Tuesday 30 September 2014

Art Review: Black Chronicles II (Autograph ABP), Rivington Place, London




When you study the past there are sometimes elisions – noticeable gaps which you know make your understanding incomplete. In Victorian literature I’ve talked about the lack of pregnancy bumps, despite the frequent babies. There’s the obsession with sex, without explicit sex scenes. And, while I’ve rejected the idea that novels of this period concentrate only on the rich, servants and poor tenants can, at times, seem like cut-out figures, and our understanding of their lives incomplete.

But one of the biggest elisions – perhaps one of the most jarring distinctions from modern life – is the absence of race. Okay, Bertha Mason, in Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Jane Eyre, may be part Creole, and there are multiple other novels which include ‘exotic’ jaunts to Africa or the East, but that doesn’t really cut it when you’re looking for something resembling black subjectivity.

Enter Black Chronicles II, an exhibition presented by Autograph ABP, currently running in London’s Shoreditch. The exhibition brings together studio portrait photographs (most never before on display) of black subjects in the nineteenth century –clergymen and missionaries, servants, former slaves, African princes, ambassadors, and, given pride of place, fourteen members of The African Choir, which toured England between 1891 and 1893. Many of the sitters are as yet unidentified, but what they testify to is the presence of the many black Victorians who history books (and fiction) have largely ignored.


Just how unusual it seems to see photographs of black men and women in top hats or crinolines confirms the exhibition’s importance. In the second room, where over 100 original cartes-de-visites and cabinet cards are on display, there is an audio recording of the late Professor Stuart Hall, whose lecture provides an academic context for the systematic forgetting which plays an important part of the construction of a national history. Rivington Place may not be one of London’s major art venues, but this exhibition is anything but offbeat or niche – it simply puts back what should already be there and forces us to confront the fact that it so often isn’t.

Do you know of any other London exhibitions you think the Secret Victorianist should visit? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.


Wednesday 24 September 2014

The Secret Victorianist at Open House London



The Secret Victorianist at Leighton House
Last weekend, the Secret Victorianist enjoyed Open HouseLondon – two days when hundreds of London’s historic buildings are open to the public for free. The sheer number of properties to choose from is staggering, even when you limit yourself by period, but I avoided the chaos of the city centre and crowds and queues of Whitehall in favour of a civilised Saturday in Kensington. Here I looked around two nineteenth-century properties, important for their contents as well as their former occupants – 18 Stafford Terrace and the Leighton House Museum.

18 Stafford Terrace is a building stuck in time. The servants’ rooms are gone, but otherwise the house is much as it was when it was home to famous Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne and his wife Marion. The couple moved into the house in 1875 and lovingly furnished it with furniture and ornaments reflective of late nineteenth-century aestheticism. On Saturday a bustling costumed ‘housekeeper’ showed us round the property but unfortunately only two rooms were on display.

Stained glass panel, 18 Stafford Terrace
 Other treasures the house holds which weren’t on show on Open House weekend include Sambourne’s collections of photographs and photography equipment. Working to tight deadlines for his Punch cartoons, photographing people was Linley’s way of cataloguing potential subjects and he used the same technique to plan the sketches for his book illustrations - notably Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) and Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales (various). The Sambourne residence is beautiful, fascinating and familial – and well worth another visit on a quieter day.

Edward Linley Sambourne photograph for Little Mermaid illustration

The resulting illustration
 Leighton House on the other hand is grand and spacious –not kitted out like a home, like 18 Stafford Terrace. You enter an extravagant atrium – domed ceilings, Moroccan tiles, a water feature, a rich blue and turquoise colour scheme and even a stuffed peacock - and wander through rooms which are largely empty, except for the impressive collection of paintings – Frederic Leighton’s and some of his contemporaries’ – which lines the walls. A significant portion of the first floor is taken up by Lord Leighton’s incredible studio space – home to much of the art collection and large enough for working on the very biggest canvasses. In comparison to the grand entrance, massive studio and large garden, Leighton’s bedroom is small and plain, furnished much as it would have been at his death in 1896. The museum is a must-see for anyone interested in Victorian art.

