by Simon Schama
Ruskin’s personal qualifications for making these prescriptions, had they been known, would not have done much for his credibility. His marriage, to Effie Gray, had been an unconsummated fiasco. He had written Sesame and Lilies while hypnotically spellbound by his own spotless lily, the adolescent Rose La Touche, to whom he acted as tutor and mentor before deluding himself that she ought to be his wife. Rose fled in horror from the proposal, triggering first in her, and then in the spurned Ruskin, an almost equally violent mental collapse. The crisis had been brought about by Ruskin’s apparently reckless change of role from trusted tutor, moral and intellectual guardian to would-be lover and husband. Ruskin failed to see this disaster in the making precisely because, as ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ made clear, he imagined that through intense reading women would actually be liberated from unattractively vapid servility to their husbands (and from the worthless chatter of fashion) and would instead be converted into their equals. Art, philosophy and morals would be ventilated over the breakfast marmalade.
But unlike some of the more conventional Victorian legislators of domestic virtue, Ruskin did not, in fact, insist that women belonged only at home. ‘A man has a personal work or duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to his home and a public work or duty relating to the state. So a woman has a personal work or duty relating to her own home and a public work or duty which is also the expansion of that.’ What had he in mind by that? Anything, in fact, that would help others out in the world, especially out in the world of the poor, make their own homes: ‘what the woman is to be within her gates as the centre of order, the balm of distress and the mirror of beauty; that she is also to be without her gates where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveliness more rare.’ The commercial success of Sesame and Lilies enabled Ruskin to help young women philanthropists and reformers like Octavia Hill to be ‘angels outside the house’ in just this way. Hill was the granddaughter of the social reformer Rowland Hill, and Ruskin had met her when she was just 15. Although she was single and obviously committed to a career other than that of wife and mother (at least until she was 40), Ruskin saw Octavia as a home-maker for others, if not for herself. It was his money that enabled her Charity Organisation Society to buy up its first London tenements and convert them into ‘improved’ lodgings for working-class families. But Octavia’s aim was to remodel the tenants as well as their buildings. When her volunteers came to collect the rent they arrived bearing a stack of forms on which the residents were required to make a report of their weekly conduct. ‘Persons of drunken, immoral or idle habits cannot expect to be assisted’ [with a charity allowance] unless they can satisfy the committee that they are really trying to reform.’ Incorrigible delinquents and recidivists would be removed as morally infectious. For Ruskin, this was a perfect instance of the benevolent exercise of ‘queenly’ power to make domestic peace where before there had been only dirt and clamour. A den of beasts would be turned into the abode of beauty and faith.
Suppose, however, that a happily married middle-class Victorian woman would actually dare to import into her home some business that more properly belonged to the world? Could that enterprise, especially if it came with the trappings of art, be reconciled with domesticity, or would it inevitably pollute the sanctity of what Ruskin had called ‘the vestal temple’? All that Victoria had to do to test the issue would have been to drive her pony trap a few miles down the Freshwater road on the Isle of Wight, past the house of her Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to ‘Dimbola’, the enlarged pair of cottages that, from 1863, were the studio as well as the residence of the greatest of all the Victorian photo-portraitists, Julia Margaret Cameron.
The case was complicated by the fact that photography in the 1860s was very much divided between genteel amateurs practising their art, and professionals turning out travel views, pictures of literary and military celebrities, police and medical documentation, and, for a more arcane but lucrative market, pornography. The considerable expenses of equipment and processing (not least the chemically reduced silver nitrate needed to sensitize glass plates and gold bullion for toning) confined the hobby to the upper middle class and Victorian gentry, who often worked out of studios and darkrooms in their own houses. The greatest of Cameron’s immediate predecessors, Clementina, Lady Hawarden (whose startlingly unconventional and sensually loaded talent was cut brutally short at the age of 42), was herself from an Irish aristocratic family. She used her house at Dundram as one of her first studios, but when she and her husband moved to South Kensington, a stone’s throw from the site of the Great Exhibition, she was able to annex part of the apartment for her photography – and use her own daughters, each of them on the verge (or over it) of sexual maturity – as models. In other words, for all her dazzling originality Lady Hawarden presented no problem and no challenge to the authority of the lords of the new art, the award of the Photographic Society. She exhibited – just three times, in 1865–6 at the London print sellers P. & D. Colnaghi’s, in 1866–7 at the French Gallery, London, and in 1867–8 at the German Gallery, London – and was awarded a silver medal for her work and showered with richly merited praise.
