Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts 9780754658559, 0754658554, 2006032287

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WOMEN’S ALBUMS AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND

To John a n d Judith, a n d in m em ory o f Pip.

Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England Ladies, Mothers and Flirts

PATRIZIA DI BELLO B irkbeck College, University o f London, UK

ASHGATE

© Patrizia Di Bello 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Patrizia Di Bello has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire G U 11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Di Bello, Patrizia Women’s albums and photography in Victorian England : ladies, mothers and flirts 1. Waterlow, Anna 2. Filmer, Mary 3. Photograph albums - England - History - 19th century 4. Women photographers - England - History - 19th century 5. Portrait photography England - History - 19th century 6. Women - England - Social conditions - 19th century I. Title 770.8’2’0942 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Di Bello, Patrizia. Women’s albums and photography in Victorian England : ladies, mothers, and flirts / Patrizia Di Bello, p. cm. Analysis of photograph albums mostly by Anna Waterlow and Mary Filmer of portraits from the 1850s-1870s. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5855-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Photograph albums— England— History— 19th century. 2. Photographs—Collectors and collecting—England—History— 19th century. 3. Women art collectors—England— Biography. 4. Art, Victorian— England. 5. Photographic criticism. I. Title. TR501.D52 2007 770.94209034— dc22 2006032287 ISBN 978-0-7546-5855-9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents

List o f Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1

The Family Album, the Feminine and the Personal

2

Nineteenth-Century Album Culture

3

Photographs, Albums, Women’s Magazines

4

Melancholic Portrait Gazers

5

Photographs, Fun and Flirtations

6

Photography, Vision and Touch

Bibliography Index

List o f Illustrations

2.1 2.2

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

5.1

5.2

5.3

Page from Mrs Birkbeck’s Album (1841). Watercolour and pencil, in an album 28 x 21 cm. Permission Birkbeck Library. ‘Mrs Lane Fox’, Heath s Book o f Beauty (1838). 14x11 cm. Permission British Library (P.P. 6680). ‘Paris and London Fashions’, Lady s Newspaper ( 1847). Permission British Library (13 March 1847). ‘Paris and London Fashions’, L ady’s Newspaper (1849). Permission British Library ( 10 November 1849). ‘Lady Eastlake’, Lady s Own Paper ( 1867). Permission British Library (9 March 1867). ‘London and Paris Fashions’, Lady’s Newspaper ( 1861). Permission British Library ( 12 January 1861 ). Pages 6 and 7 from Anna Waterlow’s album (circa 1849-60). Photographic prints, in an album 30 x 25.5 cm. V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum. Pages 10 and 11 from Anna Waterlow’s album (1860). Photographic prints, in an album 30 x 25.5 cm. V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum. Pages 12 (1858) and 13 (1857) from Anna Waterlow’s album. Photographic prints, in an album 30 x 25.5 cm. V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum. Page 16 from Anna Waterlow’s album (1857). Photographic prints, in an album 30 x 25.5 cm. V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum. Page 82 from Anna Waterlow’s album (undated). Photographic prints, in an album 30 x 25.5 cm. V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum. Page 48 from Lady Filmer’s album (circa 1864). Cartes-de-visits, locket print, watercolour, ink and pencil. University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, 77.111. ‘Lady Filmer in her Drawing Room’ ( 1860s). Albumen prints, watercolour and ink, in an album 25.5 x 23 cm. Collection Paul F. Walter. Page 79 from Lady Filmer’s album ( 1860s). Albumen prints, watercolour, gold paint, ink and pencil, in an album 25.5 x 23 cm. Musée d ’Orsay, © Photo RMN - Hervé Lewandowski.

36 46

58 59 68 73

82

90

92

94

95

108

115

119

Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

Page from Lady Milles’s album (circa 1858). Albumen print, watercolour and ink, in an album 25 x 19.3 cm. Gemsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. ‘Prince of Wales Shooting Party’ page 59 from Lady Filmer’s album, (1864). Albumen prints on paper, in an album 25.5 x 23 cm. Lunn Gallery / Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC, current whereabouts unknown. All reasonable efforts have been made to identify the current copyright holder. Please contact the author if you are. Page from Lady Filmer’s album (dated on the ‘envelope’ 1866). Cartes-de-visite, watercolour and ink, in an album 25.5 x 23 cm. Gift o f Harry H. Lunn Jr, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, 84.102.1. Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice, Lady’s Newspaper (1863). Permission British Library (14 March 1863). Chèmar Frères, Brussels. Carte-de-visite of Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice (circa 1862). Stamped at the back with the name and address of the photographers, and the shop that sold them in London, ‘Asprey - Dressing Case Makers’, 9.3 x 6 cm. Private Collection. Embroidery pattern and ‘Notes on Art’, Lady’s Newspaper (1861). Permission British Library (30 March 1861).

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the collectors, and the curators in the archives and collections mentioned here, for answering my queries about albums, even when the answers were not easily retrievable, and for giving me permission to reproduce their images. In particular my thanks go to Charlotte Cotton, for her positive response to my project. This book owes much to the intellectual support of my students and colleagues at Birkbeck College - in particular to stimulating and intellectually sustaining discussions with Tag Gronberg, Annie Coombes, Laura Mulvey, Simon Shaw-Miller, and above all, Lynda Nead - without her inspiration, support and encouragement, none of this would have happened (thank you, Lynn). I also want to thank curator Will Stapp and dealer Ken Jacobson for sharing some o f their insider-knowledge with me; Tamar Garb for her kind words; and the Victoria discussion list ([email protected]. edu) for being such a useful and supportive academic community. Thanks also to John and Judith for sharing me with this project. An abridged version of chapter six has been published in Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception, edited by Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple, published by John Libbey in 2005; a different version of some of the material in this book has been published as ‘From the Album Page to the Computer Screen: Collecting Photographs at Home’, in Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, edited by James Lyon and John Plunkett, published by the University of Exeter Press in 2007. Thanks are due to the editors of these publications for permission to re-use this material.

Introduction

I first came across ‘Lady Filmer in Her Drawing Room’ (see Figure 5.2) many years ago, while preparing one o f my first lectures on photography. I thought the image was striking. Its bright colours, uneven scale and wobbly perspective evoked not the usual image of Victorian femininity, uptight and correct, but rather something like a David Hockney design for the production of an Oscar Wilde play. Neither its technique, cut-out albumen prints over a watercolour background, nor did its author, Lady Filmer, fit well within established histories of photography. She was not a famous photographer. Her mixed media work might remind us of the photo­ collages of the twentieth-century avant-garde, but it is temporally and contextually very distant from it. Lady Filmer, however, was - and continues to be - a hit with my students, never failing to stimulate interest and debate. I went back to this image when researching the work of Annette Messager, a contemporary French artist who has often made albums using photo-collage techniques. Messager explicitly uses the format as a genre related to her obsessions as a female collector, in the context o f a body of work which often uses ‘low’ materials and techniques associated with feminine activities and obsessions - from embroidering and colouring-in with pastels, to saving bits o f string and magazine cuttings.' Looking for the history o f the association of albums and collage to feminine forms of image-making and collecting, I found several illustrations of Lady Filmer’s and other nineteenth-century women’s mixed media albums, but no sustained analysis of them. More common were somewhat dismissive remarks about the purposes o f these albums: ‘The prosperous Victorian upper classes had a great deal o f leisure time which they filled with all manners of diversions. Many talented women wiled away rainy days or long winter evenings by embellishing the family photograph albums’.2 ‘The family’s album was often maintained by the daughters of the home, underoccupied, bored, and housebound by the proprieties of the age; submissive victims of what ... Florence Nightingale, saw as “the petty grinding tyranny of the good English family’” .3 These comments illustrate common attitudes towards Victorian women’s albums: quaint, old fashioned, purpose-less activities, on which women wasted their time and talents for want of better outlets. Yet they seem inadequate as accounts of the visual energy and playfulness of Lady Filmer’s album page. Is this image an exception, or a norm that has become invisible under the assumptions modem writers make about Victorian women as frustrated and repressed? And how does it fit within 1 Her ‘Album-Collections’ of 1971—1974 include Les hommes que je t ’aime and Les hommes que je n aime pas [men I love; men I don’t love]; and Les enfantes aux yeux rayés [children with eyes scratched out]; Messager, Comédie - Tragédie 1971-1989 (Grenoble: Musée de Grenoble, 1989). 2 Asa Briggs, A Victorian Portrait (London, 1989), p. 210. 3 Gus Macdonald, Camera: A Victorian Eyewitness (London, 1997), p .55.

2

Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

an art-historical tradition which defines collage as ‘the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in [the twentieth] century’?4 As I show in the following chapters, being a Victorian woman involved a lot more Fun and Flirtations - the title of an anonymous booklet of drawing room games from the 1860s - than is commonly acknowledged in women’s histories. Women’s albums were an important aspect o f the visual culture of the time, crucial sites in the elaboration and codification o f the meaning of photography, as a new, modem visual medium. Like avant-garde collages, they responded to one o f the crucial characteristics of modernity, the availability of mechanically reproduced images. There are albums associated with named or anonymous women in most collections o f nineteenth-century photographs. This book is based on research in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A); National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive, London (NPG); Bradford Museum of Photography, Film and Television (and Royal Photographic Society), Bradford; Museum o f London, London; Musée d ’Orsay, Paris; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Gemsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas; Getty Research Institute, Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, California; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Some women took all or some of the photographs in their albums, some simply collected them and arranged them on the pages. Early on in my research 1 decided that I wanted to analyse closely a few albums in relation to the culture in which they were made, rather than survey the genre. I decided to focus on examples made from the 1850s to the late-1870s, before gelatine films and easy cameras became available; and on those that feature mainly portraiture, as this was the most common type. The main photographic albums I discuss were made by Anna Waterlow, a woman from an upwardly-mobile middle-class family; and by Mary Filmer, an aristocratic woman whose family title became extinct after the death o f her son. I selected them partly because they were the ones, from all the albums I leafed through, that I kept feeling touched by. They were also interesting because reproductions and short texts about them were already in circulation when I began researching the topic. These were albums that had caught not only my imagination, but had also been ‘spotted’ by other writers, curators and collectors, yet they had failed to attract sustained analysis. Their makers also represent the two main styles of sanctioned, respectable nineteenthcentury femininity: the devoted mother and the society hostess. In the literature of the time, these types of femininity are represented as either opposite choices, or as conflicting demands women have to accommodate. In ‘The Young Mother’, a short story by the Countess of Blessington, a popular writer at the time, Lord Mordaunt is disappointed with his wife because her devotion to their new­ born son stops her from going out in society with him.5 As a consequence, he drifts into a flirtation with Lady Dorrington ‘who devoted ... little of her time or thought 4 Gregory Ulmer, ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, Postmodern Culture, Foster ed. (London and Sydney, 1985), pp. 83-110, p. 84. 5 Countess of Blessington, 'The Young Mother’, Heaths Book o f Beauty (London, 1839), pp. 95-109. Throughout the book, page numbers are in brackets after quotes in the text, whenever practical.

Introduction

3

to her children’ (103). Resolution is achieved when Lady Mordaunt is advised to pay less attention to her child and more to her husband, if she wants to keep him faithful. At the same time, Lord Mordaunt realises what a demanding mistress and uncaring mother Lady Dorrington is. Young, beautiful and well-connected, Lady Mordaunt has to learn she cannot neglect fashionable society to ensconce herself in the nursery. The novel also suggests that Lady Dorrington, equally good-looking, would be a more attractive flirt if she let her children and her husband take some of her time and attention. In William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the talented, socially ambitious Becky Sharp does not care for her son, while the meeker, even insipid, Amelia Osborne is a devoted and self-sacrificing mother.6 In Anthony Trollope’s many narratives o f upper-class life, the most happy and successful women are the ones who learn to accommodate the demands of motherhood and domesticity, with those o f fashionable society. In her album, which I consider in detail in chapter four, Anna Waterlow seems happier with her children than in the role of Lady Waterlow, as she became through her husband’s successful career; while the Hon. Mary Georgiana, Lady Filmer, worked on her album, discussed in chapter five, while she was childless and able to enjoy life to the full as the well-connected wife of a Baronet and an MR She must have been under pressure, however, to produce the all-important heir, and her participation in fashionable society, as well as her album-making, seems to have stopped after the birth of her first surviving son. Throughout the book, I argue that women’s albums operated as tactile as much as visual objects. They juxtapose photographic images and other mnemonic traces, always pointing to something that no longer is - as it was when photographed with the here-and-now of tactile experience: holding and turning pages, marked by the touch of the women who arranged them. To understand these albums we need to consider not only the visual, but also the tactile culture of the period. Both are crucial to my understanding o f albums not as useless, quaint and old-fashioned, but as a thoroughly modem collecting practice which played an important role in the construction o f the genteel identity of women and their families. One of the most striking features of these albums is their use of collage techniques, which was common in the period. Cutting out photographs and printed or other images to recontextualise them in albums was consonant with women’s role as arrangers of the domestic interior, purchasing decorative objects and materials to recontextualise them in their own drawing rooms. But, as I argue throughout, this use of collage also had the potential to destabilise the semantic work allocated to albums by dominant culture. Cutting out and pasting paper-images was not only one of the feminine accomplishments signalling status and gentility, but could also produce ambiguous results. This ambiguity was not only visual, but also gestural: collage at once cuts and repairs, fragments and makes whole again. In the albums I discuss, these cuts and wounds are never fully resolved, never fully ‘healed’, into a smooth continuous surface, neither physically nor conceptually. In her essay on Victorian family albums,7 Marina Warner notes that, ‘many of the women who used the camera are well known, but the contribution of women to 6 7

Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848; London, 1985). Warner, ‘Parlour Made’, Creative Camera, 315 (1992): 29-32.

4

Women ’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

the reception o f images has not been explored’ (29). Such an exploration, however, is no simple task. Few o f the nineteenth-century women who helped to circulate photographic images by taking, commissioning, or collecting them, saw themselves as professional photographers, or even committed amateurs. They tended to operate outside the network o f photographic clubs and the specialist press. Throughout this book, therefore, I consider representations of women, photography and albums in the general press - in periodicals, advice manuals, novels, and women’s magazines - and compare them with those found in the albums themselves. My analysis is therefore interdisciplinary, connecting photography to its feminine and material culture, and combining photographic history and theory with Victorian and women’s studies. Like many histories of photography, I go back to the beginning o f the century, with a discussion o f albums before photography; unlike them, my focus on albummaking and on how photos were collected, rather than taken, demonstrates the continuities between photography and other paper artefacts, such as prints, drawings, hand-writing and signatures, which were also collected as souvenirs o f people. I then move on to photo albums compiled between approximately 1850 and 1870, roughly the period o f the wet plate system, when albumen prints became the most common form of photographic image, and before the popularisation o f photography associated with the rise of the Kodak Company. Chapter one shows how albums have been marginalised by most histories of photography as a minor genre, less important than the exhibition of prints on gallery walls, or the publication o f photographs in books and magazines. Albums, however, were the most common format for storing, displaying and circulating photographic prints in the nineteenth century, for artists and amateurs alike. Women’s albums have been doubly marginalised by being considered as a form of conspiquous consumption of commercial photographs, rather than as a creative endeavour. A different perspective becomes available if we redefine feminine culture and women’s albums as important sites in the creation and dissemination o f photographic meaning. Seen in this context, albums can sustain a detailed analysis beyond personal or family history. Chapter two explores the connotations o f women’s albums before the diffusion o f photography by looking at two different types: homemade albums, in which handwritten texts and visual material were collected by individual women, soliciting contributions from friends and acquaintances; and commercially printed, album-like publications, which were compilations of texts and images aimed at the feminine market. I focus on the album compiled in the early nineteenth century by Anna Birkbeck, wife of the founder of Birkbeck College, to compare it to a number of other women’s albums, both historical and as presented in the fiction of the time. I place them in the context of an aristocratic collecting tradition, which albums adapted to the social and cultural needs of new elite groups, defined by cultural, sentimental and political affinities, and by changing notions o f taste, interiority and femininity. Chapter three analyses the figure of the accomplished woman in the literature o f the period, and representations of photography in women’s magazines. The growing availability of mass produced images and object, gave a new meaning to women’s handwork. A ‘lady’s touch’ was important in the home not as domestic work, fulfilling practical needs, but because of its power to humanise mechanically

Introduction

5

produced goods, and change their meaning, from objects tainted by their association with the factory and the market, to an embodiment o f human relations based on personal ties. Women’s magazines represented photograph albums and hand decorated photographs, as at once part of a glamorous public world, and as domestic accomplishments. Photography modernised the practice of album making, and was made fashionable and desirable by being incorporated into the repertoire of genteel feminine culture. The case study for chapter four is an early example of the emerging genre of photographic family album. It was compiled between the late 1840s and the late 1870s by the wife of Sidney Waterlow - printer, Lord Major o f London, liberal MP, and eventually a baronet and a millionaire. Anna Waterlow’s album combines photographs of herself with those of her family and her children. I relate its imagery to a range of representations of motherhood, its anxieties and satisfactions, to show how, rather than being passive consumers of meanings created elsewhere, Victorian mothers were able to use photography as a way to give materiality to their own culturally and socially specific desires and pleasures. I go on to question some of the assumptions about maternal collections as symptomatic of, and compensating for, maternal loss. Cutting up and arranging photographs in albums can also be seen as an expression o f ambivalent maternal desires for both closeness with, and severance from, the children. Chapter five develops the theme of celebrity photographs through a close reading of Lady Filmer’s album pages in the context of a cluster of similar albums collected by upper-class women in the 1860s. I argue that hers should be considered a society, rather than a family album, and read in the context o f her flirtatious exchanges of photographs with Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. Her photo collages are compelling because they demonstrate that flirting was a risky, but nevertheless enjoyable pastime for upper-class women, which did not necessarily lead to loss o f status and respectability. They also emphasise and make visible the flirtatious nature of all exchanges of photographic portraits. I argue that flirting with meaning is an intrinsic characteristic o f photography, as well as a feminine strategy. Photo collage is used by Lady Filmer as a thoroughly modem, visual and tactile strategy to play with meaning, with effects that already had the subversive potential later made explicit by the uses of collage in twentieth-century avant-garde practices. The final chapter reconsiders some of the images, focusing on the interaction between vision and touch in looking at photographs. I argue that women’s albums are central to an understanding of the modernised, corporealized observer analysed by recent contributions. I conclude by comparing the tactile values of nineteenthcentury albums, with the ‘digital’ values of contemporary collections and websites imitating or referencing Victorian albums. Social mores, taste and technologies might have changed, but we still enjoy flirting with meaning and across images, and the tactile value of collections of photographs.