Leighton House
 If you find yourself in London for Open House weekend in 2015, you should definitely check it out – the buildings featured range from historic to cutting edge, beautiful to functional, and are dotted throughout the city. And learning more about Edward Linley Sambourne or Frederic Leighton from visiting their houses would make a great day out throughout the year. 

Did you visit any London attractions on Open House weekend? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!


Wednesday 17 September 2014

A Victorian Alphabet: V is for Vulnerable Victorian Virginity



Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) is one of the most famous nineteenth-century novels to deal with a ‘fallen woman’, who loses her virginity before marriage and bears an illegitimate child. And sympathetic as the novel is to Ruth, a dressmaker’s apprentice who is only 15 at the time of her seduction, and designed as it is to highlight the ill treatment of women like her, the novel is instructive when it comes to understanding Victorian constructions of (female) virginity and explanations as to what can make it ‘vulnerable’.

There are many ways in which Ruth is presented as the archetypal virgin, whose seduction is, if not inevitable, far from surprising and maybe even a ‘natural’ result of her characteristics and the attendant circumstances of her situation:


1. The virgin is youthful, but physically developed
Like Thomas Hardy’s Tess, Gaskell’s Ruth has a dangerous (and apparently dangerously attractive!) mixture of extreme youth, with its corresponding naivety, and a sexually mature body. She first meets Henry Bellingham, who seduces her, through attending the Shire Ball as a sort of in situ lady’s maid, an office for which her employer picks her specifically because her ‘waving outline of figure’ will be ‘a credit to the [dressmaker’s] house’. Yet to Ruth her selection is ‘inexplicable’- a sure sign of her unworldliness. Ruth’s youth is such that, even when she is pregnant and abandoned, the servant Sally describes her as a ‘chit’ who cannot possibly be a widow and the narrator tells us, when her child is nearing year old, Ruth still looks so young that ‘she hardly seemed she could be the mother of the noble babe’. While emphasising Ruth’s age cements her victim status it is a crucial component of what attracts people to her – whether the caddish Bellingham (who, at 23, enjoys that he is her senior) or the kind clergyman Mr Benson who takes her in.

2. The virgin is beautiful
It almost goes without saying that Gaskell’s heroine will be beautiful and – importantly – artlessly and simply so. Ruth comes to Bellingham’s attention not only because of her good looks but because in them she contrasts with the ‘flippant, bright and artificial girl’ who is his dance partner at the ball. Ruth’s beauty is set off by its naturalness, as well as its childishness. When Bellingham begins to pursue her, we are told ‘He did not know why he was so fascinated by her. She was very beautiful, but he had seen others equally beautiful, and with many more agaceries calculated to set off the effect of their charms. There was, perhaps, something bewitching in the union of grace and loveliness of womanhood with the naiveté, simplicity, and innocence of an intelligent child’. Beauty is important (note how Gaskell does not say Bellingham has seen anyone more beautiful!) but it is not enough in itself to typify the idealised virginal figure of the Victorian period. 

Portrait of a Girld, John Everett Millais
3. The virgin is prized for her purity of thought, as well as body
Linked to these ideas of childishness and artless beauty is the virgin’s ignorance when it comes to all things sexual. It isn’t just that the virgin hasn’t had sex – we are led to believe she has never even thought of it. Gaskell is at pains to make this explicit for us: ‘She was too young when her mother died to have received any cautions or words of advice respecting the subject of a woman’s life…Ruth was innocent and snow-pure. She had heard of falling in love, but did not know the signs and the symptoms thereof’. Gaskell’s use of the phrase ‘falling in love’ here isn’t just nineteenth-century delicacy – the phrases mirrors Ruth’s few thoughts on the matter which have been emotional, not sexual – and her argument is almost contradictory. On the one hand Ruth’s ignorance is abnormal – the consequence of being orphaned young – but on the other it is entirely natural. The virgin is untouched by any polluting conversation or by any stirrings of desire from within. 