Julia Margaret Cameron was an altogether different kettle of fish. Her background was respectably, even reassuringly, colonial. As Julia Pattle she was one of seven children born to a French mother and British-Indian father. The Pattle girls, however, became famous in India as eccentric beauties, who favoured brilliant Indian silks and shawls rather than the decently demure Victorian dress expected of the memsahibs. ‘To see one of this sisterhood float into a room with sweeping robes and falling folds’, wrote one of their admirers, ‘was almost an event in itelf and not to be forgotten. They did not in the least trouble themselves about public opinion.’ In 1838, at the age of 23, Julia made a serious marriage – to Charles Hay Cameron, a classical scholar (Eton and Oxford) who had aspired to be professor of moral philosophy at London University but had been turned down for not being in holy orders. Cameron had gone on to an eminent career as a member of the Governor-General’s Council and law commissioner for Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he had extensive plantations.
In 1848 Charles Cameron suddenly gave all this up and retired with Julia to Britain, where he evidently meant to devote himself again to the Higher Things and write a treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful. Through the Prinsep family – a dynasty of orientalist scholars in India and painters and poets in London – the Camerons mixed in salon society that included Tennyson and the great astronomer Sir John Herschel. While visiting Tennyson at Freshwater, Julia saw the pair of cottages that, remodelled, became ‘Dimbola’. There they established themselves along with their children, and Charles Cameron became, if not exactly a recluse amidst his books, then certainly the retiring philosopher whom Tennyson once glimpsed asleep in his bedroom, ‘his beard dipped in moonlight’.
At some point, probably early in 1863 when she was 48 years old, Julia was given a camera – the hefty wooden-box apparatus of the time. She swiftly converted her coalhouse at ‘Dimbola’ into a darkroom and the henhouse into what she called ‘my glass house’ – the studio. Most accounts of her career make this departure seem like the enthusiasm of an amateur who needed a hobby to fill in time between the polite rituals of middle-class life on the Isle of Wight and the rounds of Pre-Raphaelite visitors. In fact, it is evident from family papers that from the outset Julia was up to something much more serious, both artistically and commercially. With coffee harvest after coffee harvest failing in Ceylon the Camerons were becoming seriously hard-up. There was no sign of Charles, buried ever more deeply in his library, being willing or able to recover their fortunes. In September 1866 her son-in-law, Charles Norman, asking one of Julia’s patrons for a loan of £1000, wrote that ‘my father-in-law for the last two months has been utterly penniless so that his debts are increased by butchers’ bills’. So whether or not Julia had always meant to be a professional, now she felt bound to succeed for the sake of the family
. Clementina Hawarden could afford to sell her work at a fête to benefit the ‘Female School of Art’; Julia had to sell hers to benefit herself. But her professionalism was not going to compromise her aesthetic standards. One of her models believed that Mrs Cameron ‘had a notion that she was going to revolutionise photography and make money’. Making money cost money. Charles, who evidently worried about his mother-in-law as well as his father-in-law, reported to a creditor that he had ‘told my mother for positively the last time that any assistance of this kind can be given her and that her future happiness or discomfort and misery rests entirely with herself’.
