Six Victorian marriages, part 4: Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens

Catherine Dickens, ca 1848 (detail). Engraving by Edwin Roffe, after Daniel Maclise, and after John Jabez Edwin Mayall. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

This is the fourth in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).

Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens

"'There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.'" 

—Charles Dickens [1]

Catherine Hogarth was not Charles Dickens' first love. That was Maria Beadnell; they met when he was 17 and she was 19. He pursued her for four years, but she ultimately rejected his marriage proposal because (in the thoughts of Jane Austen's Lady Russell in Persuasion regarding Anne Elliot):

. . .with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen—involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession, would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! [2]

By his twenty-third birthday in 1835 Dickens had begun to publish "Sketches by Boz," and was starting to be acclaimed in the London literary world. He began to frequent the home of a more established journalist colleague, George Hogarth, where he met his 20-year-old daughter Catherine. The two quickly became engaged, and married a year later. They moved into Dickens' rooms, along with Dickens' younger brother Frederick and Catherine's younger sister Mary.

Portrait of Catherine Dickens by Samuel Laurence, 1838. Image source: Charles Dickens Museum

Over the course of that first year of marriage Dickens published The Pickwick Papers and wrote much of Oliver Twist. In 1837, after he and Catherine had moved to a new address, Dickens would write, "I shall never be so happy again as in those Chambers three Stories high—never if I roll in wealth and fame." [3] By Mary's account, Catherine was "happy as the day is long—I think they are more devoted than ever since their marriage, if that is possible." [4] 

Portrait of Charles Dickens by Samuel Laurence, 1837. Image source: Charles Dickens Museum

But their early happiness did not last. After 1850, the year of the publication of David Copperfield and the birth of their ninth child in fourteen years (who would unfortunately only survive eight months), there was an increasing estrangement between Catherine and Charles. She had been almost constantly pregnant since their marriage (and would go on to give birth to one more child in 1852). She was worn out by childbearing, had grown overweight, was overcome by lethargy, and was probably suffering from depression. Meanwhile, he had become world-famous, was in constant demand, and enjoyed a highly active social life. They were growing ever further apart.

As Catherine sank into lassitude, her unmarried sister Georgina, who had been living with them since she was 15, began increasingly to take on Catherine's responsibilities: by the mid-1850s,

Georgina had effectively replaced Catherine both as head of the household and as Dickens's domestic partner. It was to their aunt Georgina that the children turned with their problems. Catherine, flattened by fatigue, lay on the sofa, increasingly irrelevant in her own house. [5]

Georgina Hogarth with Mamie Dickens, 1860s (detail). Carte-de-visite by Herbert Watkins. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

Catherine was only 40, while Georgina was in her 20s. There was speculation, both at the time and since, that Georgina had replaced Catherine in the marital bed as well as in the roles of mother and mistress of the house. However, no evidence of any sexual dimension to the relationship between Georgina and Charles has ever been discovered. And we do have evidence that Charles had definitely begun to look outside his marriage for affection and sex. 

In 1855 Dickens received a letter from a Mrs. Henry Winter, or, as he had once known her, Maria Beadnell, and they struck up an impassioned correspondence. He arranged for her to visit him at home without her husband at a time when he knew his wife would be absent for hours. But the young woman he had loved no longer existed; Dickens was dismayed to see that she had become a middle-aged matron.

Maria Beadnell Winter in the decade 1850-1860. Image source: Fórcola Ediciones

Perhaps worse, Maria's attempts at coquettishness struck him (as he wrote when he later used this incident as the basis of a scene in Little Dorrit) as "diffuse and silly. . .That was the fatal blow." After getting through what Rose imagines as "the painful interview he had unquestionably imagined as the beginning of a seduction," Dickens then had to make it through an awkward dinner where the former lovers were joined by their respective spouses. [6] This embarrassing incident may have chastened him, but not for long.

In 1857, when he was 45, Dickens met Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, the youngest daughter of a famous family of actors. Although according to Rose, Dickens did not immediately embark on a sexual affair with the 18-year-old Nelly, he fell in love and began sending her expensive gifts (one of which, a bracelet, came to his home by mistake and was opened by Catherine). He also began supporting Nelly and her family financially.

Ellen Ternan. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Within months Dickens decided to separate from Catherine. At their home he moved out of their bedroom and into his adjacent dressing room, replacing the connecting door with a wall and bookcases—a symbolic entombment of her, and of his once-loving feelings. By the next year he forced her to move out of their home and into a house he'd rented for her; only their eldest son Charley went with her, while the other children stayed with him and Georgina. And this is when, Rose believes, he and Nelly likely consummated their relationship. She retired from the stage in 1860, and was dependent on Dickens until his death a decade later. Dickens' daughter Kate, about the same age as Nelly, suspected that they had a son who died in infancy.