4. The virgin is linked to nature (for good and bad)
The naturalness of the virgin state – but also the fact that this state makes her a prime ‘target’ for men and ‘ready’ for reproduction – is also indicated through the pleasure fictional Victorian virgins are of shown to derive from their natural surroundings. Ruth’s claustrophobic urban quarters may be the inhospitable home from which she is tempted away by Bellington’s advances, but things only come to a crisis as a result of long country walks. And Ruth, as she appears when framed by nature, is all the more attractive in this environment: ‘She wound in and out in natural, graceful, wavy lines between the luxuriant and overgrown shrubs, which were fragrant with a leafy smell of spring growth; she went on, careless of watchful eyes, indeed unconscious, for the time, of their existence.’ The wavy lines of the country garden recall the ‘waving outline’ of Ruth’s own curvaceous figure and the almost overwhelming fecundity of nature also suggests her sexual readiness, even if her mind is ‘for the time’ unaware of this. In this way she again prefigures Tess – Hardy’s ‘pure woman’ – watched by Alex and Angel in fertile natural environments. 


5. The virgin is free from familial ties (and protection)
Ruth’s orphaned state (alluded to in point three) doesn’t just mark her out as ignorant of men’s desires – conversely it also labels her even more directly as a potential sexual partner. Without a home to leave, she is primed to create another family and show other people affection – both emotionally and economically. She has already done this platonically with her fellow apprentice Jenny, but, with Jenny ill and Bellingham pursuing her we are told ‘Jenny’s place in Ruth’s heart was filled up’. Ruth’s fertility and natural affection could have be beneficial to her, if only Henry Bellingham was a man willing to offer her a true (legitimate and marital) home.

When it comes to apportioning blame for Ruth’s ‘fall’, the fact that Ruth is such an embodiment of desirable virginity is not the only factor in her downfall. Many are blamed for her failure to adhere to strict Victorian codes of morality, including her seducer, class and economic factors, the unkindness of other women (particularly Mrs Mason and Miss Duncombe), her guardian and, of course, Ruth herself.

Gaskell was criticised for giving Ruth too many mitigating factors to excuse her behaviour (i.e. failing to confront Ruth’s own sexuality), but importantly she does not let her off the hook. Although it is rescinded later, and given under duress, there is a moment at which Ruth gives her consent: ‘Low, and soft, with much hesitation, came the “Yes”; the fatal word of which she so little imagined the infinite consequences.’ Many factors may make a young Victorian woman vulnerable – but the responsibility for protecting her virginity is ultimately her own.

What should ‘W’ be in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist! And you can check out further posts on Elizabeth Gaskell here.


Sunday 14 September 2014

Review: Keats House, Hampstead, London



The Secret Victorianist at Keats House

John Keats didn’t live at the house which was then known as Wentworth Place for long (only from 1818 until 1820), but the period was an important one for the poet. It was here, in Hampstead, that Keats wrote some of his most famous poems, including his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, whose family occupied the smaller ‘half’ of the then divided dwelling.

Today Keats House is a single property which has been restored with décor the man himself might have recognised and completed with period furnishings and artefacts from Keats’s life. 

The Chester Room



The house is beautiful, set among tranquil gardens on a serene side street in a leafy residential area, and at times it’s hard to believe you’re in London at all (which of course you wouldn’t have been in the early 1800s!).

It is this feel of the place and the chance to see a well restored Regency property which is the attraction of visiting, rather than the items which are here from Keats’s life. It’s a lovely setting in which to read a little Keats or learn about his acquaintances, and, since your ticket remains valid for a year, I’d recommend visiting as something of an introduction to the poet, before returning a few weeks or months later, having got stuck into his poems in a little more detail. 

Fanny Brawne's Room

The house was also later home to actress Eliza Jane Chester, so there are also prints and portraits in the room she added which might be of interest to lovers of nineteenth-century theatre. If you're in London with an afternoon to spare I'd heartily recommend visiting the museum.


Do you know of any other attractions from nineteenth-century London the Secret Victorianist should visit before she moves to the US? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.







Keats's Parlour
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades: 
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?