But then this was exactly the opportunity Julia Margaret Cameron was looking for – to make her own way. And she had the toughness to persevere. Although some of her Tennysonian images of luminous madonnas and gauzy damozels reinforced, rather than undermined, the more fantastic stereotypes of women as embodiments of the pure and the passionate, there was not much of the angel about Julia herself. Unable to afford assistants, she did all the mucky work of the wet collodion process herself: staining her fingers and dresses with silver-nitrate sensitizer, making sure the glass plates were exposed while still wet, washing and fixing images, and developing the prints. Since she depended on natural light, in the not invariably sunny Freshwater, to obtain the intensely expressive effects of light and shade that characterized both her portraits and her ‘poetic’ studies, she needed extraordinarily long exposures, sometimes of 10 minutes or more. Not only her own children, and domestic servants who obediently posed, but also the good and great – the artists George Frederic Watts and William Holman Hunt; Carlyle, Sir John Herschel and Tennyson – all were bullied into keeping stock-still for unendurable periods of time. Herschel – one of the most distinguished men in Britain – was told to wash his hair so that Julia could fluff it up with her blackened fingers to get just the right look of back-lit electrified genius. As is evident from the famous portraits – some of the most mesmerizing face-images in the history of art – Carlyle did fidget. But the photographer turned this to advantage. His head, she had thought, was a ‘rough block of Michelangelo sculpture’. But Carlyle’s personality was also notoriously edgy and mercurial. So she gives us a head that is both monumental and energized – the authentic hot tremble of the Carlylean volcano, the burning ‘light in the dark lantern’.
Predictably, the extreme manipulation of focus and exposure did not meet with the approval of the eminences of the Photographic Society, who sneered at Julia’s ‘series of out of focus portraits of celebrities’ as tawdry vulgarities in which technical incompetence masqueraded as poetic feeling. (‘We must give this lady credit for daring originality,’ a typically snide review in the Photographic Journal commented, ‘but at the expense of all other photographic qualities.’) The more popular she became, the nastier they got: ‘The Committee much regrets that they cannot concur in the lavish praise which has been bestowed on her productions by the non-photo-graphic press, feeling convinced that she herself will adopt an entirely different mode of reproduction of her poetic ideas when she has made herself acquainted with the capabilities of the art.’ The subtext of this was, of course, that women, with the rare exceptions of noble amateurs such as Clementina Hawarden, had no business prematurely parading their work without mastering the one quality by which photographic excellence was properly judged: crispness of definition. Crispness, of course, like the heavy lifting and chemically saturated processes of photography, was a matter of self-effacing mechanics; a stiffupper-lip kind of art, definitely not the flouncy, dreamy, mushy thing that they believed Julia Margaret Cameron executed.
But crispness repelled Julia. She had no interest in making dumbly literal facsimiles of nature. Her aim was to make a poet out of a lensed machine. The great ‘heads’ that so disconcerted the Photographic Society were meant to take Romanticism’s exploration of the external signs of interior emotions (anger, sorrow, elation, ecstatic vision) a step further – to create expressive images of the thinker/artist-as-hero. Although she also bathed children, servants and obedient friends in the more diffused light she needed for her poetic costume dramas, Cameron was capable, on occasions, of deliberately, even cruelly, playing with the self-consciousness of sitters in their allotted roles. Her sublimely beautiful portrait of the 16-year-old actress Ellen Terry (who had gone on the boards at nine) as ‘Sadness’ is as poignant as it is precisely because her marriage to the much older Watts was evidently already falling apart on their honeymoon in Freshwater. At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum are the photographs of Cyllene Wilson, the daughter of a repent-or-be-damned evangelical preacher who had been adopted by the Camerons. To get just the right look of despair on Cyllene’s powerful face, Julia was not above locking her in a cupboard for a few hours until the expression came naturally. Perhaps this was, in the end, too much for Cyllene, who ended up running off to sea, marrying an engineer on an Atlantic steamship line and dying in her 30s of yellow fever in Argentina.