Portrait of Kate Dickens Perugini by Charles Perugini, ca. 1875. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Rose does not blame Dickens for the alteration in his feelings towards his wife. Catherine's constant childbearing narrowed her world; Dickens' increasing fame and deepening art enlarged his. His love had been diminishing for years before he met Nelly. But once he did, it brought the situation to a crisis. He wrote to a friend,

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too—and much more so. . .God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her sake, that I ever fell in her way. . .What is now befalling me I have seen steadily coming. . .and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help me. [7]

He is writing about the woman who has borne him ten children, and whom he has condemned, in the words of Rose, to "a kind of living death." [8] Perhaps Dickens is not at fault for the change in his feelings, but his public repudiation of his wife and his isolation of her from their children seem needlessly cruel. 

Catherine outlived Dickens by nearly a decade. As she lay dying in the late fall of 1879, she gave her daughter Kate the letters Dickens had written her in their courtship and early marriage. "Give these to the British Museum," she told her, "that the world may know he loved me once." [9]

Next time: Harriet Hardy Taylor and John Stuart Mill
Last time: Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith

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1. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Volume 2, Chapman and Hall, 1866, Chapter XVI, p. 234.
2. Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter IV. https://archive.org/details/novelsofjaneaust00aust/page/35/mode/1up
3. Quoted in Rose, p. 149.
4. Quoted in Rose, p. 149.
5. Rose, p. 168.
   
6. Rose, p. 164-165.
7. Quoted in Rose, p. 175.
8. Rose, p. 190.
   
9. Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, Stanford University Press, 1983, p. 159.
   

Six Victorian marriages, part 3: Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith

Study of a Girl Sitting in a Chair (detail) by Henry Wallis, ca. 1855; the sitter is possibly Mary Ellen Meredith. Image source: Tate Britain

This is the third in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).

Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith

Another writer, another disillusioned wife, another sexy artist. 

When she met George Meredith in 1848 Mary Ellen Nicolls was a beautiful 27-year-old widow with a young daughter. George was 20 and had abandoned a legal career to become a writer. It was his literary aspirations that had brought him into contact with her. Mary's brother Edward collaborated with George on a privately circulated literary magazine, The Monthly Observer, to which Mary also contributed. Mary and Edward were the children of Thomas Love Peacock, who was famous as a friend of Shelley and the author of Nightmare Abbey (1818).

Thomas Love Peacock by Henry Wallis, 1858. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

Not only beautiful, Mary was witty, well-read, and "a dashing type of horsewoman who attracted much notice from the 'bloods' of the day." [1] George quickly became smitten with her. After he had gotten a poem published in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal (Number 288, 7 July 1849), it may have seemed to both of them that his literary career was launched. They married a month later. 

But after their rapturous honeymoon (that one of the partners was sexually experienced probably helped) problems quickly arose. Mary and her father were adventurous cooks, but George had a delicate stomach, and often experienced nausea and indigestion. Two years after their marriage Mary wrote in a published review of Soyer's Modern Housewife, a cookbook,

The stomach, not the heart, as poets write, is the great centre of existence and feeling. . .When the stomach receives an antagonistic element, it revenges itself by sending up morbid impressions to the brain. . .[M]any a lover's quarrel lies in ambush at the bottom of a tureen of soup, where it jostles with matrimonial squabbles, morbid creeds, and poetic misprisions. [2]

The phrase "poetic misprisions" stands out in this passage. "Misprisions" is an unusual word; it can mean misunderstanding, but also has the sense of guilt by concealment. And the modifier "poetic" suggests that Mary may have been thinking about her poet husband.

Perhaps there was a guilty secret that George had been harboring: he had apparently led Mary, whose mother had Welsh ancestry, to believe that he was descended from Welsh nobility. (Far from being aristocratic, his deceased mother had been the daughter of an innkeeper, and his tailor father had recently emigrated to South Africa with his second wife, who had been his cook.) Mary later confided in a neighbor, Anne Bennett, who years after Mary's death wrote in "My Recollections of Mrs. G Meredith,"

Mrs Meredith's illusions respecting her husband were ere long destined to receive a rude check by discovering that he did not belong to the ancient Welsh family of which he represented himself to be a descendant for in point of fact she discovered from a letter addressed to him that his father was a tailor at Capetown in S Africa. . .Ardent lover of truth as Mrs Meredith was, the very soul of sincerity and frankness such a deception as this which had been practised upon her produced an entire revolution of her feelings and from that time forward the affection and esteem she had hitherto felt for her husband was changed into contempt and aversion. [3]