I

Chapter One

The Family Album, the Feminine and the Personal

LADY WINDERMERE: Shall I never see you again, Mrs Erlynne? MRS ERLYNNE: I am afraid not. Our lives lie too far apart. But there is a little thing I would like for you to do for me. I want a photograph of you, Lady Windermere - would you give me one? You don’t know how gratified I should be. (408)

Lady’s Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde’s play of 1892,' concerns family secrets and a number of objects which change hands, locations and meaning. At the beginning of the play, the fan is a token of Lord Windermere’s affection for his young wife; by the end, the fan becomes a gift from Lady Windermere to Mrs Erlynne, an older woman of dubious reputation, as a token o f friendship and gratitude. Before asking for the fan, Mrs Erlynne requested Lady Windermere’s photograph. In a short but key scene, Lady Windermere first offers a ‘very flattering’ (408) one of herself that is on the table of the drawing room, but on being asked if she has a photograph with her baby son, she goes upstairs to get one, which she finds with some difficulty as her husband has ‘stolen it’ (411) to his dressing room. While she is looking for this photograph, the spectator learns that Mrs Erlynne is Lady Windermere’s mother, who had eloped with her lover when her daughter was still a baby, and has been passed off as dead by her family ever since. This request for a photograph becomes charged with different meanings. For Lady Windermere, whose marriage had seemed at first threatened, but then saved by Mrs Erlynne, it is a confirmation of the other woman’s loyalty and friendship. Lord Windermere, who has been blackmailed by Mrs Erlynne, suspects the request to be a ploy to further intrigue. For Mrs Erlynne, however, and for the spectator or reader, who now knows that she is Lady Windermere’s mother, the request for a photograph o f her (secret) daughter and grandchild is the first, pathetically late act o f normal mothering she has performed in her life. It is interesting how, in the text of the play, the locations o f the fan have to be accounted for - its presence in Lady Windermere’s drawing room, its appearance in a bachelor’s apartment, its final exit with Mrs Erlynne - but the photographs do not need explanation. Oscar Wilde could rely on certain shared assumptions about the uses of photographs and their presence in different parts of the house. It must have seemed natural to the audience of the time, as it does to us, that beautiful and wealthy young women would keep flattering photographs o f themselves on a table in the drawing room, and photographs of themselves with their baby upstairs. That devoted 1

The Works o f Oscar Wilde (London and Glasgow, 1948), pp. 370-4 ] 5.

8

Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

husbands would want one too, but be reluctant to ask for it for fear of appearing oversentimental. That a mother, even when a fallen woman forced to keep her identity secret, indeed, especially when forced to keep her identity secret, should want a photograph to keep by her in her exile from the family. And that women should be more comfortable with such sentimental uses of photography than men. Sentimental uses of photography, and the desires animating them, have been the focus of much photographic theory, rooting the power of the medium in the indexicality o f its technique, its ability to take an image imprinted directly from a beloved body, creating a portable and socially accepted - socially meaningful - little fetish. This indexicality, the basis of photography’s supposed realism, is also what has given photographs the status o f objective documentation in legal, medical and scientific institutions. But while documentary uses of photography have been historicised in terms o f the development o f photographic language within specific institutions of power and fields of knowledge, affective uses of photography have largely been taken for granted as a spontaneous reaction to photographic technology applied to the conventions of portraiture. Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida is perhaps the most cited twentieth-century formulation of the power of photographs of loved ones to affect us.2 Influenced by phenomenology, Barthes’s reflections are framed as a search for the common element in his, and by extension his culture’s, fascination with photographs. He finds this common element, in phenomenological terms the essence or noeme of photography, in its capacity to point to something ‘that has been’, its power as ‘an emanation o f the referent’: ‘from a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here’ (80). This becomes apparent to him only when he turns away from famous images, to look at a photograph of his own mother. She was there, and the light reflected off her body has been captured by the photographic process, embalming that moment in time - there-and-then - to transport it into the here-and-now.3 For Barthes, photography can be properly understood as a medium not by looking at famous images circulating in museums or documentary archives, but at the ordinary photos we keep at home. What he emphasises is not how they acquire meaning through socially and culturally specific conventions, but the generalised effects of the medium, its meaning rooted in optics and chemistry, creating a physical, tangible connection between the photograph and its referent or subject matter. As I show in this book, Barthes’s insights into the power o f personal, familial photographs are very similar to nineteenth-century responses to what was then a new medium. Unlike him, I am interested in investigating historically the social conventions through which photographic portraits have become our society’s privileged sign o f emotional attachment. In his essay ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’,4 Allan Sekula makes the simple but important point that ‘the meaning of any photographic message is 2 Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980; London, 1984). 3 This temporal shift is discussed by Laura Mulvey, ‘The “Pensive Spectator” Revisited’, Where is the Photograph, Green ed. (Brighton, 2003), pp. 113-22. 4 Sekula, ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’ (1975), Thinking Photography, Burgin ed. (London, 1982), pp. 84-109.

The Family Album, the Feminine and the Personal

9

necessarily context-determined’ (85). Photographs are not an ‘unmediated copy of the real world’ (86) and cannot be separated from what they are asked to do by photographic discourse, the ‘system within which the culture harnesses photographs to various representational tasks’ (87). The job of the historian, therefore, is to investigate how photographic meaning is created through social processes, by identifying and investigating moments in which ‘photographic sign systems’ (87) emerge. On one level, my project takes up Sekula’s agenda. I am interested in investigating the invention o f photographic meaning in nineteenth-century feminine culture. If, as Sekula argues, ‘photographs are used’ and ‘photographic literacy is learned’ (86), I am interested in how nineteenth-century women learned to use and read photography, at a time, a few years after its development, when photographic literacy was being invented as much as learned. Sekula analyses photographic meaning in terms of tensions between opposing values. In the nineteenth century, he argues, the tensions were between the emotional and the informative value o f the photographic image, between the ‘truth of magic and the truth o f science’ (94). For Sekula, however, both were based on bourgeois ‘folklore’ characterised by a primitive belief in the photograph as the result of the ‘unmediated agency of nature’ (86). In other words, Mrs Erlynne wanted a photograph because she naively believed that it could prove that she was, after all, a mother, and at the same time magically provide some vestigial connection between her, her daughter and her grandchild, that would somehow compensate for her own distance and secret identity. Such assumptions about nineteenth-century responses to photography have since been questioned.5 But even if the nineteenth-century public did believe in photography as unmediated nature, this does not adequately explain how and why photographs should have become the dominant, most sociallyrecognised form of indexical trace, over and above any others. Why, for example, should it seem unexceptional that Lady Windermere should have photographs ready to give to a friend, rather than fingerprints, locks of hair, worn ribbons or vials of tears, all recognised but less established forms o f ‘unmediated’ sentimental relics or souvenirs?6 Sekula argues that photographic values and meanings are not essential, indexical, or embodied in the images themselves, but are determined by social and historical context. In his analysis, however, personal uses of photography become marginal, as he focuses on the tensions between aesthetic and documentary values in modernist accounts of photography as an art form. Like Sekula, photographic history has tended to foreground the aesthetic and informational uses o f photography. They are the ones through which photographs acquire the historical, social or aesthetic significance which makes it worth studying individual images in their specific contexts. The assumption is that personal photographs are significant only to those for whom they have personal meaning. Barthes, for example, famously does not reproduce in Camera Lucida the photograph of his mother, its comers ‘blunted from having been pasted into an album’ (67), because ‘it exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ordinary’ (73). 5 Lindsay Smith, The Politics o f Focus (Manchester and New York, 1998). 6 Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, N.C. and London, 1993).

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

My own methodology is based on thinking about how it might be possible to invert this paradigm, and give personal photographs as personal, the sustained visual attention and historical investigation usually reserved for images that are considered of aesthetic or documentary value. In other words, to see what would happen if the actual photographs kept by an individual woman in her house, were subjected to the formal, social, semiological and psychoanalytical scrutiny usually reserved for canonical works, kept in institutional archives and important collections. Missing corners Aesthetic photographic meaning may have been ‘invented’ (in Sekula’s term) by modernist photographic discourse in the early-twentieth century, but subsequently it has been applied retrospectively to selected nineteenth-century practices. Here the neglect of the album as a possible meaning-giving context is often physical as well as conceptual. In 1939 Lady Clementina Tottenham attended ‘An Exhibition ofEarly Photographs to Commemorate the Centenary of Photography, 1839-1939’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one o f the first museums to collect photographs as an art form. She later sought out the curator, Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith, to ask him why photographs by her grandmother, the early photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden, were not included. On being told that unfortunately the V&A did not possess any, she went home, and cut or tore 775 prints by Hawarden from the albums that had been in the family since her death, to donate them to the V&A. The story was related in 1999 by the then curator of photography, Mark Haworth-Booth, at a seminar during an exhibition of Hawarden’s Studies from Life, in reply to a question as to why many o f the prints had comers tom off.7The audience responded warmly to the story, with a wistful chuckle. Its connotations may have been several: a regretful smile at the naivete of Lady Tottenham, tearing the prints off rather than letting the Conservation department remove them properly; nostalgia for a time when plenty of Victorian treasures were still hidden in attics and treated casually by their owners. This provenance also adds to the aura o f the prints, marking them as authentically vintage and scarred by a history that nearly confined them to obscurity. What is taken for granted, however, is that the prints had to be removed from those albums, as a necessary and positive step, crucial to the construction of Hawarden’s reputation as a great Victorian photographer, a rediscovered early master (or mistress) of the medium. Collected together in their original albums, the prints could not have been individually framed and hung in the series of exhibitions that have been crucial to the making of Hawarden’s fame. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, as set out in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, albums may be rich in ritual or sentimental value, but they have a poor exhibition value.8 Hawarden’s prints had to 7 ‘Repositioning Photography’, V&A, 27 February 1999; see also Mark Haworth-Booth, Photography (London, 1997), pp. 121-23; Virginia Dodier, Clementina, Lady Hawarden (New York, 1999). 8 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Illuminations (London, 1973), pp. 219-53.

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be removed not only from the family attic, but also from the family album. To leave them there would have militated against the work acquiring exhibition value, which is crucial to the art system as it developed ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’. This process of removal is of course justifiable in terms of the practicalities of public exhibitions: nineteenth-century albums would not survive being handled by the number o f visitors attending exhibitions, and it would be impossible to show the prints without them being touched. As well as representing a dichotomy between emotional and exhibition values, we could also conceptualise this process of removal, o f prints from albums, as a dichotomy between visual and tactile values. As Susan Stewart points out in her ‘Prologue: From the Museum o f Touch’, modem museological practices privilege visual over tactile experience, by confining objects to framed or cordoned-off spaces inaccessible to the viewer, who is prevented from touching the exhibits.9 This ‘ritualised practice of refraining from touch’ (28) is performed to preserve images and objects as traces or relics o f the highly valued touch o f the original authors who created them. I am fascinated by the tears and cuts at the edges of Hawarden’s prints, because they are the material scars left by the violence done to them in removing them from their original context, a photographic album, to reposition them as individually framed images to be selected, arranged and sequenced by exhibition curators. I wonder what happened to the albums left behind: page after page empty, except for fragments at the comers, bits of prints glued onto the page, left behind by the act o f tearing them off. This drastic removal from the album, however visible on the prints and crucial to their meaning and reputation, is rarely questioned. In histories o f photography, modes of collecting and displaying photographs, associated with the domestic and feminine space of home, are ignored or played down when the intention is to valorise the photographer, the images or the medium. Museological practicalities - prints need to be taken off the album to be exhibited as art - become a value system: to see prints in an album is to see them as not-art.10 In her study o f the photographs by Clementina Hawarden, Carol Mavor is also struck by the tears on her prints.11She uses these ‘permanent scars’ to emphasise how much the prints deserved to make ‘the short but dramatic flight’ (xviii) to the V&A, just around the comer from the Hawarden’s London house in South Kensington. In the context of a critical reassessment of Hawarden’s photography, it could be argued that it is necessary to emphasise her status as an artist versus that as an amateur ‘lady’ photographer. To be taken seriously, her work needs to be distanced from the photographic albums collected by ‘many Victorian mothers of her class’ (xvii), with their connotations o f limited domestic scope and lack of aesthetic ambition. Yet albums are how most nineteenth-century photographic prints were collected, looked at and

9 Stewart, ‘Prologue’, Material Memories, Kwint, Breward and Aynsley eds (Oxford and New York, 1999), pp. 17-36. 10 See also Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces’ (1982), The Originality o f the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988), pp. 131-50. 11 Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs o f Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham, NC and London, 1999).

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exchanged, before the development at the turn of the century o f light-fast printing techniques, which facilitated photographic exhibitions and permanent displays, and the halftone block, which allowed photographs to be printed in illustrated books, magazines and newspapers. Amateur and professional photographers regularly produced albums, as gifts,12 samplers of a photographer’s work,13 or limited editions for sale.14 Albums provided a way of displaying and circulating photographic work that was an alternative to exhibitions, only now established as the main mode of circulating art in the public domain. After all, as Constance Classen shows in her brief history o f ‘Touch in the Museum’, handling artefacts, rooting through drawers and leafing through albums were standard practices for early visitors to private or public collections.15They became prohibited only as museums were institutionalised and their audiences expanded throughout the nineteenth century. Album-making was seen as an important activity of early Photographic Societies.16 Members of the Photographic Exchange Club, a section of the Royal Photographic Society, would receive prints by fellow photographers, through a system of regular mutual exchanges. As amateurs, they were familiar with collecting prints and drawings in albums, and understood them as an important mean to construct, record and circulate the aesthetic values and visual standards o f the Society.17 Lewis Carroll compiled albums of his own and other people’s work, and looked after the photograph album kept in the Common Room of his college at Oxford. His album ‘Professional and Other Photographs’ includes images by himself, Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden. Photography historian Helmut Gemsheim discusses Lewis Carroll’s albums as the photographic equivalent o f artist’s sketchbooks, which might give background information on the creative process of an individual artist, his influences and interests, and on the development of specific images. This means differentiating them from the album-making activities of women in the same period, which he discusses elsewhere as part of a process not of creation, but o f consumption of the output o f commercial photographers. Yet it might also be argued that for a bachelor, living in University male-only accommodation, looking after the Common Room album was a mode of photographic collecting not so radically different from that of women in domestic settings, compiling albums on behalf of the family. 12 On Julia Margaret Cameron’s album gifts to family, friends and patrons see Mike Weaver, British Photography in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989). 13 Lewis Carroll used his albums to introduce himself to people - or to the parents of children - he wanted to photograph; Helmut Gemsheim, Lewis Carroll Photographer (New York, 1969). 14 Colin Ford and Roy Strong, An Early Victorian Album: The Hill/Adamson Collection (London, 1974). 15 Classen, ‘Touch in the Musum’, The Book o f Touch (Oxford and New York, 2005), pp. 275-86. 16 Eugenia Parry Janis, ‘Let Us Crown Ourselves with Rosebuds’, For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: an Album o f Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, Mulligan ed. (Albuquerque, 1994), pp. 9-13. 17 Grace Seiberling, Amateurs, Photography and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago and London, 1986).