Julia was successful but not, it seems, quite successful enough. Held at arm’s length by the photographic establishment, she had secured crucial patronage from one of her husband’s old Etonian friends, the banker Samuel Jones Loyd, Baron Overstone, to whom she assigned some of her most extraordinary albums in return for his investment. She showed and sold at Paul Colnaghi’s gallery and entered into a contractual arrangement with the Autotype Company to publish carbon reproductions. To ensure herself against piracy, Julia registered 505 of her photographs under the recent Copyright Act (1869), giving the impression that she meant to profit as much as she could from her originality and popularity. Thanks to the efforts of dealer and publisher, her work became famous. But it never held ruin at bay. In 1875 she and her husband, with their fortunes evaporating, returned to Ceylon, where she died in 1879. Although there was a flourishing Indian-Oriental photo-industry under way, views of temples and tea parties were not Julia Margaret Cameron’s line. The images petered out and then stopped altogether. But the power of her accomplishment was already enough to have wiped the sneer from the face of those who condescended to ‘lady artists’.
It is almost certain that, through Cameron’s photographs to illustrate Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ (1874–5), a poem associated in the queen’s mind with the memory of Albert, Victoria knew of her work and would not have disapproved of a woman photographer. A woman doctor, on the other hand, was a great deal more shocking. The very idea of girls familiarizing themselves with the gross details of human anatomy, much less dissecting corpses in the company of men, was, needless to say, perceived by the queen as a revolting indecency. And those who took the first courageous steps in this direction could only do so while pretending to study for the acceptable work of nursing – paradoxically regarded as less shocking despite nurses’ equal familiarity with living anatomy. In the year of Prince Albert’s death, 1861, Elizabeth Garrett was – to the consternation of the examiners at the Middlesex Hospital, who had not realized that ‘E. Garrett’ was a woman – placed first in the teaching hospital’s qualifying examinations. The daughter of a rich Suffolk businessman, Garrett had left school at 15. But instead of grooming herself (perhaps through a Ruskinian education in reading and drawing) for the altar and parlour, she had quite other ideas. A speech by Elizabeth Blackwell changed Garrett’s life. Blackwell, born in Bristol, had been transplanted to the United States where in 1849, at the age of 28, she had become that country’s first accredited woman doctor. After losing the sight of an eye while working at the obstetric hospital of La Maternité in Paris (where women were welcomed, according to her, as ‘half-educated supplements’ to the male physicians), Blackwell had returned to America, set up a one-room dispensary in 1853 in the New York tenements, and eventually, in 1857, opened the New York Infirmary and College for Women. She was, in short, a living inspiration.
Elizabeth Garrett was determined to do for Britain what Blackwell had done for the United States. Initially horrified by her bone-headed temerity and
obstinacy, her rich father was eventually won round – enough, at any rate, to subsidize her ostensible education as a nurse, which included her attendance at medical college lectures. Despite being ostracized by the male students and prevented from full participation in dissections, Elizabeth was undeterred, buying body parts and dissecting them in her bedroom.
Begged to keep quiet about the result of her examination in 1861, Garrett (possibly egged on by a number of articles in the Englishwoman’s Journal that advocated the creation of a corps of women doctors specializing in female and paediatric medicine), chose instead to publicize it, scandalizing the profession. Her application to matriculate at London University was denied – but only after a divided 10:10 vote in the Senate, with the Chancellor, Lord Granville, voting explicitly against the recommendation of his Liberal party colleague Gladstone, an early admirer of Garrett’s. In 1865 she took and passed the examination of the Society of Apothecaries, who, horrified at their oversight, passed a statute retroactively excluding women from the profession. In 1870, after performing two successful surgeries and passing written and oral examinations in French, the University of Paris awarded her their medical degree. But this was by no means the end of the battle for women’s medical aspirations. In the year that Garrett achieved her French licence a group of five women, led by Sophia Jex-Blake, were subjected to the physical intimidation of a near riot when they attempted to take the Edinburgh University medical examination. When a path was cut through the jeering crowd to the examination room, a flock of sheep was pushed in after the women. Whether it rankled or not, it was, inevitably, often a supportive marriage that gave these women power. When Elizabeth Garrett became Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, as the result of marrying a steamship owner, she was finally in a position to open her New Hospital for Women.