This doesn't seem as though it can have been the whole story, and indeed there were other possible reasons for her growing disaffection. She had at least one, and probably more, miscarriages or stillbirths (only one child survived, a son born in 1853). George's literary career was hardly flourishing; his book Poems (1851) had been greeted with indifference. And by Meredith's own account, the couple was besieged by creditors; he claimed that his next book, the novel The Shaving of Shagpat: an Arabian Entertainment, published in 1856, had been "written. . .with duns at the door." [4] George also began to spend time apart from his family. In his later novel, The Egoist (1879), Meredith has a character describe a disenchanted couple after a few years of marriage as "staring wide awake. All their dreaming's done. They've emptied their bottle of elixir, or broken it." [5]

Enter Henry Wallis, a young painter (two years younger than George) on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. George posed for Wallis's painting on the death of the poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), which, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, made Wallis instantly famous. The painting was praised by no less a critic than John Ruskin as "faultless and wonderful" [6].

Chatterton by Henry Wallis, 1856. Image source: Tate Britain

Wallis's career now seemed to be made, although he was already financially independent (he was the stepson and heir of a well-to-do London architect and property owner). George's frequent absences, moroseness, poverty, and stalled literary career may have contrasted starkly for Mary with Wallis's attentiveness, genial charm, wealth and success. Judging by evidence presented in Johnson's True History, Mary and he may have became lovers in the winter or spring of 1857, sometime after Wallis's 27th birthday. In any case, by the summer Mary had separated from her husband, and was living on her own in Seaford, amid the spectacular white cliffs of the Seven Sisters (the children were probably left with relatives).

The Seven Sisters from cottages at Seaford Head. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Separation was a huge step for a Victorian wife to take. Her husband controlled their property (including any money she had brought to the marriage) and retained legal custody of the children. Any woman living on her own immediately became the object of gossip and scandal, and would also quickly need to find ways to support herself. This was not easy; when Charles Dickens discovered that Mary had apparently not been paid for writing she had done for his magazine Household Words, he directed that George be contacted to find out whether he wanted the money. Most women would leave their husbands only in the most dire circumstances (see Six Victorian marriages, part 2: Effie Gray and John Ruskin).

But Mary was not a typical Victorian wife. Johnson writes, Mary "refused to accept a condition of life that bound people together in loveless chains. . .Mary Ellen thought of herself as a person, as Victorian women [or, perhaps we should rather say 'Victorian men'] often did not." [7]

Whether or not Mary and Wallis had become lovers before she separated from George (which seems highly probable), they certainly had by July, when she became pregnant. Their son, Harold, was born in April 1858 (although, since Mary was still officially married, "George Meredith, Author" was listed as the father on the birth certificate). 

Mary Ellen Meredith by Henry Wallis, 1858. Image source: Ashmolean Museum Oxford

Soon after the birth Mary began to exhibit symptoms of illness, writing to Wallis in London that "I am very weak, as I have never been before, dragging pains in my limbs, and swelled ancles [sic]." [8] Later in the year Wallis took Mary and the baby to Capri, a small island off the coast of Naples, where he liked to spend winters and where they thought the climate might improve her health. 

In the spring of 1859 Mary returned to England with Harold but without Wallis. By the summer of 1860 she was living with Harold in a house near her father, but was in declining health and financial straits. She died, probably of kidney failure, in October 1861; she was only 40 years old. Only three mourners attended her funeral: her maid Jane Wells, her neighbor Mrs. Bennett, and an old friend (probably of her first husband), Captain Henry Howe. Her children were kept away, and her father, her lover and her husband were all absent. Her father was aged and had a "detestation of anything disagreeable"; her lover (almost certainly by this time her former lover) could hardly appear at her graveside without scandal; and her husband remained implacably hostile.

George's bitterness towards Mary provided the subject that enabled him to finally attain literary fame. Both the novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and the 50-sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862) were, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "fuelled by the trauma of sexual betrayal," and they made Meredith's (somewhat scandalous) reputation. [9] He would go on to become a major literary figure in the late 19th century, dying at age 81 in 1909.

George Meredith aet. [at the age of] 35 (1863).
Image source: The Kissed Mouth: Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian Art for all!

Modern Love, Sonnet II

It ended, and the morrow brought the task.

Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had!
He sickened as at breath of poison-flowers:
A languid humour stole among the hours,
And if their smiles encountered, he went mad,
And raged deep inward, till the light was brown
Before his vision, and the world, forgot,
Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot.
A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
The pit of infamy: and then again
He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
To ape the magnanimity of love,
And smote himself, a shuddering heap of pain. [10]

 

Next time: Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens

Last time: Effie Gray and John Ruskin

 

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1. The painter William Holman Hunt, quoted in Margaret Harris, "Meredith, George, novelist and poet," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34991
   
2. Quoted in Diane Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, New York Review Books, 2020, p. 80.
3. Nicholas A. Joukovsky, "According to Mrs Bennett," Times Literary Supplement, Issue 5297, 8 Oct. 2004, p. 13-15.
4. Quoted in Harris, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
5. Quoted in Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, p. 87.
6. Quoted in Johnson, p. 88.
7. Johnson, p. 125.
8. Johnson, p. 137.
9. Harris, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
10. George Meredith, Modern Love, Sonnet II. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44704/modern-love-ii

Six Victorian marriages, part 2: Effie Gray and John Ruskin

The Order of Release by John Everett Millais, 1853 (detail). Image source: Tate Britain

This is the second in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).