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Albums were an established way of patronising and supporting photography. As Seiberling discusses, the albums at Windsor Castle, compiled by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, were an important aspect of the Royal support and approval o f photography. To fill them, they regularly purchased prints and commissioned photographs. Early photographic books, like Anna Atkins’s Photographs o f British Algae,18 or Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil o f Nature,” were made by binding hand captioned photographs or pasting them on pre-printed pages, which made them, as publications, more akin to limited edition albums than today’s books of photographs, by retaining the material and tactile qualities of photographic prints, unlike the smooth, seamless feel o f today’s books, where images and text are printed with the same technology and on the same paper.20 As Geoffrey Batchen acknowledges in his essay on ‘Vernacular Photographies’ [sic],21 album-making has been largely ignored by critical and historical writing on photography. Batchen refers to a variety of practices by often unknown individuals who made or collected photographic images without any professional or artistic training. My point here is that all photographic albums, including those made by well known photographers and collectors, are undervalued and under-researched. Photographic albums have become so strongly identified with ‘vernacular ’(Batchen’s term) or amateur practices, that ‘the critical gaze of respectable history’ (57) finds it difficult to take them seriously. Batchen himself, however, is not interested in granting them historical specificity. In his essay, he considers an enormously wide range of photographic practices and objects, varying from Victorian albums by upper-class women, such as the ones I discuss in the following chapters, to funerary effigies used by the Owa of western Nigeria since the nineteenth century, and fotoesculturas made by Mexican twentieth-century artisans. His rational is that all o f these objects combine mechanically produced photographic prints with other materials, usually hand-manipulated ones. He can justify his consideration of such wide range in terms of time, place and culture, with the rationale that he is interested not in a history of vernacular photography, but in a ‘vernacular theory of photography’ (59). I would question, however, to what extent a theory, general enough to encompass such a wide range o f culturally diverse practices, can be useful or illuminating about any one o f them individually. My own study of albums made by women in nineteenthcentury England is based on approaching the material from the opposite perspective: rather than considering them in the context of the many other photographic objects made by different people at different times and places, I consider them in relation to the very specific conditions in which they were made. As Sekula argues, to be relevant, theory has to be grounded in a historical investigation o f the culture in which photographic practices evolve, take place and become meaningful.

18 Atkins, Photographs o f British Algae (Sevenoaks, 1843-1853). 19 Talbot, The Pencil o f Nature (London, 1844-1846). 20 On early photography books, see Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1998). 21 Batchen, ‘Vernacular Photographies’, Each Wild Idea (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2001), pp. 56-80.

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Histories The History o f Photography by Erich Stenger, Germany’s leading photographic historian in the 1920s, discusses photographic albums as seriously as other genres, dedicating a page and a half to them - ‘Artistic Photography’and ‘News Photography’ get about two each.22 He sees albums as a direct result of the development of photographic prints, displacing the more ornate frames used for daguerreotypes, which in turn had been inspired by those used to frame miniature paintings. Albums associated photographs more closely to books, although without giving up ornamentation. The photo album showcased ‘portraits of relatives and friends’ (59), as well as ‘“views” accumulated while travelling’ (60); displayed ‘on the parlour table’ it ‘showed the taste of its owner’ (59). He goes on to describe examples of more unusual or ornate albums, such as the one incorporating a clockwork musicbox that would play music when opened by the viewer. Stenger’s model for a social history of photography, including sections on how photographs were used in a variety o f personal and professional settings, has not been as influential as it could have been. This is partly because his credentials as a historian were tainted by his nationalist tone, over-emphasising the importance of German contributions, and celebrating Nazi photography.23 Later historians have followed the model for the treatment of nineteenth-century albums established by another German writer on photography, Gisèle Freund. In France, where she escaped in 1933, she graduated from the Sorbonne with a doctoral thesis on nineteenth-century photography, which was published in 1936 as La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle: Essai de la sociologie et d ’esthétique .24 Never translated into English, this work has nevertheless had an important influence on two very different and seminal writers on photography: Beaumont Newhall and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin and Freund met in Paris, where she photographed him while he was working on his Arcades Project at the Bibliothèque National, and he cites her writings in several of the ‘Convolutes’ in which his notes were organised.25 Freund’s 1936 work was also consulted by Beaumont Newhall during his research for the exhibition Photography, 1839-1937, which was the first retrospective survey at the Museum of Modem Art in New York. Its catalogue grew to become Newhall’s classic The History o f Photography, many times updated and still in print.26 22 Stenger, The History o f Photography ( 1938; New York, 1979). 23 Martin Gasser, ‘Histories of Photography, 1839-1939’, History o f Photography 16:1 (1992), 50-60; Elizabeth Ann McCauley, ‘Writing Photography’s History before Newhall’, History o f Photography 21:2(1997), 87-101. 24 Amanda Hopkinson, ‘Gisèle Freund’, Guardian, 1 April 2000, p. 26; Mary Warner Marien, ‘What Shall We Tell the Children? Photography and its Text (Books)’, Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography, Heron and Williams eds (London, 1996), pp. 207-22. 25 Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1999); Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin (London and New York, 1996), p. 224. 26 Newhall, The History o f Photography (1949; New York, 1994); see also Gasser, p. 57; Allison Bertrand, ‘Beaumont Newhall’s Photography 1839-1937: Making History’, History o f Photography 21:2(1997), 137-46.

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Freund later expanded her studies on the history of photography to the twentieth century and the rest o f Europe, and published Photography and Society in 1974.27 She discusses nineteenth-century photographic albums in the context of the portraiture associated with industrialisation. This was the first example of how cultural activities formerly the sole domain o f the aristocracy, were being taken up by the middle classes as they expanded politically and economically. This increasing demand led to the development of the Daguerreotype, a mechanised form of portraiture. There is a profound ambiguity in Freund’s account o f the connections between the rise of the middle classes and the rise o f photography. Mechanisation is seen as positive when associated with the modernisation of cultural forms, and with democratic, humanist ideals. It becomes negative, however, when, pushed by the economic power o f the nouveau riche, it is used in favour of the rise of capitalism and the indiscriminate consumption of cultural forms that were previously exclusive to the elite. The crucial differentiating factor is cultural and political outlook: members of the petit bourgeoisie, ‘men enclosed in the little world of their shops ... with just enough education to keep their account books ... [have] bad taste’ (20) because they use photography to ape the aristocracy, vulgarising and cheapening old cultural forms instead o f evolving new ones. The middle-class intellectual, on the other hand, when ‘not confined by the conservative politics’(20) of his time, can develop a new aesthetic, materially and conceptually suited to his new role in society and to the new modes o f production. The narrative that unfolds in Freund’s book is of the struggle for survival of the artist photographer, a well educated individual who can produce portraits that are artistic expressions oftheir time. Her favourite example is Nadar, whose ‘extraordinary taste’ (42) enabled him to use the photographic process to produce works of art, not commodities. His portraits, closing in on the head of his subjects against a plain background, represented ‘the inner spirit of a man’ (42). Practitioners like him were unable to compete in a market dominated by commercial photographers, uneducated incompetents who ‘could never hope to enter more prestigious professions’ (55), and pandered to the tastes of the bourgeoisie. Disderi, for example, who in 1854 became popular with his invention of the carte-de-visite, which ‘filled family albums’ (68) with portraits showing stereotyped notions of beauty, achieved at the cost of heavy retouching. Freund is scathing about how carte-de-visite albums demonstrated the bad taste of the middle classes. Conventional signs of wealth, rather than truth and individuality, were made visible in the show o f clothing and in the heavy use of drapes and props that characterised the full length carte-de-visite portraits. These connotations o f fake gentility were then reinforced by album collectors, who placed family portraits together with photographs of favourite celebrities. Freund’s dismissal of the carte-de-visite as bourgeois bad taste is the most explicit version o f what remains essentially the same argument in later histories o f photography. In his discussion o f nineteenth-century portraiture, Beaumont Newhall pitches the carte-de-visite against the work o f ‘more serious photographers’ like Nadar, who produced ‘the finest portraits o f mid-century’ (65), in a ‘bold and

27 Freund, Photography and Society ( 1974; Boston, 1980).

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vigorous style’ (66) able to represent strong individual personalities. In the cartede-visite: no effort was made to bring out the character o f the sitter ... the images were so small that the faces could hardly be studied, and the posing was done too quickly to permit individual attention. To accommodate card photographs of relatives, friends and celebrities, elaborately bound albums were introduced around 1860. [They became] a fixture in the Victorian home, and as a consequence, quantities ... have survived. As a document of an era, they are often of great charm and interest. (66)

Newhall does not discuss or illustrate any albums - his history is concerned with technological development and aesthetic achievement, not ‘charming documents’. In another important early general survey, Helmut and Alison Gemsheim’s The History o f Photography, the discussion o f photographic portraiture as a profession and as an aspect of social experience is more detailed.28 Like Freund and Newhall, they discuss photographic albums in the context of the carte-de-visite, charting its introduction in England in 1857 by Marion & Co., a French firm o f photographic dealers and publishers. Cartes were approximately 10.5 by 6 centimetres albumen prints, sold already mounted on card, embossed at the back with the name of the studio they came from. Their standard size, as well as their popularity, made it possible to sell specially made photographic albums, whose pages were pre-cut with window mounts into which individual cards could be slotted. Called ‘cartes-de-visite’ because their size and feel made them similar to visiting cards, they were usually full-length portraits, taken by dividing the large format plate into smaller sections, each exposed through a separate lens. The format did not become popular until 1860, when J. E. Mayall published a ‘Royal Album’ of carte-de-visite photographs o f the Royal Family, which sold very well. Around the same time, the Queen started collecting carte albums, getting one o f her ladies in waiting to write ‘to all the fine ladies in London for their and their husbands’ photographs, for the Queen’.2’ Collecting albums became a fashionable activity. Within a few years, ‘no Victorian drawing­ room was complete without its photograph album. ... It was an excellent means of whiling away the awkward quarter of an hour before dinner, indicating to visitors the tastes and prejudices of the host’ (230). Overall, the Gemsheims’s discussion o f albums emphasises their limitations as an intermediate step in establishing the role of photography as central to the development of mass media and celebrity culture. They point out how carte-de-visite photographers were, on the whole, uninterested in portraits that would record ‘what Julia Margaret Cameron called “the greatness of the inner, as well as the features o f the outer man’” (229-30). They are, however, carefiil to differentiate the style and quality of different studios. The Gemsheims, like Freund and Newhall, construct an account o f nineteenthcentury photography in which the artistic value of images diminishes as their commercial function increases. They associate personal uses o f photography before 28 Gernsheim, The History o f Photography (London, 1955). 29 Eleanor Stanley, Twenty Years at Court, 1842-1862 (London, 1916), quoted by Gernsheim, p. 226.

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the development of Kodak in 1888 with commercial studio portraiture, and classify the family album as a form of social display and conspicuous consumption. Both explicitly and implicitly, they valorise uses of photography that associate it with the realms o f mass communication media and aesthetic production, rather than with the commercial and domestic spheres.30 This association of the album with domestic display and consumption, coupled with a disregard of albums as artistic production, does not provide a historical model to discuss individual albums as deliberate, important or ambitious projects. The histories I have discussed have all been important in the development o f a modernist photographic aesthetic, which, following formalist art historical concerns, aims to identify an essence inherent to photography as a medium, in order to assign aesthetic value to works that seem to define or comment critically on this essence, whatever their initial aim might have been.31 This aesthetic has consistently favoured photographic images that stylistically have been described as ‘Straight’ - images that were taken and printed with documentary-like directness, using strictly photographic means, such as focusing and framing while exposing the picture, rather than post-production manipulations. A ‘straight’ aesthetic rejects the dressed up studio sets and combination prints of mid-nineteenth-century art photographers such as Oscar Rej lander, and the out-of-focus, mixed media printing techniques o f tum-of-the-century Pictorialist photography. This aesthetic can also be used to valorise documentary or photojoumalistic images, whose direct, straight­ forward way o f capturing history as it unfolded in front of the camera, could be transcended to become, on the walls of the art gallery, timeless. Unlike, for example, the anonymous documentary photographs celebrated by Szarkowski on page 68 of his Photography Until Now, women’s albums and mixed media album pages are difficult to recuperate for this modernist canon, because they are too hybrid, spurious and multi-referential. Critical histories Since the 1970s, modernist histories of photography have come under increasing criticism and revision, in developments parallel to those in art history.32An important example o f this ‘new’ type of photographic history is The Burden o f Representation, by John Tagg.33 This is a collection of essays on the uses o f photography as documentary evidence within a variety of institutions such as hospitals, asylums, and prisons. Influenced by Foucault and social histories o f art, Tagg discusses the 30 This pattem is followed by many histories of photography, for example Naomi Rosenblum, A World History o f Photography (Paris, London and New York, 1984); André Rouillé, ‘The Rise of Photography 1851-1870’, A History o f Photography, Lemagny and Rouillé eds (1986; Cambridge, 1987), pp. 29-52; John Szarkowsky, Photography Until Now (New York, 1989). 31 Victor Bürgin, The End o f Art Theory (Basingstoke and London, 1986); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire (Cambridge Mass. and London, 1997). 32 A.L. Rees and Frances Borzello, The New Art History (London, 1986). 33 Tagg, The Burden o f Representation (Basingstoke and London, 1988).

