of the aristocracy marrying a man whose hands were dirtied by the dust of the factory; a man descended from farmers and coal miners and who worshipped in the dissenting chapels that challenged the established hierarchy of the English Church. The new couple were ostracized: they were not invited to the events that mattered, and Charlotte’s drawing room was distinctly quiet during the usual visiting hours.
Charlotte was naturally emotional and prone to sentimental tears, but she wasted few of them on the newlyweds’ situation. Relishing the thought of a different life, she was untroubled by the opinions of the social elite. She believed in her husband, and in herself, and she believed that marriage to an active, industrious and political man would, in the end, open more interesting and challenging doors than the ones that were being closed to her. In August 1833, after a honeymoon tour of Sussex, Charlotte accompanied her husband for the first time to his ironworks in Dowlais, in South Wales, where it was evident that London sensibilities were not shared by John Guest’s friends and workers. Charlotte described with great delight the couple’s arrival in Cardiff, which was celebrated by ‘a volley canon, fired in grand style’. Furthermore, ‘a triumphal procession and an illumination were planned’ to greet them, intended on such a grand scale that ‘no less than from 15 to 20 thousand people would probably have collected on the occasion’.13
The thought of such a reception horrified Guest, however, who, despite his public role, was a shy man; he had experienced a similar event before, during which a boy had been killed in the press of the crowd. But he did not want to seem ungrateful or heavy-handed in putting an end to the celebrations. In a pattern that was to be often repeated during their twenty years of marriage, John Guest turned to his wife for advice, and they decided to order a prompt dinner at a local inn, allowing them to press on to Dowlais and arrive a day earlier than expected, so that, diplomatically, ‘the complimentary machinations for the following day might be eluded without being rejected’. In compensation, John and Charlotte gave out celebratory beer to over 4,000 people at the ironworks a couple of days later and ‘they gave us some discharges of canon in return’.14
Charlotte’s married life was extraordinarily active and successful. She embraced the Victorian ideal of the wife and mother, following her husband’s political and industrial interests with pride and giving birth to ten children in the space of thirteen years. She also took her responsibilities for the Dowlais workers’ welfare to heart, developing housing and recreational projects and working hard to introduce a fresh water system. She was particularly keen that all the children should have the benefit of a good and useful education, and she founded six schools, raising large amounts of money for their upkeep by private subscription. So important did she become to the success of the ironworks, and the lives of the people who worked there, that a friend noted that in many respects she was more influential than her husband: ‘for in all that he was deficient she excelled, and while we credit him with founding the greatest ironworks in the world, and giving sustenance and substantial comfort to twenty thousand souls, it is chiefly to her influence we must look for all that was done in the way of moral and mental elevation’.15
In order to better accommodate their rapidly expanding family, Charlotte also set her mind to improving their home. In August 1835, she gave birth to Ivor Bertie Guest, a son and heir, and with the dynasty secure, she encouraged Guest in 1846 to buy Canford Manor in Dorset, a convenient distance from business both in London and Wales. The manor of Canford Magna had history. It dated back to Saxon times and had been an important base for the Earls of Salisbury. It had also been the home of William Ponsonby, the brother of Byron’s lover Lady Caroline Lamb. It boasted extensive rolling parkland, dropping down to the River Stour, shaded woodland paths and neatly kept formal gardens, but the house itself was unremarkable, a muddled conglomeration of earlier buildings and practical extensions to the original medieval manor. Charlotte thought it dull and was immediately determined to make some alterations; to stamp her character on the place.
The Guests commissioned the architect Sir Charles Barry (who was, at the same time, rebuilding the Palace of West-minster with Augustus Pugin) to improve and expand Canford. Together, they created a fairytale, battlemented neo-Gothic house, complete with towers and turrets and a spectacular garden pavilion that housed twenty-six ancient Assyrian sculptures, including two colossi, one with two human heads and a lion’s body, the other in the form of a bull. Charlotte worked closely with Barry, enjoying the challenge of learning about architecture and undertaking extensive discussions with the skilled stonemasons, carpenters and designers on site. John Guest, too, took a close interest in the house but he had less time to spend in Dorset and his role was primarily to pay the bills: the improvements became so costly that he became known locally as ‘paying Guest’.16
So much was being achieved in the valleys of South Wales; so spectacular was the Canford house becoming and so influential was John Guest proving in public life that news could not fail to reach fashionable London society of Charlotte’s increasing wealth and influence. What had amounted to social ostracism came to be conveniently forgotten, and during the 1840s and 1850s showers of invitations duly arrived from those eager to make the family’s acquaintance. Along with her commitments in Wales and Dorset, Charlotte became famed as one of London’s most entertaining and gracious hostesses. Before long, there were splendid dinners at the Guests’ London house in Spring Gardens, Westminster, with the children playing on the back stairs, the table laden w
ith veal cutlets, woodcock pie and boars’ head, and leading statesmen such as Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington discussing politics in the parlour.
Nevertheless, Charlotte’s life was not confined to entertaining, society events, philanthropic projects and running a family. Even with the interest of rebuilding Canford, and the challenge of keeping ten children healthy and occupied, she wanted more. She saw her marriage as a professional, as well as a personal, partnership and was eager to take an active role in the development of the ironworks. Just as she had been willing to challenge Victorian convention in marrying Guest, so she was determined not to be confined by the usual nineteenth-century restrictions on a woman’s role. The day after she first arrived at Dowlais with her new husband, she insisted on seeing the furnaces and the forges, and after dinner she walked back to the works to watch the iron being cast. She was soon able to take an informed view of the processes and before long she was translating technical documents into French, to better disseminate developments in the industry, and was writing pamphlets on ironworking techniques and improvements. The prospect of entrepreneurial business excited her, not so much for the wealth and prestige which accompanied it, but because it offered a means of reaching and understanding people and cultures across the world. During her husband’s frequent absences, she was in sole charge of the expanding Dowlais empire and she entertained streams of influential visitors: iron masters from France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Poland, the Nawab of Oudh from India and Russia’s Grand Duke Constantine. Charlotte believed fervently in the value of what was being achieved at Dowlais and, when John’s work as a politician and industrialist was recognized in 1838 with a baronetcy, she thought he deserved more: ‘I consider it a paltry distinction and was much averse to his taking it. . . I shall not rest till I see something of more value bestowed upon him.’17
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