Effie Gray and John Ruskin

With pre-marital chastity demanded absolutely of middle-class women (suggested but not required for men), the Victorian wedding night, a supercharged transition from innocence to experience, could hardly have been easy, may well have been a barbaric trial for at least one, and sometimes for both, of the newly married pair. [1]

John Ruskin, for example, found on his wedding night that his wife's body "was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it." [2] Gray herself wrote in a letter to her father, "he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening 10th April." [3] What caused Ruskin's reaction is not known; it has been speculated that he was shocked by her pubic hair or other differences between her body and the idealized nudes of art.

At the time of her marriage in 1848 Gray (her given name was Euphemia) was the pretty, vivacious 19-year-old daughter of Ruskin family friends who had fallen on hard financial times. He was a decade older, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and already the author of the first two volumes of Modern Painters. Over the next five years he would publish The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, but he would never manage to work up the desire to have sex with his wife; they stayed apart from one another frequently. 

Effie Gray by Herbert Watkins. Albumen print, late 1850s. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

Effie increasingly resented Ruskin's coldness and disapproval, which could become outright cruelty. On her twenty-fifth birthday in May 1853 he'd told her that he had no intention of ever consummating their marriage because he considered that she was mentally unstable and would be an unfit mother. As chief evidence of her depravity Ruskin cited Effie's interest in opera.

Both Ruskins admired the work of the artist John Everett Millais. Effie modelled for his painting The Order of Release, but after a sly comment from Ruskin's father began to wonder whether her husband was deliberately throwing her together with Millais. That suspicion may have been heightened in the summer of 1853 when Ruskin, Effie and Millais travelled to the Scottish hills and shared a small house while Millais painted Ruskin's portrait by a waterfall.

Portrait of John Ruskin by John Everett Millais, 1854. Image source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

He also painted Effie near the same location. 

The Waterfall by John Everett Millais, 1853. Image source: Delaware Art Museum

As Rose writes, "in that tiny cottage the three of them lived together in disconcerting proximity. Millais could not help but see the neglect which Ruskin bestowed so lavishly upon his wife." [4] Millais learned (probably from Effie) that the marriage was and continued to be sexless, and he, too, began to wonder whether Ruskin was hoping that they would give him an excuse for separation or divorce—Effie's adultery.

John Everett Millais by Herbert Watkins. Albumen print, 1857. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

If that was Ruskin's plan, it didn't work quite in the way he'd hoped. Millais and Effie did not begin an affair, but they did fall in love. And that gave Effie a powerful motivation to finally do something about her loveless marriage. On 25 April 1854 she left London on a planned visit to Scotland to stay with her parents; Ruskin was leaving on a tour of Switzerland with his parents in a few days. But Ruskin was unaware that Effie's parents had actually been in London for two weeks, that lawyers had been consulted and that Effie had submitted to what must have been a humiliating medical examination to prove her virginity. That night Ruskin was visited by her lawyers, who served him notice that she had filed suit in ecclesiastical court to have the marriage annulled. Ruskin wrote to his solicitor that he blamed the estrangement between them on her: 

Perhaps the principal cause of it—next to her resolute effort to detach me from my parents—was her always thinking that I ought to attend her, instead of herself attending me. [5]

Since Ruskin's failure to "attend" Effie was precisely what was at issue in her suit, his lawyer must have realized the bad effect this document might have if produced in court, and filed it away in his desk, where it remained undiscovered for seventy years.

Effie won the case; on 20 July she received notice that her marriage to Ruskin had been dissolved on the grounds of his "incurable impotency." [6] After waiting a year in order to curtail gossip she married Millais, and went on to have eight children with him (and be his frequent model). Ruskin never married again, although when he was approaching 50 he proposed to a former pupil, 18-year-old Rose La Touche (whom he had first met when she was 12), who ultimately turned him down.