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relationship between photography and the practices of observation, regulation and surveillance accompanying such institutions, and the uses of photography by social reform movements. Beginning with a critique o f Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Tagg argues that: the indexical nature of the photograph ... can guarantee nothing at the level of meaning. What makes the link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign is a discriminatory technical, cultural and historical process in which particular optical and chemical devices are set to work to organise experience and desire and produce a new reality - the paper image which, through further processes, may become meaningful in all sort of ways. (3)

Personal uses of photography are considered in Tagg’s first chapter, which begins with an evocative description o f ‘a special kind of photograph, more pressing and intimate’ than the mass-produced images surrounding us in adverts, newspapers and magazine covers: ‘the photographs we carry in our wallets, set on our sideboards and mantelpieces, collect in albums ... portraits whose meaning and value lie in countless social exchanges and rituals which would now seem incomplete without photography’ (34). Tagg raises some o f the same questions which I want to ask about the images kept in nineteenth-century albums. What did such pictures do? What uses did they have? Why have they been kept? The rest of Tagg’s chapter, however, seems to skirt around these questions. Tagg asserts that the development of photography was caused by the demand for portraiture, yet most o f his essay is taken up by an account of how technology developed to meet the demand, rather than why the demand developed in the first place. He does, however, qualify this by adding, in a footnote, a paragraph about the lack o f art-historical theorisation o f portraiture, which he acknowledges makes his own account of photographic portraiture ‘provisional’ (214). His argument seems to imply that there is continuity in the demand for portraiture across different technologies, and that any historical changes are quantitative, rather than qualitative. In other words, people wanted portraits in the eighteenth century for the same reasons they wanted them in the nineteenth, but by the late-eighteenth century many more people wanted portraits, and so technologies like photography developed to satisfy this growing demand. Photographs ‘did’ for people of the nineteenth century what miniatures had done earlier, only faster and cheaper. Rather than developing new ‘artistic modes’ (38), commercial photographers recycled the poses and conventions of aristocratic portrait painting, but ‘at a price within the resources o f the middleclass patrons’ (38). I want to extend this argument by exploring not only the continuities between photographs and miniatures but also their discontinuities, focusing on how photography created desires, uses, demands and pleasures that could not have been engendered by paintings. Like historians before him, Tagg sees the photographic portrait as first and foremost a commodity whose rise is associated with the rise of the middle classes ‘towards greater social, economic, and political importance’ (37). Like all commodities, their value is socially defined, according to needs that are ‘alternatively manufactured and satisfied’ by the capitalist system. ‘To “have one’s portrait done” was one of the symbolic acts by which individuals from the

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rising social classes made their ascent visible to themselves and others’ (37). This symbolic value requires images to have an aura. In Tagg’s account, ‘the aura of the precious miniature passes over in the early daguerreotype’ (37). In the small carte-de-visite this aura is somewhat diminished by mass production techniques, but bolstered by being collected in elaborate albums where photographs of friends and celebrities could mingle. It is only with the development of first the Kodak system, which freed amateur photographers from having to make their own prints, and then o f the half-tone system, which allowed photographs to be printed on magazines and newspapers, that photographs lost ‘what Walter Benjamin called the “cult” value’ (56) and ‘became so common as to be unremarkable ... items o f passing interest with no residual value, to be consumed and thrown away’ (56). Tagg is not oblivious to differences between manual and mechanical methods o f portrait making, which seemed to guarantee ‘not only ... cheapness and ready availability, but also ... authenticity’ (56). But what did authenticity do for the consumer o f photographic portraits and collector of cartes-de-visite albums? What was its role in the need to celebrate or signify rising social status by producing images which were elaborately and obviously set up? Like Freund, Tagg identifies a few exceptions to the formulaic nature of the majority of studio portraits: the ‘poignancy at once monumental and transient’ (45) of Hill and Adamson’s Calotype portraits; the idiosyncratic images of amateurs like Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron; or the ‘really convincing and sympathetic’ portraits by Nadar (53). These exceptions were independent from or could barely survive the financial pressures of commercial studio photography. So, why were the more formulaic productions more in demand, and therefore more commercially viable, than the exceptions? Is it a question, as Freund puts it, of the bad taste of photographers and their public? Tagg does not explore further these questions. The rest of his book deals with institutional uses of photography and its burden on the ‘new class of the surveilled’ (59). In a more recent survey, Patricia Holland argues that personal photography has played an ‘important role in the modernisation of Western culture ... as a medium through which individuals confirm and explore their identity’ (108).34 Acts of self reflection and self contemplation, such as collecting images of personal relevance, have become an indispensable feature of a modem sensibility. She is, however, rather dismissive of nineteenth-century albums made by women: ‘As pressure increased on middle-class women to make their lives within the confines of the home environment, useless but suitably decorative hobbies such as collecting cartes-de-visite fitted in well with other genteel activities such as sketching and pressing flowers’ (117). She contextual ises the use of photography and albums by Victorian women within their fascination for ‘fads and fancies’ such as: mounting dainty [photographic] miniatures into brooches and lockets, decorating jewel cases, or even setting them into the spines of a fan. A Victorian album was itself a series of visual novelties, with the portraits often cut up and arranged in decorative shapes and incorporating drawings and other scrapbooks items. ... The interest is not just in the individual pictures but in the arrangement as a decorative collection. (118) 34 Holland, “‘Sweet It Is To Scan...” Personal Photographs and Popular Photography’, Photography, Wells ed. (London and New York, 1997), pp. 103-50.

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Such ‘conceits’ were, however, swept away by the coming o f gelatine plates and hand held cameras: ‘Albums o f the 1880s, compared with those of the 1860s, show a much more relaxed style and closeness to the subjects. The movement and visual interest was now in the picture itself rather than in the decoration and arrangement o f the pictures on the page’ (121). Although Holland values personal photography, in this instance she comes closer to historians who prefer “straight” photography - non-manipulated and formally elegant - rather than narrative and decorative images. In my own analysis o f nineteenth-century women’s albums, I consider in detail the issue o f mixing photographs with non-photographic decorations, as crucial to the visual and tactile significance of albums in the context in which they were created and circulated. Walter Benjamin, one o f the key early writers on photography, rediscovered in the late twentieth-century by art historians critical of the modernist orthodoxy, wrote about albums in his ‘Small History o f Photography’.35 In his account, photography’s ‘flowering’ came in the decade that preceded its industrialisation through the cartede-visite, which radically changed the nature of photographic portraiture: ‘The first people to be reproduced entered the visual space of photography with their innocence intact, uncompromised by captions ... the human countenance had a silence about it in which the gaze rested’ (244). For Benjamin, Daguerreotypes and Calotypes retained an aura, an atmosphere of privacy and secrecy, because of their dark shadows or blurred details, due to lengthy exposure times. Their indeterminacy made the subject available to the gaze o f the viewer, but with dignity, leaving secrets embedded in the photograph, for viewers to search and discover in their imagination. The aura of early portrait photographs was, Benjamin argues, dispelled by the sharp focus and detailed mid tones o f the carte-devisite. This seemed to strive too hard to fix the identity of the subject, caught between the stereotyped studio backgrounds and the caption given by either the photographer or the collector, and to deny the ambiguous and multiple nature of the meaning of every image, including portraiture. For Benjamin, as for Freund, the development of the carte-de-visite is associated with the time when: businessmen invaded professional photography [and] a sharp decline in taste set in. This was the time photograph albums came into vogue. They were most at home in the chilliest spots, on occasional tables or little stands in the drawing room: leather bound tomes with ugly metal hasps [sic.] and those gilt-edged pages as thick as your finger, where foolishly draped or corseted figures were displayed: Uncle Alex and Aunt Riekchen, little Trudy when she was still a baby, Papa in his first term at university ... and finally, to make our shame complete, we ourselves: as a parlour Tyrolean, yodelling, waving our hat against a painted snowscape, or as a smartly tumed-out sailor, standing leg and trailing leg, as is proper, leaning against a polished doorjamb. (246)

For Benjamin, the experience of being photographed in the nineteenth-century studio, amongst the ‘nonsense’ o f pillars and drapes, painted backdrops and ‘further impedimenta’, is a humiliating one. Carte-de-visite portraiture deprived individuals 35 Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931), One Way Street and Other Writings (London and New York, 1979), pp. 240-57.

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o f their aura, through its ability ‘to put darkness entirely to flight’ and record ‘appearances as faithfully as any mirror’ (248). As we have seen, Benjamin’s views on photography are related to and influenced by Freund. They use similar sources from nineteenth-century culture, such as Charles Baudelaire, who wrote against the fashion for photographs in ‘The Modem Public and Photography’, a section o f his review of the ‘Salon of 1859’.36These connections might partly explain how essentially the same views on the carte-de-visite and on nineteenth-century albums can be found in both modernist and postmodernist histories o f photography.

/ferstories Histories of women photographers have tended to pay more attention to albums. Naomi Rosenblum, for example, barely mentions them in her World History o f Photography ,37 but in her History o f Women Photographers she discusses briefly the mixed media practices - cut-out photographs and watercolour images - found in the albums made in England by wealthy women like Lady Filmer.38 She acknowledges that very little is yet known about them, concluding that: ‘Why any o f the titled ladies just discussed started photographing remains a mystery’ (50). Rosenblum aims to draw attention to women photographers, and she effectively demonstrates women’s early involvement in the medium as a means of self-expression and to earn a living. Within her account, however, women’s albums remain a Victorian oddity. In Women Photographers, one of the first histories to concentrate exclusively on women, Val Williams connects the development in the 1850s of albumen prints, and the practice of keeping these in albums, to the burgeoning interest in photography shown by aristocratic women.39 Attracted by its newness and its exclusivity, they practised photography in significant numbers, to record ‘family life and everyday events ... with the express intent of arranging them in an album’ (14). She sees these amateur aristocratic uses of photography as inherently conservative, representing and celebrating aristocratic families as ‘stalwart protectors of home and countryside’ (14): For virtually the first time, the aristocracy and gentry could begin to construct their own histories, abandoning their reliance on painters. ... From its very beginnings, [portrait photography] has been used to produce a favourable impression of upper-class lifestyles’.

(15) Williams goes on to consider the exceptions, photographers like Clementina Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron, whose work transcends the need to celebrate upper-class values. Later on, in her discussion of Vanessa Bells’s eleven albums o f photographs, she writes that ‘Vanessa Bell’s practice of keeping a family 36 Freund quotes this in Photography and Society, p. 78, Benjamin in ‘Convolute Y Photography’, Arcades, pp. 691-92. Baudelaire’s ‘Salon of 1859’ is reprinted in Art in Theory: 1815-1900, Harrison, Wood and Gaiger eds (Oxford, 1998), pp. 666-68. 37 Rosenblum, World History o f Photography (Paris, London and New York, 1984). 38 Rosenblum, History o f Women Photographers (Paris, London and New York, 1994). 39 Williams, Women Photographers (London, 1986).

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

album is well in keeping with the nineteenth-century tradition with which, in spite of her bohemianism, she identified strongly’ (79). Her individual photographs can be visually very experimental, revelling in tilted viewpoint, blurred shots and off­ guard moments. For Williams, however, Bell’s album-making practice remains conservative and ideologically suspect, because it obscures the pains, contradictions and general ‘precariousness o f ... family life at Charleston’ (83) caused for example by her separation and her complicated affair with bisexual Duncan Grant. Later feminists, in contrast, abandoned the family album in favour o f ‘sophisticated documentary methods to express ideas of the exploitative nature of family systems and the inequities which they fostered’ (88). Williams’s reading of family albums as a gloss over the unpleasant realities and contradictions of family life is analogous to Jo Spence’s initial reading of her own family collection in Beyond the Family Album (1979), an installation reworking the photographs of herself that her mother had kept.40In her photographic and written work, Spence aims to demonstrate how snapshots and albums can be used in a personally and socially liberating way. She combines social history with feminist and psychoanalytic understandings of the workings of gender as representation, to visually reconstruct and imaginatively change her own fragmented and painful family history. This is not to arrive at a sanitised, happy version, or to achieve a unitary, definite self-image, but to expose, resist and attempt to counteract the social, political and unconscious processes through which women are constructed in a patriarchal and capitalist society. Her work makes visible the images that the traditional album systematically excludes, because they would speak of failure to achieve appropriate standards of success as a family. She emotionally and materially reworks individual images from her past to bring out and make visible the conflicts, frustrations and unhappiness that have been glossed over by the codes of amateur photography and studio portraits. Through this process, and unlike Williams, she also gains insight into a mother’s investment in representations of the family as a fantasy of her success as a woman, rather than its realities. Spence makes the important point that the album’s denials - of work, unhappiness, conflict, separation, illness and daily drudgery - should be seen not as a gloss over realities, but over frustrated desires and aspirations. My own methodology in re-reading nineteenthcentury albums through a visual and historical analysis informed by feminist (art) history and psychoanalysis is inspired by her working methods. I apply them retrospectively to nineteenth-century women’s albums, to consider them in the light of a history that is not only personal, but also social and cultural. I want to examine how album-making codes may have developed historically and become dominant; what active role women may have had in producing them; and what desires and aspirations - rather than actualities - could be imagined and made visible through the family album. Anne Higonnet is one of the few writers who have investigated the album historically as a feminine language. As part o f her research on women artists, Higonnet traces in France, and elsewhere in Europe, a tradition of feminine amateur images and practices which included watercolour painting and album-making.41 She 40 Spence, Putting M yself in the Picture (London, 1986), pp. 82-97. 41 Higonnet, ‘Secluded Vision’, Radical History Review 38 (1987), 16-36; Higonnet, Berthe Morisot s Images o f Women (Cambridge Mass. and London, 1992).

The Family AIhum, the Feminine and the Personal

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argues that this was the tradition women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt came from, rather than the academic tradition of their male counterparts in the Impressionist movement, even if many of the drawing masters employed in upperclass households were often themselves academically trained. This feminine amateur tradition could be limited and limiting, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, academic training was also perceived as potentially limited and limiting. If used critically in the context of avant-garde practices, however, both could be enabling and sustaining. Like the academic tradition, feminine visual culture in the nineteenthcentury was under pressure from forces of modernity, such as illustrated magazines and photography. My study traces a similar tradition in the context of English culture, but whereas Higonnet subordinates albums to avant-garde artistic production, albums remain my focus. In her discussion o f drawing and watercolour albums o f the early-nineteenth century, Higonnet argues that this tradition of feminine visual literacy was under threat from the mass production of images, deskilling women and turning them from active producers of images into passive consumers. Ann Bermingham, in her history o f the social significance of Learning to Draw, demonstrates how the growth of commerce in prints and mass-produced art materials were crucial to amateur drawing being redefined and devalued as a feminine accomplishment.42 In my own analysis o f albums, commercial photography and illustrated publications, I argue that these new mass-produced media modernised, revived, and in many ways celebrated this feminine visual culture, even if they also commercialised it. In ‘Secluded Vision’, Higonnet points out that album-making had been popular since the late-eighteenth century, when ‘amateur artistic pursuits started to become a defining feature o f femininity as it was conceived of by the middle classes’ (20). In Morisot, she also emphasises the aristocratic, elite connotations of album-keeping, citing an 1841 article bemoaning how: ‘In the past, this luxury object was found only in elevated aristocratic regions, in the salons of elegant society, on the side-table of the woman of the world: now it has fallen degree by degree into the middle class: the wife of the manager’s assistant has her album’ (51). Higonnet thus sets up a double transition. Albums before photography and massproduced prints were aristocratic and associated with feminine production - women making images. Albums after these developments became middle-class, and a form o f consumption rather than production. But as Bermingham argues, drawing was also a form o f consumption - o f art materials, manuals, drawing lessons, and the paraphernalia o f art objects and activities marketed by entrepreneurs such as Rudolph Ackermann in London, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Most o f the texts I have so far discussed characterise the photographic album as a middle-class pursuit, even if, as Freund emphasises, this was an attempt to imitate aristocratic practices. Williams, on the other hand, discusses the role o f aristocratic women as amateur photographers and album-makers. From these texts it might seem that middle-class women were more likely to buy photographs and collect them into albums, than take their own. But, as the albums that I discuss in the following chapters show, given the practical means, middle-class women were just as likely 42 Bermingham, Learning to Draw (New Haven and London, 2000).

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Women ’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

to take up photography, and titled ladies were just as fond of collecting commercial cartes-de-visite as middle-class women were. In ‘Parlour Made: Victorian Family Albums’ Marina Warner is less specific about the issue of class.43 Like Williams, she sees collecting and decorating photographic albums as a welcome addition to ‘the usual grospoint, samplers and whatnot with which they whiled away long evenings at home’ (29), thereby evoking a comfortable lifestyle, associated with the upper classes, in which practical sewing could be delegated to servants. Many of the albums she considers come from aristocratic or landed gentry families, and use photographs in conjunction with cut paper work and watercolour to create collages, often of a humorous nature. My own research aims to clarify the dynamics of class in nineteenth-century feminine culture, as they affect and become affected by photographic representations and albums. As we shall see, current definitions of class (aristocratic or upper, middle and working class) are insufficient to give a sense of the nuances and layers of rank as represented and constructed through nineteenthcentury culture. Alan Thomas, one of the few historians of nineteenth-century photography to focus on its uses rather than its technical and aesthetic development, dedicates a whole chapter to ‘The Family Chronicle’, concentrating on albums that were compiled by women who were not themselves amateur photographers.44 In his exploration of women’s albums, he suggests that aristocratic women were more likely to make albums that exploited their skills in drawing, fine paper cutting and watercolour, to make photographic collages and mixed media pages. This is, however, an oversimplification: collecting albums was a very diverse and heterogeneous practice. In the following chapters I hope to clarify some of these issues of taste, and of plain versus decorated or mixed media albums. As collections arranged in a specific sequence and narrative, albums offer insights into how photographs were looked at and used. That they do so, however, raises the question of how we are to understand the role of the collector. Is she a consumer of new forms of mass produced visual culture, or a reader of images with meanings already encoded in them by photographic industry and concomitant discourses? Or is she an author, imposing on the photographs a new meaning, contrived through their selection, sequence, and arrangement on the page? Thomas argues that these women should be seen as authors. This, however, raises the question of meaning: does it come from the objects or people being photographed, accurately represented by a medium presumed to be transparent, or is it created by the formal and technical choices of the photographer, however commonplace and invisible they may seem? Or are they, as Sekula’s argument would suggest, the result of the ways in which photographs are used - in this case, in albums? O f course the same uncertainties - how does a photograph mean and who determines this meaning? - transfer themselves to the albums. Do they have a meaning given by the collector, differing from that of the individual photographs? Are we to see the album as the statement of an author, perhaps as a form of informal or private written speech, like diaries; or as evidence of a reading practice, o f how women looked at photographs? Literary 43 Warner, ‘'Parlour Made’, Creative Camera 315 (1992), 29-32. 44 Thomas, Expanding Eye (London, 1978), pp. 43-64.