In Parallel Lives Rose sees the Ruskin-Gray marriage as a union of incompatible sensibilities. Ruskin was primarily an observer, thinker and writer; Gray loved the opera and the theater and a varied social life. Rose is not trying to identify a villain or victim in their situation (although one may occur to us); instead she writes that "the novelistic imagination this material seems to me to demand is that of George Eliot, whose great theme was the egotism of perception and who assumed that all action rightly portrayed was a tragic—or comic—clash of understandings":

The plot from his point of view weirdly prefigures (by some twenty years) the story of Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch: a high-minded man, dedicated to his work, is seduced by a pretty face and appealing manners and thinks he can annex the charming creature for life without seriously altering his pattern of living. . .If, however, we can sympathize with Ruskin as a Lydgate married to a Rosamund Vincy, the story of their marriage from Effie's point of view is uncannily similar to that of Dorothea Brooke's marriage to Casaubon—the story of an ardent, high-spirited woman who married an emotionally and sexually defective man. [7]

Next time: Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith
Last time: Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

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1. Quoted in Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Alfred Knopf, 1984, p. 57.
2. Quoted in Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, Murray, 1967, p. 191.
3. Quoted in Vanessa Thorpe, "What was John Ruskin thinking on his unhappy wedding night?" The Observer 13 March 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/mar/14/john-ruskin-wedding-effie-gray
   
4. Quoted in Rose, p. 80.
   
5. Quoted in Rose, pp. 87-88.
6. Quoted in Rose, p. 91.
   
7. Rose, p. 70.

Six Victorian marriages, part 1: Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

"Shewing how wrath began." Illustration by Marcus Stone for Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (1869). Image source: Project Gutenberg.

Every couple is an enigma to outsiders, and often even to itself. [1]

Marriage is a perilous undertaking. In the U.S. almost half as many people get divorced every year as get married, even though marriage rates have declined and the age of first marriage has increased steadily since the late 1950s, suggesting that the decision to marry is taken ever more deliberately. Even when, without social stigma, we can date dozens of people and live with partners for months or years in a kind of trial marriage to determine the compatibility of our political views, social preferences, domestic habits, family connections, monetary attitudes and sexual practices, we still have a nearly 50% failure rate when choosing spouses.

Imagine how much more difficult it was for the Victorians. Couples typically knew little about one another before uniting, and if they discovered they'd made a mistake there was little that they could do. Nineteenth-century marriages, no matter how miserable, usually were for life: until 1857 it generally took an Act of Parliament to obtain a divorce. 

In books by Phyllis Rose (the classic Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages) and Diane Johnson (The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives), six Victorian marriages are examined. Rose writes,

. . .like [John Stuart] Mill, I believe marriage to be the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults, and so I am interested in the management of power between men and women in that microcosmic relationship. Whatever the balance, every marriage is based upon some understanding, articulated or not, about the relative importance, the priority of desires, between its two partners. Marriages go bad not when love fades—love can modulate into affection without driving two people apart—but when this understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength. [2]

But in the Victorian era, couples often discovered that those tacit or explicit understandings had been founded on inadequate evidence or false premises.

Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle

Jane Baillie Carlyle (née Welsh), attributed to Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling, after a painting by Samuel Laurence. Salt print, circa 1852, based on a work of circa 1851.
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

Jane Welsh, like many other women hungry for knowledge then and since, faced the barrier of an implacably sexist educational system. Young middle-class women were supposed to become "accomplished," that is, learn to read and speak a smattering of French or Italian, play the harp or piano, sing, draw, and embroider. Actual learning—studying the classics of history, philosophy and literature—was the purview of men. 

Jane was witty, bright-eyed, and the only child of well-off parents. Not surprisingly she had several beaux, but all were unsatisfactory. They promised to enlarge neither the breadth of her experience nor the scope of her mind. She wanted a suitor who could convincingly play the role of Saint-Preux, tutor and lover of the heroine of Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Jane's favorite novel. 

The only suitor who came  anywhere close to St. Preux was the impecunious, uncouth, but brilliant Thomas Carlyle. He had almost immediately confessed his interest in her, but Jane did not think of him romantically:

Now Sir, once for all, I beg you to understand that I dislike as much as my Mother disapproves your somewhat too ardent expressions of Friendship towards me. . .I will be to you a true, a constant, and devoted friend—but not a Mistress—a Sister—but not a Wife—Falling in love and marrying like other Misses is quite out of the question—I have too little romance in my disposition ever to be in love with you or any other man; and too much ever to marry without love. [3]

Thomas Carlyle, 1854. Image source: Future Museum, South West Scotland.

Jane may have been concerned lest her mother forbid any correspondence, and for her Carlyle was an intellectual lifeline. He sent her books and reading lists, exchanged ideas, corrected the grammar of her translations, and urged her to undertake literary projects (for all of which Jane felt herself unsuited). But she steadfastly held him at arm's length—or, rather, pen's, because they kept up a frequent correspondence.

After she had exchanged letters with Carlyle for four years Jane was entering her mid-20s and recognized that she would either have to marry soon or live with her strong-willed mother for the rest of her life. But as a woman uninterested in conventional marriage her options were few. Carlyle had told her that if she married someone else he would stop writing to her, and she knew that likely the same would be true if he married someone else. So she grudgingly acknowledged that the only way they could be sure of continuing their intellectual exchanges was to marry: "Not many months ago, I would have said it was impossible that I should ever be your wife; at present I consider this to be the most probable destiny for me; in a year or so, perhaps, I shall consider it the only one." [4]

Her mother staunchly opposed the match, on the grounds of both Carlyle's relative poverty and his irascibility. (His temper must have been bad indeed for it to be apparent after only a couple of short visits.) Jane, distressingly, begins to sound like a woman making all the accommodations on her side: "No! my own Darling! we shall not be parted on this account. . .And tho' you should never be good-humoured, what then? Do we not love each other? And what is love if it cannot make all rough places smooth?" [5]

His own view of marriage, expressed in letters to her over the 18 months of their engagement, should have given her full warning about what she was letting herself in for: 

Do you not think, that when you on one side of our household shall have faithfully gone thro your housewife duties, and I on the other shall have written my allotted pages, we shall meet over our frugal meal with far happier and prouder hearts than thousands that are not blessed with any duties, and whose agony is the bitterest of all, "the agony of a too easy bed"? [6]

She is relegated to "housewife duties," while he, the great man (though, he warned her, "sick and sulky"), sits in his study while she caters to his needs. Her needs go unmentioned and unmet. 

Jane Baillie Carlyle (née Welsh), attributed to Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling. Salt print, 1855?.
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

Indeed, a "too easy bed" would not be her lot. James Froude, who was chosen by Carlyle to be his biographer, wrote that "Carlyle was impatient, irritable, strangely forgetful of others, self-occupied and bursting into violence at the smallest and absurdest provocation—evidently a most difficult and trying household companion. . .Mrs. Carlyle's pale, drawn, suffering face haunted me in my dreams." [7]

Carlyle's violence was more than verbal: Jane's journal recorded an incident where Carlyle left "blue marks" on her arms because he had grabbed her so forcefully. After her death Carlyle read her diary and "saw that he had made her entirely miserable; that she had sacrificed her life to him; and that he had made a wretched return for her devotion." [8] Jane herself had a sharp tongue and keen wit, of course—she wrote to a childhood friend, "if you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!"—but no provocation could excuse physical violence. [9]

Froude wrote of Jane,

I thought her the most brilliant and interesting woman that I had ever fallen in with; so much thought, so much lightness and brilliancy, such sparkling scorn and tenderness combined, I had never met with together in any human being. It was evident that she was suffering; she was always in indifferent health, she had no natural cheerfulness, at least, none when I knew her. Rumour said that she and Carlyle quarrelled often, and I could easily believe it from occasional expressions about him. [10]

Their marriage was probably unconsummated, to Jane's dismay. Her friend Geraldine Jewsbury, in whom Jane confided, told Froude that "'Carlyle was one of those persons who ought never to have married,'" because he was uninterested in or incapable of providing physical affection to his wife. [11] And meanwhile Jane was expected to deal with all of the unpleasant tasks of daily life (including talking to their neighbors about the early-morning crowing of their roosters) in order to free Carlyle from such petty concerns and enable him to devote his time to writing. 

After thirty years of marriage Carlyle began to spend more and more time at the soirées of Lady Harriet Ashburton. Although Jane cultivated her own circle of acquaintances, she justifiably felt neglected and taken for granted:

Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own. She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another. This had been the occasion of the most violent outbreaks between them.  [12]

 

Jane Baillie Carlyle (née Welsh), by Robert Scott Tait. Albumen print, April 1855.
Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

At this point Jane considered leaving him, but was unable to make the final break. She died a decade later in 1866 after forty years of marriage, and after being in ill health for many years. Remarkably Carlyle decided to publish her journal and letters, which painted him in an extremely unflattering light. Perhaps he considered it a penance. Froude wrote, "He shut himself up in the house with her diaries and papers, and for the first time was compelled to look himself in the face, and to see what his faults had been." [13]

Samuel Butler later wrote to a female friend that "it was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four." [14] It seems clear, though, that in their marriage most of the misery was on one side.