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studies and studies of the social production o f art have de-centred the figure of the author, ‘now understood as constructed in language, ideology and social relations’,45 and emphasised instead the function of the reader, defined by Roland Barthes as ‘the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost’ (148).46 In this respect, albums are particularly interesting, poised as they are between being a reading practice and a writing practice. They offer evidence of photographs having been looked at in a particular context, the pages of an album, with their specific sequence and captions; but also of the domestic rituals in which albums were used. As a writing practice, albums are, like all texts, ‘not a line of words’ (or photographs), but, in Barthes’s terms, a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety o f writings none o f them original blend and clash’ (146). Assembled from heterogeneous sources, albums seem to emphasise this multidimensionality, to make visible their nature as ‘a tissue o f quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (146). My project involves retracing some of the threads of this tissue, threads that take us away from the purely photographic into wider aspects o f the cultural experience of women in the nineteenth century. In this context, collecting by individuals is as important and as worthy of research as the collecting practices of museums and archives discussed by John Tagg.47 Feminine spaces DUCHESS OF BERWICK: ... (Crosses to sofa and sits with LADY WINDEMERE.) Agatha, darling! LADY AGATHA: Yes, mamma. (Rise) DUCHESS OF BERWICK: Will you go and look over the photograph album I see there? LADY AGATHA: Yes, mamma. (Goes to table up to L ) DUCHESS OF BERWICK: Dear girl! She is so fond of photographs of Switzerland. Such pure taste, I think! (375)

In this passage, from the first act o f Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Berwick is using the photograph album in Lady Windemere’s drawing room as a way to exclude her daughter while she discusses scandalous gossip. The album is used in the play - by the mother and by the writer - not only as an object in the drawing room, but as a space, metaphorically off-stage, to which the young woman can be relegated, while avoiding an awkward exit. The literature on the Victorian album highlights its relationship to specific domestic spaces such as the parlour or drawing room, which was crucial to its social 45 Janet Wolff, The Social Production o f Art (Basingstoke and London, 1993), p. 136. 46 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, ¡mage - Music - Text (London, 1977), pp. 142— 48. 47 See also Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject’ and Allan Sekula ‘The Body and the Archive’, The Contest o f Meaning, Bolton ed. (Cambridge Mass., 1989), pp. 3-14 and 343-79.

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

meaning. For traditional historians o f photography, the album’s roots in domestic space have militated against it being taken seriously. In reversing this paradigm, I am informed by feminist historians who have also been interested in the circulation of images within the domestic and the personal, and in how such categories have adversely affected the status o f cultural production by women. The nineteenthcentury representation o f homes as private places of rest and leisure, physically and ideologically separated from places o f work, production and commerce, is connected to how femininity came to be defined and lived.48 Ideals or idealised representations, however, need to be examined carefully. Reconstructing nineteenth-century women’s experiences of home and family has led to questioning representations such as the figure of the perfect lady, living a vacuous life through consumption and useless activities, whose only purpose was to fill time.49 Rather than a place of rest and consumption, the domestic sphere was a central space for the production of the cultural norms and social meanings associated with the feminine and the family.50 My own analysis involves a re-evaluation of the role of photography and of women in the production of cultural capital, and of the contribution of feminine culture to the development of photographic language. Looking at albums and their representations, I am interested in understanding the logic that made certain narratives and meanings more viable than others, rather than evaluating their realism, and in the conscious and unconscious structures of fantasy and desire mobilised by the photographic images and by the act of collecting them. Read in this way, albums reveal subject positions that were multiple and contradictory, breaking down simple notions of agency and intention in creating images, and their representation of pre-existing realities. I analyse images as symptoms o f the culture in which they were created, symptoms manifesting themselves in, and creatively represented by, individual image-makers. My understanding of the photographic album as one of the modem ‘spaces of femininity’ is indebted to Griselda Pollock’s analysis o f ‘Modernity and the Spaces o f Femininity’.51 In this essay she argues that Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt developed in their work a formal language that was the pictorial equivalent of the experience of women in the spaces created for them by modem life - the home as a familial space, the suburb as a feminine territory. She shows how their use of contradictory and compressed spatial systems, often within a single frame, correspond to their contradictory social position as women artists within bourgeois codes of femininity. Morisot and Cassatt represent space phenomenologically, according to how it feels - to sight, touch, and emotions - rather than according to purely visual and objective systems. These strategies are developed not just to be avant-garde, but as women painting their own experience of modernity. This analysis is also useful 48 See for example Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles (London, 1973); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (London, 1987); Catherine Hall, White, Male and MiddleClass (New York, 1992); Jane Rendell, ‘Subjective Space: A Feminist Architectural History of the Burlington Arcade’, Desiring Practices, McCorquodale, Ruedi and Wigglesworth eds (London, 1996), pp. 216-33; Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge, 2001). 49 Jane Lewis ed„ Women s Experience o f Home and the Family (Oxford, 1986). 50 Elizabeth Langland, Nobody's Angels (Ithaca and London, 1995). 51 Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, Vision and Difference (London and New York, 1988), pp. 50-90.

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to understand Victorian albums, especially their use of collage and mixed media images. Women used the feminine space of the album, a space that too had been shaped physically and socially by modernity, in ways that were not realistic nor failed attempts to be ‘arty’, but used the realistic charge o f photographs to give power to their fantasies and validate their experiences, represented phenomenologically - how they felt, including to touch - rather than according to established modes o f representation. A similar approach can also be found in Lindsay Smith’s The Politics o f Focus. Albums play an important part in her analysis o f the work of women as photographers and as collectors. She argues that women’s disregard for the integrity and realism o f the photographic image, normally seen as a function of sharp focus, untouched negatives and straight prints, did not derive from lack o f skill or judgment, but from the different emotional and visual investment women made in photographic images. At the beginning of Pollock’s essay, she asks if a woman can ‘be offered, in order to be denied, imaginary possession of Olympia or the barmaid’ (53). The answer is: of course not. But that is not to say that modernity did not offer women other imaginary possessions. Such offers, through photography, illustrated magazines or advertising, are a central aspect of modernity. Full acquisition of these possessions - a beautiful house, a slender waist, healthy children, a loving family, fond memories of loved ones - are also constantly denied by social, material and economic circumstances. I show how the imaginary nature o f these possessions, as they are constantly being offered yet denied to women, is one o f the central themes of the photographic albums I discuss in the following chapters. Albums, with their fragmented, collaged and compressed spatial organisation, were part of a female visual culture that women could use to articulate their experience of what, in modem society, they were offered only to be denied: success as a mother, in the case of Anna Waterlow; success in aristocratic society, in the case of Lady Filmer. To investigate the significance of women’s albums before the availability of photographs, I begin the next chapter with a discussion of Anna Birkbeck’s earlynineteenth-century album, and its similarities and differences from commercial women’s albums o f the time.

Chapter Two

Nineteenth-Century Album Culture

On the 25th o f December 1826, George Birkbeck (1776-1841), successful doctor, busy lecturer and founder of the London Mechanics’ Institution - now Birkbeck College, University o f London - wrote a long letter to John Britton, antiquary and lecturer on the history of architecture at the Institution.1 My dear Sir, In consequence of your recommendation of Mr Behnes as an artist, I gave him at some inconvenience a great number of sittings. ... In the course of his visits Mrs Birkbeck spoke of her Album, in which he undertook to induce some of his poetical friends to write and for which purpose he took the book with him ... Subsequently Mrs Birkbeck has wanted the book, which is of some value especially as containing some contributions from her friends, and has written to him for it without effect. I have also written and received no answer, and we have sent a messenger about half a dozen times in vain, and our only hope of recovering the book rests in your kind interference, as he probably will not run the risk of losing your friendship by such obstinate conduct. (184)

Mrs Birkbeck recovered her album, which is now a rare example of an earlynineteenth-century album to survive intact and with a well-documented provenance. Recently rediscovered in the archives of Birkbeck College, the album has been described as ‘a fascinating insight into the life and activities of the literary, artistic and diplomatic circles of Regency London and beyond’.2According to George Birkbeck's biographer, the album, ‘with its sentimental verses and its delicate paintings of birds and flowers, is a pleasant period piece’ (185). These descriptions, however, cannot account for the album’s importance to the family that is shown by the letter above. Its value might be described as personal, yet these ‘contributions from her friends’ warranted pulling strings obtained through professional associations. The same mixture o f friendship and patronage also provided the networks through which the album’s material was gathered. Anna Birkbeck, née Gardner (c. 1794-1851), daughter of a Liverpool merchant, was the second wife o f George Birkbeck, whom she married in 1817. The album is a leather-bound volume, 250 pages long, measuring approximately 28 by 21 centimetres. On the title page the word ‘Album’ is printed surrounded by a roundel with the name of its owner and the date, 1825. A small, brightly-painted watercolour of an oak tree with a rose and a rope has been painstakingly cut around each indented 1 Thomas Kelly, George Birkbeck (Liverpool, 1957). All the biographical information on George Birkbeck and his family is from this book. 2 Birkbeck Library MSS, Janet Foster, ‘Mrs Birkbeck’s Album. Digitisation Report’ (London, 2001).

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

oak leaf and pasted onto the page. On the reverse of the front endpaper, a watercolour o f a waterfall further illustrates the beginning of the album, with references to flowing and rushing away (the waterfall), beauty and love (the rose) and ties that bind (the rope). The next item is a watercolour of a child working a flower chain, captioned by verses beginning ‘and its fragrance ne’er pass away’, another reference to both permanence and impermanence. Described as a ‘Commonplace and autograph book’ by Janet Foster, an independent Archives Consultant, the album contains contributions by famous women and men of the time, collected from 1825 to circa 1847. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818), contributed on pages 189-90 a poem on ‘The Death of Love’ dated 19th of November 1830; Letitia Elizabeth Landon, celebrated writer of poetry, fiction, and literary reviews, two ‘Songs’ (23-7); Emma Roberts, poet and travel writer, and a friend of Landon’s, two long poems (30-31; 106-107); the social reformer Robert Owen signed a short sentence: ‘The character of man is without a single exception formed for him [his emphasis] ’ (107). The album has an international flavour. The Italian poet Guido Sorelli, translator of Milton, contributed some verses on page 57. There are also contributions in Arabic, French and Russian. Various artists, one a Royal Academician, contributed drawings and water-colours. Several entries are dated in the weeks just before George Birkbeck’s letter to John Britton, presumably by Behnes’s poetical friends: some ‘Lines’ and a ‘Sonnet’ by Eliza Louisa Emmerson dated ‘Dec. 18 1826’; and a poem dedicated ‘To the Lady of Dr George Birkbeck MD’ by Thomas Gent, penned in November of the same year: ‘Lady unknown! A pilgrim from the shrine of Poetry’s fair Temple brings a wreath which fame, and gratitude alike entwine around a name that charms the monster Death and bids him pause’ (19). William Behnes himself later contributed a drawing of a cherub surrounded by doves, signed and dated ‘1847’ (49).3 The last pages of the album are dedicated solely to autographs, signed directly onto the pages. Henry, First Lord Brougham, a friend of Dr Birkbeck since their days at Edinburgh University, signed the album more than once.4 According to Kelly, the second occasion was on his last visit to the Birkbeck’s house, when George was seriously ill, and his wife asked him ‘to inscribe his name once more in her album’ (197). What is interesting is not so much the value of the individual contributions in Mrs Birkbeck’s album as literary or visual works, but the way they suggest and construct a rich network of social and cultural contacts. Defined by their blankness (from the Latin alhus, white), albums belong to a broad category of containers of miscellaneous items, such as repositories, cabinets, and magazines, defined by what is placed in them. Unlike museums, galleries or encyclopaedias, which could also be defined as containers of miscellaneous items, albums have no aim or mandate to impose taxonomic order or value on their contents. In ancient Rome, an albo, a blank tablet, was used to enter notices to be exhibited to 3 On this and the other sculptors in the album see Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven and London, 1982). 4 Brougham, Lord Chancellor 1830-1834, was a liberal reformer associated with the abolition of slavery and the founding of the University of London; Dictionary o f National Biography (Oxford, 1995) on CD-ROM [DNB]

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the public; the head of the principal college of priests wrote his annals in an album, and in time the term was used to describe lists of official names. In the nineteenth century the term was still used for the official list of people matriculated from a university, and for the roll in which a Bishop listed his clergy.5 The word was also used in the English language from the mid-seventeenth century to describe a blank book in which visitors to a country house were invited to contribute signatures or short pieces of writing, often of a learned or poetic nature. It would seem that, in general terms, to be inscribed in an album was a sign of belonging to or participating in a community o f fellows, defined by intellectual, religious or geographical connections. The word was also used to describe published collections of verses, such as ‘The Album of Cashiobury House’.6 By the nineteenth century, albums were used to collect music, songs, poetry, sketches, water-colours, prints and autographs o f people, as well as any other flat and lightweight souvenir. The word could be used to describe an initially blank book, filled in by hand to become a one-off individual collection, or a commercially printed and published anthology of texts, images, or music, by one or more authors. Anne Higonnet traces the origins of more personal albums, like Mrs Birkbeck’s, to the Romantic period.7 Their content, associated with an individual rather than an institution or a location, was up to the person making or collecting them, and the practice was seen as predominantly feminine and with genteel, if not aristocratic, connotations. Men also compiled albums, but these were usually associated with specific professional endeavours. Artists, for example, made albums of drawings and coloured sketches, and musicians published albums of music. It is, however, difficult to generalise. Mary Ellen Best filled her albums, now split into individual pages, only with water-colours. These recorded her life, her circle of friends and acquaintances, the places she visited and the rooms she inhabited, but were also part o f her work as an artist, an activity she performed both as a wealthy amateur and as a professional painter, especially of portraits.8 Generally, the contents and authorship of women’s albums were heterogeneous.9 Images and texts could be originals by the album’s owner or her circle of friends, or copies, again made by herself or by other people. Also popular was cut paper work, in which intricate patterns designed by the author or copied, were cut from coloured paper and pasted onto album pages or scrap-books. By the mid-nineteenth century, mass-produced images from printed ephemera were cut out and pasted on a variety of suitable surfaces in a practice also known as decoupage.10 5 Anon., ‘Album’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Baynes ed. (Edinburgh, 1875), vol. 4, p. 456. 6 Anonymous reviews in The Times, 9 August 1793, p. 9, and 23 August 1793, p. 2. 7 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot’s Images o f Women (Cambridge Mass. and London, 1992). 8 Caroline Davidson, The World o f Mary Ellen Best (London, 1985); Anne Higonnet, ‘Secluded Vision’, Radical History Review 38 (1987), 16-36; Frances Borzello, Seeing Ourselves (London, 1998). 9 There were however exceptions, such as the botanical albums made by women working on the boundary between amateur and professional botanical illustrator, discussed in Ocean Flowers, Armstrong and de Zegher eds (New York, Princeton and Oxford, 2004). 10 Jane Toller, The Regency and Victorian Crafts (London and Sydney, 1969).

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

As we have seen, collecting albums was popular from the late-eighteenth century as part of middle-class femininity, but was also considered an activity with aristocratic origins. In this chapter, I explore further the dynamics of this class identification. To understand the social functions of album-keeping, we need to consider it as part of a feminine culture (and a culture of femininity) constructed by and through the image of the ‘lady’, as Mrs Birkbeck is addressed in many of the album entries, as a high ranking woman with the means and the time to pursue her personal and social interests. This image was desirable because o f its aristocratic connotations, even as it was ambiguous in terms o f class. Lady could be used to indicate a titled aristocrat, wife or daughter of a Peer or a Baronet, as well as a woman of sufficient wealth, education and taste to behave like one. The image of the lady is common in nineteenth-century culture, used with a variety of nuances of meaning, at times contradictory." In his study of Class in Britain David Cannadine shows that in the nineteenth century, group distinctions by class (upper, middle and lower or working class) did not replace individual distinctions by rank, but rather one model overlaid the other.12 Even when the language of class was added to that o f rank, it was often used in the plural - the middling classes. As these expanded and gained economic and political power, they also diversified in terms of wealth, culture, modes of living, and social aspirations - or, to use a nineteenth-century concept, in terms of rank. Wealthy, well educated merchants and professionals, who often were or became connected to the gentry, could have enough money, culture and time to socialise with the aristocracy, pursue political ambitions and even hopes for a title. At the other end of the scale, shop keepers and bureaucrats might have just about enough education, manners and servants to consider themselves gentlemen, but often had to struggle to keep up a lifestyle appropriate to such a definition. Anthony Trollope’s novels, for example, often represent middle-class professionals as keen to differentiate themselves socially, in terms of rank, from people involved in trade, even though they were equally middle-class, and sometimes just as wealthy.13 Religious and political affiliations further fragmented class cohesion, fostering vertical allegiances up and down the social scale, as represented in the Birkbeck album, joining in its polite and radical community members of the aristocracy, professional intellectuals making a living from their work, and commercial gentlemen such as antique dealers. Rank and status were not abstract socio-economic categories, but part of a range of rituals - with attendant satisfactions or humiliations - some o f which were performed daily. The application of the rules of precedence in seating family and any guests at the dinner table is one example of an originally aristocratic practice which was followed in middle-class households.14 At each level, people were supposed

'1 Susan Casteras, The Substance or the Shadow (New Haven, 1982); Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels (Ithaca and London, 1995). 12 Cannadine, Class in Britain (London, 2000). 13 For example Trollope, Ralph the Heir (1871; New York, 1978); see also Margaret (Mrs) Oliphant, Phoebe, Junior (1876; London, 1989). 14 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven and London, 1978); Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position (London and New York, 1987); Maijorie Morgan,

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to associate or marry with people a few ranks above or below, so that step by step the whole fabric o f society was at once separated yet connected in a hierarchical structure. Many nineteenth-century novels were concerned with exploring in detail nuances o f rank, manners, social ambition and pretension to gentility, and the ways in which individuals o f different status were brought together under changing social and economic circumstances, especially in the great cities. In this culture, the image of the real lady - one whose title derived from familial relationship to the Peerage, whose breeding could be traced back for generations, and whose taste and moral purity were not only due to an impeccable upbringing, but also the result of having never been exposed to anything vulgar, coarsening or degrading - became a cynosure o f gentility and a figure of desire for women in all ranks. Albums acquired desirable genteel connotations because they were collected by high-rank women - even if theirs was a rank due to intellectual achievement, rather than title, as in the case of the Birkbecks. Album-making and collecting was one o f the attributes of a lady’s femininity, or of a lady-like femininity potentially available to all women. As such, it was eagerly taken up and re-presented by a mass culture keen to service the general desire to know about genteel lifestyles, and so circulated to an audience that included less well connected middle-class women. Some of the entries in Mrs Birkbeck’s collection address the topic of the album itself, revealing a certain familiarity with the genre and its expectations, and sometimes some ambivalence. To be asked to write or draw in an album seems to have been part o f a common culture of politeness and exchange. It meant to be singled out as an individual worth remembering and celebrating, but also to be imposed on with an obligation to produce something on demand. Mr Behnes, for example, was not the only one to prove tardy in his fulfilment of a promise to provide items for her album. John Thelwall, noted romantic writer and radical reformer, and a teacher at the Mechanics’ Institution on literary subjects,15 apologised in the form o f a poem for not having written something earlier: A poet’s wit is not his own ... “Twas friendship’s debt” in vain I said “And to a Lady due” But fancy slept; and wit was fled, and would not take the cue. So “blank the album page must be”

but here my offering late I send if it be worth accepting. (51-55)

The difficulties o f versifying on demand for a lady’s album were satirised by William Thackeray in his description of a ‘Club Snob’:16

Manners, Morals and Class in England 1774-1858 (New York, 1994). 15 Kelly, p. 129. 16 Thackeray, The Book o f Snobs (1846-1847; Gloucester, 1989).

34

Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England lI can’t’ says he. ‘Sometimes I can write whole cantos, and today not a line. ... Such an opportunity! Such a divine creature! She has asked me to write verses for her album, and I can’t. ... She’s the most accomplished, highly connected creature! - and I can’t get out a line. (189)

Unlike this club snob, John Thelwall did find his inspiration and produced for Mrs Birkbeck a poem titled ‘The Offering’, illustrated with a watercolour of a plinth inscribed ‘To Mrs Birkbeck’, supporting a lyre and a wreath of flowers (53). At the end o f ‘The Offering’ there is an Italian poem by F. Bozelli, about roses and stolen kisses (55). The Italian theme continues on the next page with verses by Guido Sorelli, (56) and a coloured print or watercolour of an ancient Roman cup, cut out and pasted onto a piece of embossed card. In the album, poems, drawings, flowers and cups all become offerings due to a lady, gifts attesting to the rank and value of her femininity and individuality, rather than her precise social classification as the wife of a doctor. But this meaning is represented lightly, without great insistence or ponderousness, as befitting a lady’s demeanour in polite society. Thus, some entries address the topic humorously: ‘In an album tis pleasant to write / as anything does very well / but to me this does not respite(?) quite / not yet having learned to spell.’ (99).17 Some are more earnest, such as ‘An Album’ by John Britton, who compares it to: a quilt of patchwork [which] consists of various miscellaneous pieces of different hues and qualities, but jointly combining to make a pleasing and useful whole. Each is contributed to give exercise to the fancy in its composition and arrangement, and each will offer amusement to the eye when completed ... in the formation of the Album there is much wider scope for the mind - a more intellectual occupation; whilst it keeps up a constant and rational excitement during its progress, it becomes a repository for the most endearing sentiments of friendship, and affection. (146-147)

Many entries in the album reflect a romantic taste for poetry about love, beauty and their passing; and for the melancholic longings associated with the cult of sensibility that had been fashionable since the end of the eighteenth century. George Birkbeck himself seems to have had a taste for these, as we can see from some verses by him which have been pasted into the album, perhaps after his death, which end: ‘Thy gentle Spirit! Bright and kind, / A moment midst its joys may find, / when memory’s power prevails. / Then, should thy beaming eye these traces see, / though absent long, and far away, thou’lt think on me’ [my emphasis]. This poem, written by George Birkbeck when he was young, is pasted on page eight of the album, together with a printed card of the ‘Order of Procession for the Funeral of Dr Birkbeck,’ 13 December 1841. Its position next to the funerary card makes it a poignant set of ‘traces’ for his wife to remember him by, when her ‘beaming eye’ sees them. The poem can in a sense be seen as a key to reading the whole album: hand-written texts, drawings, water-colours and signatures are there not only for their literary and visual merits, or because of the social significance of the people who have so marked the album, but are above all inscribed into Mrs Birkbeck’s album as belonging to her

17 DNB.

‘A Charm' by William Jerdan, journalist, writer and editor of the Literary Gazette,

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circle of family, friends and acquaintances. Looking through the album was meant to be at once amusing to the eye and rewarding to the intellect, but above all to give the ‘bright and kind’ spirits of Mrs Birkbeck and her visitors an occasion to let ‘memory’s power’ prevail. The themes in the album are varied. Romantic, sentimental and melancholy themes are punctuated by recurring tributes to Dr Birkbeck for his endeavours in the cause o f science and the diffusion of knowledge, and by the sobering contributions left by men and women associated with radical reforms and liberal political circles. Lord Brougham, for example, had been active in the passing o f the bill to abolish slavery and was an important Whig politician associated with reform. Tributes to Birkbeck include one by Sir John Bowring, linguist, diplomat, editor of the Westminster Review and o f Jeremy Bentham’s writings, who was a radical philosopher and one of the founders of the London Mechanics’ Institution.18 It is not known if Mrs Birkbeck herself sketched any of the images in the album, or which were copies and which original contributions from artists she knew. Images from a repertoire that was considered typical of feminine taste, such as portraits and genre vignettes of women and children, are placed in a wider visual context, which includes classical nudes, picturesque locations and the occasional humorous vignette. Thus on page 15 we find an drawing of a woman sitting under a tree, whose reading has been interrupted by two children she is now cuddling and kissing, signed ‘by Corbould’ and dated June 1837. On page 165, there is a watercolour by R.J. Stotland, of a young man in ancient roman dress unveiling a statue of a seated woman crowned with flowers, followed on page 167 by a watercolour titled ‘The Sketch 1741’, which depicts two women on a neo-classical terrace by a park. One is sitting sketching; the other is standing next to her, looking down towards the album (Figure 2.1). As we shall see, this image o f women looking at an album together is a recurring one in nineteenth-century feminine culture. An interest in sculpture is shown by a pencil drawing captioned ‘Bailly’, which looks like Edward Baily’s famous 1822 sculpture of Eve at the Fountain, but it is not clear if the drawing is also by him (195). A taste for the picturesque is well represented by, amongst others, a landscape o f Crummock Lake (179) and the interior of a Breton church (193). Towards the end of the album, a humorous watercolour shows a man wearing a university gown, asleep by a table covered with many empty bottles, in a room strewn with a violin, globe, books and pens. The background is rendered as clouds with black and white vignettes, representing his dreams: boxing, fishing, horseriding, hunting (249). The female collector What were the connotations of such a collection, of this interest in visual and textual culture, in the wife of a doctor in early nineteenth-century London? In her study of women’s albums, Higonnet argues that a tradition of women making albums using their drawing and watercolour skills, was replaced during the nineteenth

18 Encyclopaedia Britannica ( 1875), vol. 4, p. 181 ; vol. 3, pp. 575 and 779.

36

Figure 2.1

Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

Page from Mrs B irkbeck’s Album (1841). W atercolour and pencil, in an album 28 x 21 cm. Perm ission B irkbeck Library.

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century by the use of commercial images in the form of mass-produced prints and photographs. This, however, neglects the fact that the collections made by women had always mixed material that was bought or commissioned from professionals with items that were made by the women themselves or by friends. Stella Tillyard, in her biography of the Lennox sisters, self-defined women of fashion, belonging to the highest aristocratic and political circles in eighteenth-century England and Ireland, gives us a taste o f the cultural life o f such women.1’ Avid readers of the latest books from England and France, assiduous writers and collectors of elegant letters, they read, wrote and collected poetry and verses, which they also exchanged with family and friends, some of whom were gifted poets. As well as books and letters, Caroline, married to Henry Fox, the politician who became 1st Lord Holland, collected porcelain and paintings. She organised the existing family paintings, commissioned more portraits from fashionable artists, and arranged them in the picture gallery at Holland House, which she and her husband used to entertain as part o f his political career. The collection emphasised their marriage, family and successful careers. ‘In a world where dynastic considerations counted for so much’ (149) ownership of family portraits was an important signifier of rank, and having ancestors and relations worthy of portraiture was an important sign o f gentility in all classes of people.20 As well as celebrated artists, the collection also included works by her friends, such as Lady Bolingbroke, who was a talented painter. The collection thus visualised not only Fox’s marriage, ancestors, and his successful career, but also her network o f family and friends. Caroline’s younger sister Louisa Conolly, married into a family o f more modest means, collected prints in the Print Room and in the Long Gallery at her house at Castletown in Ireland. She asked her sisters, wealthier and closer to London, centre of the art trade, to buy prints for her, and asked her nephews on the Grand Tour to send her images from Italy. A good draftswoman, she also copied them herself from books and folios in her own or relations’ libraries. As Ian Pears shows, collecting had become increasingly fashionable in England since the seventeenth century.21 By the eighteenth century print rooms became common in fashionable wealthy houses. Gentlemen would keep prints picked up on their Grand Tour, which were cheaper and more easily available than paintings, to remind them of youthful experiences and to showcase their completed education and artistic taste. Less well travelled connoisseurs might opt for the alternative of ‘Grangerising’ books. Named after Reverend James Granger’s Biographical History o f England (1769), this consisted of the extra-illustration of books, usually on biographical, historical or topographical subjects, with relevant prints.22Grangerisers were usually men, but they valued the help of women for their skills in cutting around

19 Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox I740-IH32 (London, 1995). 20 See also Marcia Pointon. Hanging the Head (New Haven and London, 1993); David Solkin, Painting fo r Money’ (New Haven and London, 1993). 21 Pears, The Discovery o f Painting (New Haven and London, 1988). 22 Pointon, pp. 54-73; images were cut out and pasted in the blank spaces around the printed text.

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Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

the ornate frames that were added to decorate the prints.23 Women kept more intimate collections, combining landscape, architecture and genre scenes with engravings from portraits of family and friends. Pasted on the walls of Louisa’s print room were portraits o f notable ancestors and relations - for example, a print from Reynolds’s painting of her sister, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, which hung in Caroline’s picture gallery; images reflecting cultural and political interests - for example, portraits of Garrick, the actor, and of Pitt the Younger; and upper-class pursuits such as hunting, playing cards and flirting. These were interspersed with genre images illustrating familial and maternal bliss, or conveying moral messages and hints of mortality. For the long gallery at Castletown, which Luisa transformed into a fashionably informal living room, she used the same collecting and decorative scheme, but commissioned a painter to copy prints chosen by herself and her sister Sarah, onto oil panels which were hung surrounded by decorative scrolls and swaggings copied directly onto the wall. Collecting demonstrated that the Lennox sisters had the economic means to purchase or commission such articles, and also access to a network of family, friends, and patronage that enabled them to do so. Mixing and arranging purchased and commissioned works with items made by friends, relations or by themselves demonstrated that they had taste and knowledge of the fine arts. It showed that they had the time and cultural means to cultivate their taste not only as consumers but also as practising amateurs - disinterested art lovers whose taste and choices were not hampered by the economic necessities associated with practising as a professional, and whose interest in collecting went beyond the need to showcase wealth. In print rooms, folios or in the smaller space o f the album, women’s collections o f images often combined material from different sources and in a variety of media. Images could be hand-made or mechanically reproduced, original or copied. Visual and conceptual skills of selecting and arranging were as valued as the more manual accomplishments of drawing, painting, and cutting out complex shapes with a precise hand. As John Brewer also shows, in the eighteenth-century, cultural pursuits became important in English culture, as a means o f softening political and religious extremism, and promoting forms o f dialogue, conviviality and exchange.24 This domain could also overcome barriers o f class and rank, but only insofar as the people concerned had a degree o f common education, and enjoyed a level of financial ease. As Pears demonstrates, the concept of the collection evolved in this culture o f politeness, not just as the accumulation of individual pieces, but as a form of self expression, ‘of creation through the process of selective acquisition’ (160). Collecting might be another form o f upper-class conspicuous consumption, but unlike, for example, gambling or keeping horses, it was considered a virtuous interest, as it involved sharing one’s good taste with other people. In this context, we can see Mrs Birkbeck’s album as a miniaturised and compressed version of the kind of collections more wealthy and aristocratic women were able to spread over drawing rooms, picture galleries, libraries and specialised print rooms. The album formed and displayed 23 Lucy Peltz, 'The Extra-Illustration o f London', Producing the Past, Myrone and Peltz eds (Aldershot England and Vermont USA, 1999), pp. 115-31. 24 Brewer, Pleasures o f the Imagination (London, 1997).