Next time: Effie Gray and John Ruskin 

---

1. Rachel Donadio, "Domenico Starnone’s New Novel Is Also a Piece in the Elena Ferrante Puzzle," New York Times, 9 March 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/books/review/ties-domenico-starnone-jhumpa-lahiri.html
2. Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Alfred Knopf, 1984, p. 7.
3. Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, ca. 17 January 1822. Carlyle Letters Online, Duke University Press, 2019: https://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume/02/lt-18220117-JBW-TC-01
4. Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle, 29 January 1825. Carlyle Letters Online, https://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume/03/lt-18250129-JBW-TC-01
5. Quoted in Rose, p. 42.
6. Quoted in Rose, pp. 42-43.
7. James Froude, My Relations With Carlyle, Longmans, Green and Co., 1903, p. 8. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n19/mode/1up
8. Froude, p. 11. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n22/mode/1up
9. Jane Welsh Carlyle to Elizabeth Stodartc, a. 29 February 1836. Carlyle Letters Online, https://carlyleletters.dukeupress.edu/volume/08/lt-18360229-JWC-EA-01
10. Froude, p. 3. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n14/mode/1up
11. Quoted in Froude, p. 21. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n32/mode/1up
12. Froude, p. 22. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n33/mode/1up
13. Froude, p. 11. https://archive.org/details/a582586800frouuoft/page/n22/mode/1up
14. Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902), A Memoir. Macmillan and Co, 1919, p. 429.
    

Black Beethoven and the Black Mozart

Portrait of Beethoven (detail), by Joseph Maehler, 1805

Was Beethoven Black?

It's no surprise that in a year of reckoning with systemic racism the speculation that Beethoven had African ancestry has resurfaced. (Of course, every human who has ever lived has African ancestry, but I don't think that's what's meant. Also, let's not forget that race is a social, rather than biological, category. But I digress.)

The evidence is circumstantial: Beethoven's complexion was described by acquaintances as dark, his nose was described as round, and he was nicknamed "The Spaniard." Beethoven's family history has been traced back several centuries, and was Flemish, but of course nothing can be ruled out.

In "Beethoven was black" (The Guardian, 7 September 2020) Philip Clark writes that the speculation may have originated in an interview with the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose father was from Sierra Leone and whose mother was a white Englishwoman. Coleridge-Taylor noted the resemblance between his own features and Beethoven's, as described by contemporaries and represented in engravings and paintings. But Coleridge-Taylor was using the question of Beethoven's identity to highlight the racial prejudice he himself had just experienced during a recent visit to the United States: "If the greatest of all musicians were alive today, he would find it impossible to obtain hotel accommodation in certain American cities."

Following up on Coleridge-Taylor's insight, it's especially interesting to me that the question of Beethoven's race seems to recur during moments of widespread black political mobilization. Coleridge-Taylor's interview took place in 1907, just a few years after the publication of W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the founding of the Niagara Movement (1905), and a few years before the founding of the NAACP (1909). Beethoven's ancestry next receives prominent attention, according to musical scholar Dominique-René de Lerma, in J.A. Roger's Sex and Race, Vol. 3 (1944); during World War II, racism's contradiction of American ideals was made starkly apparent as African-Americans fought against fascism abroad but found themselves facing prejudice and violence at home. Rogers provocatively turns the question of Beethoven's race around: "there is not a single shred of evidence to support the belief that he was a white man."

During the Black Power movement of the 1960s, both Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael asserted that Beethoven was black. In 1969 Rolling Stone carried an article entitled "Beethoven was Black and Proud!," and in his comic strip Peanuts Charles Schulz had Schroeder, on hearing that Beethoven may have been black, discover that all along he's been playing soul music.

This year the question of Beethoven's race has arisen again, in part because issues of racism have once more come to the fore, and partly because it is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. In a recent article, "Was Beethoven Black?," (Smithsonian Magazine, 23 June 2020) Nora McGreevy quotes University of Michigan history professor Kira Thurman:

There’s a way in which white people, historically, have constantly denied black people any kind of association with genius. And in a lot of ways, there is no figure that we associate more with genius than Beethoven himself. The implication of the idea that Beethoven might be black was so powerful, was so exciting and so tantalizing, because it threatens to overturn how people have understood or talked about race and racial hierarchy in the United States and around the world.

But of course the whole 19th- and early 20th century notion of musical history as a succession of geniuses is precisely what led to the exclusion and neglect of composers who did not fit prevailing (i.e., racist and sexist) models of genius. One of the most exciting developments in classical music during my lifetime has been the rediscovery of music outside of the established canon (see, for example, my post on Anna Beer's Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music).

As Thurman has written, "So instead of asking the question, 'Was Beethoven Black?' ask 'Why don’t I know anything about George Bridgetower?'"

Portrait of George Bridgetower by Henry Eldridge, before 1821. 

Image source: British Museum

Bridgetower was a virtuoso violinist and composer. His father was Afro-Caribbean and his mother was German-Polish. As a child he may have studied with Haydn; he gave concerts before Habsburg Emperor Joseph II and Britain's King George III and Queen Charlotte, and later became first violinist in the orchestra of the Prince of Wales (the future George IV).