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her taste, and showcased her husband’s reputation, for the benefit of her family and visitors. Anna and George Birkbeck both came from merchant families from the north o f England. George’s ancestors were a typical example of a middle-class Quaker family, who rose in wealth and education, and used an active interest in cultural and philanthropic works, supported by well managed incomes, to mix with people higher up the social scale. George’s professional life in London was divided between teaching at the London Mechanics’ Institution, and working as a doctor, which was a more reliable source of income. Anna started her album in what seems to have been a good year for the family. Dr Birkbeck’s profile as a public man had been growing since the founding of the Mechanics’ Institution, and in 1825 its commercial stability had allowed it to open a new lecture theatre, a ceremony attended not only by middleclass reformers, but also by the Duke o f Sussex, the King’s brother, giving the place an air o f Royal sanction if not official support. Other titled supporters included the Marquis of Lansdowne and Lord Brougham, who continued to give the Institution a gloss o f aristocratic connection by attending the yearly prize giving ceremony. Dr Birkbeck, always a member o f various scientific societies, became more interested in the arts, helping in the setting up o f the National Repository, an initiative of the Society of Arts to organise an annual exhibition of English art and manufacturing. Notwithstanding the arrival of a baby every two years to a total of six children, his home life was becoming more prosperous and genteel, with acquisition of a country residence at Forty Hills, near Enfield, to complement his town house in the well-todo Finsbury Square area, near the wealthy merchant families who still lived in the city in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The album can be seen as representing, in the heart of the Birkbeck’s home, the social, cultural and political circles in which the couple moved. With its combination o f romantic verses by celebrated women writers, references to the fine arts and antiquities, and contributions from an international set of learned individuals and liberal or radical reformers, the album seems to harmonise feminine romanticism, sentimentality and beauty, with the more masculine and enlightened pursuits of knowledge and political endeavours. The album constructs the Birkbecks as members o f an international, urbane, liberal, cultured elite of people of good taste, balancing knowledge and sense with a fashionable interest in sensibility. The lady as a woman of taste Since the eighteenth century, the concept of taste as an index of rank, education and breeding had become a common ground between aristocracy, gentry, and the rising ranks of the educated middle classes. It could also be used to construct differences: between truly cultivated taste and recently acquired, superficial mannerism; between spiritually valuable displays and the merely ostentatious; between true gentility and the pretensions o f upstarts. A fine and delicate inner sensibility, the supposedly innate basic requirement for a person of taste, needed to be cultivated through constant exposure to cultural forms that had been already selected by other people of taste. As a badge o f distinction, taste was potentially available to everyone, but in practice it

40

Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

needed a degree of education, time and financial means, beyond the reach of many middle-class individuals. This concern with taste as a signifier of gentility was accompanied by a growing interest in the arts. Poetry, painting and music became established as the fine arts of taste; they maintained the connotation of a minority elite interest even when they were circulated through books and engravings. The ability to understand and demonstrate taste became crucial because it indicated an exposure to culture over a period of time in a variety of experiences and settings. Unlike fortunes and clothes, taste could not be acquired quickly. The participation of women to the public sphere of culture and the discourse of taste - as readers and audiences, or as collectors of prints and paintings - raised anxieties about women’s neglect of their domestic duties. Indulging in excessive consumption, even if cultural, could fill women’s heads with fancies and romantic desires that were above their station in life, making home-life dull, and women vulnerable to moral corruption. This seemed a particular threat to women if their cultural activities were too exclusively associated with its commercialised forms, in other words if they took place mainly through buying. It was less of a threat if this consumption was accompanied by a direct, personal involvement with its production. Making, decorating and arranging beautiful objects, drawing in albums, cutting out frames for prints, or copying verses in beautiful calligraphy, sheltered women from the charge of an extravagant and potentially corrupting interest in purely commercialised forms o f culture. Throughout the nineteenth-century, this personal, tactile involvement with decorative objects remained a powerful index of women’s gentility, and an important impetus to the pursuit o f feminine accomplishments. The eighteenth-century concern with the vulnerability of polite society to moral and economic corruption was combined with romantic notions of sensibility, which became fashionable in the later part o f the century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, sensibility was seen as a truer indicator of individual value than polite conduct, and as a quality best cultivated in private circles away from the hustle and bustle of fashionable public places. Romanticism and the cult o f sensibility were crucial in establishing the private sphere as the setting for the true realisation of personal interiority, through activities and interactions based on authentic feelings rather than performances put on for fashionable considerations and in the interest of social ambition. Drawing rooms, rather than commercial assembly rooms, became increasingly important as the preferred meeting ground for men and women of polite society.25 In this setting, women’s accomplishments became an even more important part of polite culture. As Ann Bermingham discusses in her analysis o f the image of the accomplished woman on the marriage market, to meet people in public places became associated with the risk of mistaking fake fortunes and assumed manners for real material or spiritual worth, while at the same time, domestic locations were constructed as the spaces of authentic subjectivity.26 In this context, women’s consumption of culture collapsed into the commodification of themselves as culture, to be exhibited in domestic spaces, used to entertain guests. Accomplishments 25 Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles (London, 1973); Amanda Vickery, 'Golden Age to Separate Sphere?’, Historical Journal 36:2 (1993), 383-414. 26 Bermingham, Learning to Draw (New Haven and London, 2000).

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allowed women ‘to perform their subjectivity through certain allotted modes of artistic expression’ (184). After marriage, the income provided by a successful husband would allow women to use their accomplishments as a civilising, polite influence on men returning home from the competitive world of work, commerce and politics.27 The meaning of the concept of the private was also changing, from one of lack, used to describe ‘persons not holding public or official position or rank’ (from Latin privare, to deprive, and privatus, withdrawn from public life); to one of privilege (as in private property), and o f a voluntary withdrawal from public life, to achieve personal independence, in familial settings and amongst ties of friendships and love.28 Anna Birkbeck’s album constructs her participation in a world of culture that still involves her in a public sphere of scientific, political, educational and artistic endeavours; but her participation is constructed as being based on individual encounters and across personal exchanges. The album publicises the interiority o f the woman of the house by making it visible. Unlike diaries, albums, however personal, have no connotations of secrecy. They represent culture as performed in a private sphere, but for display to friends and visitors. The private here signals not only the domestic nature of the space in which the album is worked on and exhibited, but also the non-public, non-commercial exchanges between the album collector and the people whose traces (signatures, poems or drawings) are collected. It is important, for example, that all the autographs are penned directly onto the album pages, not pasted in, as this shows that they were not bought from autograph dealers, but were the result of personal contacts and gift exchanges. This distinction between private and public, however, rather than being a clear demarcation between spaces (the domestic versus the commercial, the house versus the street or place of work) and spheres (the feminine versus the masculine) is a shifting, fluid boundary. A house is private, in that only selected visitors and callers are allowed in; within the house, some rooms are public because they are used to receive visitors. Albums are public declarations, but in the case o f women’s albums, they are shown only to selected audiences. Just as class was not a matter o f simple economic or social distinctions, but was instead conceptualised as a complex structure o f ranks, stations, and small shifts in social and cultural behaviour, so private and public, rather than clearly divided and defined spheres, were also a matter of degrees and nuances.29 Compiling albums, like collecting paintings and prints, meant taking part in a culture of collecting (albeit in a modest form) associated with elite lifestyles.30 It aimed to demonstrate knowledge of current definitions of what was tasteful, but

27 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (London, 1987); Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class (New York, 1992). 28 Raymond Williams, Keywords (London, 1976), pp. 203-204. 29 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Introduction’, Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester and New York, 1995), pp. 1-30; see also Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven and London, 2000); Erika Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure (Princeton and Oxford, 2000); Jane Rendell, The Pursuit o f Pleasure (London, 2002). 30 See also Penny Sparke, As Long as It's Pink (London, 1995).

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Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

also to show a degree of individuality and creativity in selecting, combining and displaying the material collected. Anna Birkbeck’s album is inflected, for example, by her family connections with a political elite, which gave her individual access to people like Robert Owen and Mary Shelley, over and above the access that any member of the interested public could have had by buying their books or by reading about them. Like picture galleries and print rooms in houses, collections in albums were in an ambiguous space, both domestic and private (the home) and partially in the public domain - intended to be seen by visitors. As George Birkbeck’s letter, at the beginning of this chapter, shows albums could also circulate and be seen by contributors beyond the immediate circle of visitors to the house. Albums as printed media Anna Birkbeck’s album can be understood as drawing on an upper-class tradition of feminine collecting, transforming it in size and format, and introducing meanings which were relevant to her specific status and cultural position in early nineteenthcentury society. But to further understand the connotations of her album we need to examine it in relation to the ways in which the printed media represented and appropriated feminine collecting practices. These more public representations in turn influenced the meaning o f women’s albums as a genre throughout the nineteenth century, blurring the distinctions between albums before and after photography. Throughout the nineteenth century, women’s albums were represented in the press and women’s magazines as possessions and gifts suitable for Queens and aristocratic women. On the 5,h of June 1838, for example, The Times thought it worth reporting as ‘An Agreeable Surprise’, that the Duchess Alexandre of Wurtenber had been able to find ‘an album and jewel case like those she lost by fire’ (4). Gifts of albums to Queen Victoria and other Royal princesses or high-ranking women were reported as important moments in the course of official visits at home or abroad. Thus, on the 7th of October 1844, The Times reported the gift to Queen Victoria of an album containing ‘32 drawings by the first French artists, representing ... scenes and events connected with Her Britannic Majesty’s v isit... splendidly bound in scarlet Morocco ... within a rich border of the most delicate tooling’ (4). These representations confirmed the association of women’s albums with aristocratic collecting practices, which, from around 1825 onwards, were also exploited by commercial printers, who started producing ready-made album-like compilations of images and texts. Collectively known as annuals, these were part portfolio of prints, part anthologies of poems and short prose. Most of these illustrated periodicals came out annually, in November, to coincide with the market for New Year gifts. An important sector of the rapidly expanding market for prints and illustrations, they mixed on the drawing room table with albums made by the woman of the house.

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With titles such as Forget-Me-Not,51 Pictorial Album,32 and Drawing Room Scrap-Book,33 these were seen as a particularly feminine genre. Popular variants were Heaths Book o f Beauty,34 and the Court Album ,35 which specialised in portraits of aristocratic women, Queens and other worthy women from history, accompanied by short biographical texts. Collectively also referred to as ‘Gift Books’, ‘Drawing Room Books’ or ‘Picture Books’ in reviews and adverts, these were early versions of today’s coffee table books. Portraits; genre vignettes featuring women or children; women in exotic or rural costumes and locations; and picturesque landscapes and ruins, were the staple imagery of the illustrations, which were considered more important than the text. Textual material included short stories, often based around the lifestyles of the aristocracy; short essays, often describing foreign locations or exotic lifestyles; and biographical pieces or poems intended to ‘illustrate’ the visual material. The most popular title in the first part o f the century was probably the Keepsake, published by Charles Heath between 1828 and 1857, and imitated by many other publications which used the word in their own titles as a byword for an elegant feminine illustrated book, to the extent that the word also became used to describe the whole genre. The Keepsake, at one guinea the most expensive of the annuals,36 became famous for being bound in crimson watered silk, a fabric usually used for women’s dresses, further connoting the genre as feminine.37The defining characteristic of ‘Annuals’, as opposed to later ‘Picture Books,’ seems to have been that the images were chosen first, and the accompanying texts were then commissioned to match or poetically illustrate the images. This was partly for practical reasons, as obtaining visual material and preparing it for printing was more costly and time-consuming than commissioning poems or texts to match the pictures. As Thackeray describes them, these books were ‘daintily illustrated with pictures of reigning beauties, or other prints of a tender and voluptuous character; and, as these plates were prepared long beforehand, requiring much time in the engraving, it was the eminent poet who had to write to the plates, and not the painters who illustrated the poems’ (340).38 These texts, supposed to

31 Originally subtitled A Literary Album, this was the first annual, published in 1822 by Rudolph Ackerman, who owned a print shop and drawing school in London; Anne Reiner, Friendship s Offering (London, 1964). 32 Subtitled: Cabinet o f paintings fo r the year ¡837 (London, 1836); Ruary McLean, Victorian Book Design (London, 1963). 33 Subtitled: With Poetical Illustrations by L.E.L. (London, 1832 to 1854). Other editors included the Hon. Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton and Sarah Stickney (afterwards Ellis); Glennis Stephenson, Letitia London (Manchester and New York, 1995). 34 Edited first by L.E.L. then by the Countess of Blessington, (London, 1833-1847); the term became generic for the type of publication. 35 Published, like most annuals, in London, 1850-1857. 36 Prices began at 12 shillings; Alison Adburgham, Women in Print (London, 1972), p. 239. 37 On the Keepsake, see L.E.L. s ‘Verses 'and 'The Keepsake fo r 1829, Electronic Editions, Romantic Circles, Terence Hoagwood, Kathryn Ledbetter and Martin M. Jacobsen eds (www. rc.umd.edu, 2001). This is an electronic facsimile edition of sections of the Keepsake for 1829 [L.E.L. s Verses). 38 Thackeray The History o f Pendennis (1848-1850; London, 1986).

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Women ’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

be inspired by the images, were liable to be criticised as written to order with no real inspiration. The first issue of the Keepsake, to give one example, featured a portrait o f ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford’, from a painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, ‘illustrated’ by a poem written by L.E.L. addressing the mute steel engraving.39 Reviewers in the late 1850s made much of the difference between annuals and later picture books, which made looser visual and textual connections, and took advantage of faster printing methods and a growing range of existing plates available to be reprinted. Not being designated for a specific year, picture books had a longer shelf life. The crucial difference, however, seems to have been the explicitly commissioned nature of the poems in annuals, which intruded too much into the fantasy of poetry as a pure art form, beyond commercial consideration and financial need. This might explain some of the scorn with which annuals were described later in the century. This is how Margaret Oliphant described annuals in her review of the latest ‘Picture-Books’:40 The days of annuals are over and past. ... Those wonderful stories - those scraps of murdered drama and sublime blank verse - those invocations of the serene beauty steelgraven on the frontispiece ... Whether it will ever be possible to make verses and pictures ‘to match’ without sacrificing one of the united arts ... it is a question which we will not undertake to answer ... But we have not given up the laudable practice of making presents at Christmas, nor of making books, magnificent and sumptuous, for the same. (309)

In practice, they were all handsomely bound, lavishly illustrated volumes with short texts, intended to be looked at and leafed through casually, perhaps in company, rather than for sustained and solitary reading. The illustrations were normally steel engravings, imitating with a cheaper method the look of the copper plate used in finely crafted eighteenth-century prints. At times, their style imitated the sketches and pencil drawings found in women’s albums, or the effects of water-colours. The text was set in decorative typefaces; the covers were often embossed and decorated with gilt text, and in more expensive editions, elaborately bound in morocco leather and inlayed with gold and colour. The cover was important, as the book was supposed to look good from the outside, lying on the drawing room table. Several contributors to Mrs Birkbeck’s album also published or worked for annuals. These include Mary Shelley,41 William Jerdan,42 Letitia Landon, Amelia Opie, and Barbara Hofland.43 Corbould, identified as the author of the drawing on page 15 of the Birkbeck album, was a name closely associated with the illustration of annuals.44 Landon, who wrote two ‘Songs’ in Mrs Birkbeck’s album, was one of the many women writers who became famous through their work on annuals.

59 L.E.L. s 'Verses'. 40 Oliphant, ‘Picture-Books', Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 81(1857), 309-18. 41 She contributed, for example, to the Keepsake for 1829; L.E.L 'Verses ’and Adburgham, pp. 218-72. 42 Editor of the Literary Gazette, Jerdan also wrote for the Keepsake. Stephenson, p. 26. 43 Adburgham, p. 267. 44 Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting (London, 1999).