In April 1803, at age 24, Bridgetower was invited to Vienna by Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian von Lobkowitz, a patron of Beethoven, to play the set of Beethoven's string quartets (Op. 18) dedicated to the Prince. The violinist charmed and delighted the bearish Beethoven, and he immediately began composing a piece for them to play together at a concert given for Bridgetower's benefit in late May.

The concert was postponed for two days to enable Beethoven to finish composing, and even so he just made it: it wasn't until 4:30 in the morning on 24 May, the day of the concert, that Beethoven asked a student to copy out the first two movements for the violin (the third movement had been composed some time before). In the event there was only time to copy the first movement before the concert began. Patricia Morrisroe in the New York Times, 4 September 2020, describes what happened next:

Beethoven and Bridgetower took the stage for the morning concert, having never rehearsed the piece. Bridgetower was sight-reading.

Beethoven had given Bridgetower an opening solo that began with an explosive declaration, moving into a fiery, sensual dialogue. At one point, Bridgetower surprised Beethoven by imitating and then expanding on a short piano cadenza in the first movement. Beethoven, jumping up, hugged him, crying, "My dear boy! Once more!"

After the performance, Beethoven presented Bridgetower his tuning fork and wrote a dedication on the score: "Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico" ("Mulatto sonata composed for the mulatto Bridgetower, great mulatto madman and composer").

However, Bridgetower and Beethoven later fell out (it was very easy to fall out with Beethoven). When the piece composed for Bridgetower was finally published in 1805 it was dedicated to another violinist, Rudolphe Kreutzer, and has been known ever since as the "Kreutzer Sonata." The designation is doubly invalid, first because the work was written for Bridgetower, but also because Kreutzer never played it (he found the piece that Bridgetower had sight-read at the first performance to be "unintelligible"). Kreutzer, though, has been immortalized by his tenuous association with this work, while Bridgetower has been largely erased from music history.

The first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata, performed by Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VVIjtaer54

Was Mozart Black?

Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Image source: New York Times

Mozart wasn't black, but there was a "Black Mozart." As Marcos Balter, professor of music composition at UC San Diego, writes in "His Name Is Joseph Boulogne, Not 'Black Mozart'" (New York Times, 22 July 2020), "this erasure of Boulogne’s name not only subjugates him to an arbitrary white standard, but also diminishes his truly unique place in Western classical music history."

Joseph Boulogne's father was a Frenchman who owned a plantation on Guadeloupe, and his mother was an Afro-Caribbean slave. Meaningful consent is not possible, of course, when one partner holds life-or-death power over the other. Remarkably, though, when Boulogne was about 10 his father took him and his mother back to France and paid for his education, including fencing and music lessons.

Boulogne became a champion fencer and a highly regarded violinist. When in 1769 the composer François-Joseph Gossec was forming an orchestra for his Concerts des Amateurs series he invited Boulogne to join the violin section; within a few years he had become concertmaster and then musical director, and the orchestra established a reputation as one of the best in Europe.

Boulogne was also a pioneering composer. According to Balter he wrote some of the first string quartets by a French composer, and achieved his greatest success with the eight symphonies concertantes he wrote between 1775 and 1778. A symphonie concertante features two (or more) solo instruments with orchestra; Balter calls it "a virtuosic dialogue that emulate[s] a musical duel."

Interestingly, in 1778 Mozart travelled to France and stayed for a time in the same house as Boulogne. During and immediately after that visit in 1778 and 1779, perhaps inspired by the work of Boulogne, Mozart wrote six symphonies concertantes. Balther also reports that another musicologist, Gabriel Banat, has identified a musical passage in a Mozart symphonie concertante that seems to derive from a Boulogne violin concerto from 1777.

Here is a performance of the Allegro from Boulogne's Symphonie Concertante in G major by the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRBUA5rgaLs

Boulogne would go on to negotiate the commission for Haydn's six "Paris" symphonies and conduct their premieres in 1786. He also composed operas, one (Ernestine, 1777) with a libretto by the author of the scandalous Les liaisons dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Boulogne's vocal works were not as popular as his instrumental music, however, and most have been lost entirely or in large part. One opera, Le Droit de seigneur (1784), is known only by a single surviving aria, but the title suggests that Boulogne may have written an opera based on Beaumarchais' Le mariage de Figaro two years before Mozart and Da Ponte premiered Le nozze di Figaro in Vienna.

As Balter writes of this accomplished composer and musician, "Boulogne doesn't need to be anyone's second best—let alone anyone's Black echo."

Update 9 September 2020: Ars Minerva, the SF Bay Area group focusing on neglected composers of the Baroque and Classical eras, will present a "Cocktails & Chit-Chat" event on the life and music of Joseph Boulogne on Thursday 17 September, 6 pm Pacific Time; for details see the Ars Minerva website.