Nineteenth-Century Album Culture

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She edited and wrote for the Literary Souvenir” the Keepsake, Fishers Drawing Room Scrap-Book, the Pictorial Album, and Heath s Book o f Beauty. By publishing specially commissioned texts, rather than anthologising already published material, annuals gave writers, women in particular, a prestigious outlet for their work and an important source of income. Many annual writers were from aristocratic circles, chosen because their titles and well-known names would add to the air o f elite and fashionable femininity all annuals aspired to convey. The most famous o f these women was the Countess o f Blessington, writer of fashionable novels and o f the Journals o f Conversations with Lord Byron (1832).4* Writing was an acceptable occupation for women and connection with aristocratic names gave annuals desirable connotations of taste, exclusivity and aristocratic patronage that neutralised to some extent the potential vulgarity o f cultural products produced for a large audience. Annuals marketed and presented themselves as collections fit for a Queen or a Lady of taste and refinement. Fishers Drawing Room Scrap-Book illustrated its frontispiece with a portrait o f the future Queen, Princess Victoria, captioned with her engraved signature, as if she had personally owned, or given as a gift, each copy of the publication.47 Heaths Book o f Beauty's frontispiece was decorated by a portrait bust of the young Queen, in a neo-classical niche with ums and wreaths, turning each copy into a collection in her honour. In their contents, annuals sometimes addressed the genre itself by making references to women’s album collecting, involving the reader in this as an elite activity. In H eath’s Book o f Beauty for 1838, for example, we have a portrait of Mrs Lane Fox, looking up at the viewer from the album she has on her table (Figure 2.2). The accompanying poem describes ‘the book that in your lap reclines’.48 In the last verses, the woman in the illustration, who as an observer of albums mirrors the woman looking at this particular issue of the Book o f Beauty, is compared to the making of portraits and prints: ‘Let the glad artist learn of you, / Lady, the art of true engraving. / You who at every glance awake / A portrait teeming with expression, / And cleverly contrive to make, / Where’er you go, a proof impression!' [his emphasis] (253). Annuals here are represented as duplicating in print not only a feminine interest in small images in bound volumes, but the effect that women themselves have, as Ladies and/or Beauties, on the circle of people they meet. This capacity to ‘at every glance awake a portrait teeming with expression,’ is thus common to the annual, as a book of beauty; to Mrs Lane Fox, as a beauty herself; and by extension, to the woman who is looking at this annual, leafing through pages of portraits, and with every gesture creating a new visual sensation. As she stops to look at this portrait, the reader’s pose mirrors that of Mrs Fox, and she too can feel engaged in ‘awaking portraits teeming with expression’, in a moment of fantasy in which looking and being looked at become blurred. 45 First published in 1824. 46 Adburgham, p. 249. 47 Many copies of the annuals 1 have looked at are inscribed by hand, on the frontispiece, with the name of the owner, or with a message from the person giving them as a gift. 4g James Smith, ‘Mrs. Lane Fox’, Heath s Book o f Beauty (London, 1838), pp. 252-53.

46

Figure 2.2

Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

‘Mrs Lane Fox’,//c-a/AX Book o f Beauty (\83&). 14x 11 cm. Permission British Library (P.P. 6680).

Nineteenth-Century Album Culture

47

Another example of this connection between women’s albums, annuals and desirable femininity can be seen in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-Book for 1851, where an illustration titled ‘English Beauty’ is teamed with a French poem described as found in a young woman’s album: ‘vers inscrits sur I'album d u n e demoiselle anglaise' [verses inscribed on the album of an English young lady].49 The verses themselves are a romantic, almost racy address to this English Beauty, by ‘/e chevalier de chatelaine’ [the lady’s knight], who wants to be everything that touches her, gives her pleasure or makes her happy. The verses are now not only in the album o f that one English Beauty, were they would have been inscribed by hand, but also in the album, or Drawing Room Scrap-Book, of every English woman who has bought or been given a copy, and who can fantasise about having been addressed by such a sensual and romantic chevalier, without having to take the trouble to write poems herself, seek poems from other people, or even just copy verses by hand. To get a sense o f how these publications were used, we can turn to fiction. Charlotte Bronte refers to albums and illustrated books in Jane Eyre (1847).50 The setting is the drawing room o f Mr Rochester’s country seat, after a dinner party for the local aristocracy and landed gentry. Jane Eyre, working as a governess for Mr Rochester, has been invited to join them after supper, and Bronte’s detailed description o f the room and the social interactions within it vividly renders the excitement and curiosity of someone who has never been a witness to such a gathering before. After supper, the ladies have spent some time by themselves in the beautifully furnished drawing room, amusing themselves by a little chat or by looking at the books displayed on the table, while the men were having port and cigars. But now they have come back into the room, and coffee is served. Illustrated books now provide an opportunity to pair up with men: ‘Mr Frederick Lynn has taken a seat besides Mary Ingram and is showing her the engravings o f a splendid volume: she looks, smiles now and then, but apparently says little’ (205). Blanche Ingram, young and beautiful, is ‘standing alone at the table, bending gracefully over an album,’ (205) waiting to be sought by Mr Rochester. Looking at albums here is a cool pose in a social and sexual game o f momentary seductions and skirmishes in long-term strategies o f matrimonial conquest. By the time Jane Eyre was published, albums were well established as drawing room accessories; they provided entertainment and a focus for interactions between guests. As a wealthy and well-travelled individual, the prints in Mr Rochester’s albums may well have been collected abroad, rather than bought at home. Their presence on the table is another detail demonstrating how well Mr Rochester’s drawing room is appointed, with an awareness of what is required to entertain in style, surprising in someone who seems to socialise only rarely. But albums and picture books could also be associated with a commercialised feminine culture, of an uncertain status between gentility and vulgarity, and the use o f visual culture to climb up the social scale, rather than demonstrate rank. We find them for example in the drawing room that Becky Sharp, the heroine of Vanity Fair (1847), manages to rent and furnish with borrowed funds while seducing Lord 49 Anon., ‘English Beauty’, Fishers Drawing Room Scrap-Book (London and Paris, 1851), pp. 24-5. 50 Bronte, Jane Eyre ( 1847; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1984).

48

Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

Steynes into giving her not only gifts and loans, but also a lucrative position for her husband.51 They figure in the list of valuable items her French maid escapes with, when scandal and ruin finally destroys Becky’s marriage: ‘four richly gilt Louis Quatorze candlesticks, six gilt Albums, Keepsakes, and Books of Beauty, a gold enamelled snuff-box which had once belonged to Madame du B arri,... the sweetest little inkstand... and all the silver laid on the table’(633). Beautiful and accomplished, but bitter and cynical from her experience of poverty, Becky Sharp does not accept the place allotted to her by society, and refuses to become a governess. She becomes instead a social climber with few moral scruples, and makes her way into wealth and high society through seduction and marriage. We know she can paint, as one of her many accomplishments, but we are not encouraged by the text to imagine that she might have worked on those albums. The social whirlwind o f her life with Rawdon, in fashionable, aristocratic and morally corrupt London, would not have given her the time to do so. Besides, personal albums would have been o f no interest to Mademoiselle Fifine, who steals them in lieu of wages. Thackeray had reviewed annuals for Fraser’s Magazine in 1838:52 They all bear the same character, and are exactly like the Books o f Beauty, Flowers o f Loveliness, and so on, which appeared last year. A large weak plate ... a woman badly drawn, with enormous eyes ... and an exceedingly low-cut dress - pats a greyhound, or weeps into a flower-pot. ... The picture is signed Sharpe, Parris, Corbould, Corbaux, ... Miss Landon, Miss Mitford, or my Lady Blessington, writes a song upon the opposite page, about water-lily, chilly, stilly, shivering beside a streamlet, plighted, blighted, lovebenighted, falsehood sharper than a gimlet, lost affection, recollection, cut connection, tears in torrents, true-love token, spoken, broken, sighing, dying, girl of Florence, and so on. The poetry is quite worthy of the picture, and a little sham sentiment is employed to illustrate a little sham art.

He also reviewed them disparagingly in the same magazine in 1838 and 1839, although this did not prevent him from contributing to them.53 Not every critic shared Thackeray’s disdain for annuals. As Stephenson and Adburgham emphasise, many saw annuals as a positive contribution to women’s visual culture, cultivating a taste for art amongst the emerging members of the wealthy middle classes. Some reviewers went as far as associating annuals with the growth of interest in contemporary art by a new generation o f collectors from industrial towns such as Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds. Many other critics thought the illustrations were the best element, as they were often engraved from the works of famous artists such as Turner and Maclise, and thus contributed to women’s art appreciation. Images of the lady The commodification of aristocratic women within periodicals was not itself a nineteenth-century phenomenon. In the eighteenth century, the life and activities of 51 Thackeray, Vanity Fair (\%47; London, 1985). 52 Quoted by Stephenson, p. 128. 55 Adburgham, pp. 218-72.

Nineteenth-Century Album Culture

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Georgiana, Duchess o f Devonshire, were extensively reported. As a noted political hostess, active campaigner for the Whigs, and leader of the fashionable set, her image and accounts of her activities helped sell newspapers, magazines, and prints. Her personal attendance at a theatre could launch a stage career and her patronage could make the reputation o f musicians. Anything she wore was reported, and became fashionable.54 As we will see, engraved portraits of her continued to be sold throughout the nineteenth century. By then, the most explicit and visible form o f this commodification was the circulation of portraits o f aristocratic women, as loose prints, bound in annuals and albums, increasingly used on the front page of women’s magazines, and even advertised in The Times as textiles: ‘[16 September 1842] Portraits Woven in Silk at Spitalfield Weaving, copied from engravings with a new technique developed on Jacquard looms. First attempt a portrait of the Duchess of Kent, 10 by 14 inches, to be presented to her in the course o f the week’ (6). This market was enhanced by the widespread reporting in the press of the activities of the aristocracy. Sections titled ‘Fashionable Intelligence’ or ‘The Upper Ten Thousand’ gave readers details of which Ladies were coming to town, or leaving for the country or abroad; reported distinguished guests at important parties during the season, forthcoming marriages and presentations at court; and gave details of the latest dresses, hairstyles and outfits worn on such occasions. On the 22nd July 1852 The Times printed an anonymous article expressing some anxiety about the propriety of this commodification of women: how can any judicious parent or guardian consent to such a profanation as that the portraits of these young ladies should be hawked about every printseller’s shop, to give a fillip to the imagination of every soaring Guppy in the three kingdoms? ... Let us ... ask ourselves [about] these young ladies ... who are languishing at us out of the shop-windows, or simpering in these gorgeously bound books at every booby who will invest half-a-guineas in the purchase of a batch of them? Surely the most un-Oriental husband - father - brother must think it just as well to avoid such a consummation for his female relatives. (4-5)

The light tone of the article suggests that the experience was familiar, and the anxiety of a passing nature. The ‘Guppy’ in the article suggests the latest instalment o f Charles Dickens’s Bleak H oused Its chapters are punctuated by reports o f Lady Dedlock’s movements in the ‘Fashionable Intelligence’. Throughout the book she is under constant scrutiny, by the press, her husband, the servants, the family lawyer, and visitors to the Deadlock’s Country House. Even when she is not there, her portrait is under scrutiny. Dickens describes the circulation and currency of both engraved portraits and aristocratic gossip columns, making explicit the relationship between the two in his portrayal of Mr Guppy, a law clerk, and his impoverished friend Mr Jobling, whose most precious possession is a: collection of copper-plate impressions from that truly national work, ‘The Divinities of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty’, representing ladies of title and fashion

54 Amanda Foreman. Georgiana, Duchess o f Devonshire (London, 1999). 55 Dickens, Bleak House (1852-1853; Ware. Hertfordshire, 1993).

50

Women s’ Albums and Photography in Victorian England in every variety o f smirk that art, combined with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent portraits ... he decorated his apartment, and as the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress ... ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed by every variety of flower-pot and balustrade, the result is very imposing. ... Fashion is ... Jobling’s weakness. To borrow yesterday’s paper ... and read about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are shooting across the fashionable sky in every direction ... gives him a thrill of joy. To be informed what the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty is about, and means to be about, and what Galaxy marriages are on the tapis, and what Galaxy rumours are in circulation, is to become acquainted with the most glorious destinies of mankind. [He] reverts from this intelligence, to the Galaxy portraits implicated; and seems to know the originals, and to be known to them. (236-37)

Mrs Birkbeck too collected portraits of fashionable women and aristocratic beauties, some of which were probably cut out from annuals. But rather than keeping them in her precious album, or on the walls at home, she pasted them in another album, a rougher scrapbook dedicated to a variety of printed imagery and ephemera.56Anna Birkbeck’s hand-made album might have shared writers and some of the visual taste with fashionable feminine publications, but its personal, oneoff nature, with its pages marked by individuals rather than by printing presses, removes it from the world of mass-circulated and commodified culture. How well the Birkbeck album manages to hint at fashion without straying into the vulgar, to include well known names without turning them into commercialised commodities, and to give the sense of a collection based on authentic personal interests which included serious scientific and political pursuits, becomes clearer if we compare it with one collected by a fictional doctor’s wife in Middlemarch, published in 1871 but set in the period 1829-1832.57 Rosamond Vincy, who marries Dr Lydgate with disastrous consequences for his pursuit of science and learning, also keeps an album: ‘Rosamond ... was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verses, and perfect blonde loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date’ (301). She feels herself in love with Lydgate, not because of any understanding of him as a man, but excited by his ‘aroma of rank’ (196). The fantasy of being married to him, a professional from a family of landed gentry, allows her to imagine herself ‘nearer to that celestial condition on earth’ (195). While in the grip of this fantasy, ‘more than ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-carts, and portraits o f friends ... being from morning till night her own standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own consciousness’ (196). It seems that while men like Jobling fantasised about knowing and being known by ladies, women fantasised being ladies. Rosamond has never mixed socially with the local gentry and aristocracy; her knowledge o f their behaviour is as second-hand as Mr Jobling’s in Bleak House. Her ideas about the behaviour o f perfect ladies come mainly from her education as the best pupil in a provincial school, ‘where the teaching included

56 Untitled MMS, Birkbeck Library. 57 George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Middlemarch (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985).

Nineteenth-Century Album Culture

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all that was demanded in the accomplished female - even to extras, such as getting in and out of a carriage’ (123). Her accomplished education might seem to make her interested in the arts poetry, drawing, music - but these are for her not a pleasure o f the imagination, to paraphrase Brewer, but poses she can strike as if in a fashion plate, to perform the part of a lady for an actual or imaginary audience. To marry Lydgate, Rosamond had given up the attentions of what might have turned out to be a better, if less genteel provider: Mr Ned Plymdale (one o f the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds) was in tête-à-tête with Rosamond. He had brought the last Keepsake, the gorgeous watered silk publication which marked modem progress at that time: and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting. ... ‘I think the Honourable Mrs S. is something like you’, said Mr Ned. He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it rather languishingly. (302)

Lydgate of course pours scorn over the Keepsake, ‘I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest - the engravings or the writings’ (303). With their romantic imagery and tumultuous texts, annuals gave women a temporary imaginative escape into a world o f beauty and art, Byronic heroes, powerful yet genteel heroines, and sensuous adventures in exotic locations. These were not always consonant with middle-class values o f respectable femininity, self-control and moderation, and the consumption of annuals continued to be seen as a problematic aspect in the cultural life o f middle-class women, filling their heads with unsuitable fancies that would make them unfit to manage a middle-class household. In Middlemarch, Rosamond’s sketching, copying poems in her album and admiring the latest issue o f the Keepsake signal the limited extent o f her education. She has been taught to aspire to better herself through a good marriage - one with someone above her in rank. But she has no real understanding of the cultural subtleties involved in being a perfect lady, rather than simply looking like one. While she recognises the gentility of albums, keepsakes or Edinburgh educated doctors,58 she cannot use them properly, ending up coarsening the fine tools o f Lydgate’s intellect and scientific aspirations by using them to acquire a costly and vulgar house in London. She has been educated enough to want to marry a doctor, rather than her richest suitor, but not enough to be the suitable wife o f a doctor with a limited income. Isolated from both her peers and her betters by her pretensions to a higher rank, Rosamond can take part in album culture only as a consumer. Even her sketching is a result o f purchasing impersonal commodities on the market - blank books, paints, notions of gentility - rather than the production o f hand-inscribed traces o f individuals, to be exchanged as gifts between equals. Anna Birkbeck’s collection of hand-made miscellanea is based not on highly mediated notions of gentility and the expediency of commercialised production, but 58 Lydgate, like George Birkbeck, was educated at Edinburgh University, which had a very good reputation for its medical training. Kelly, pp. 5-40.

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

on convivial and polite gift exchanges between herself and the people who wrote poems, painted watercolours, or simply signed their names for her album, out of respect rather than for a fee. It demonstrates that Anna Birkbeck’s interests were those of an amateur rather than a consumer. Her accomplishments as someone who arranged the contents and look of her album, as well as her marital connections, gave her the right to be addressed as ‘Lady’ by contributors to her album. This demonstrates her ability to socialise in a world at once fashionable and learned, using her networking skills rather than her purchasing power to accumulate a small but perfectly formed collection - which she can treasure not because of its commercial value, but because of its significance in human ties of friendship, which are, of course, priceless.

Chapter Three

Photographs, Albums, Women’s Magazines

Leafing through a few months worth of issues of the Lady s Newspaper and Pictorial Times from 1863,' we can get a flavour of how photography was used and represented in publications aimed at women. On January 31st, on a page titled ‘Pastimes’, after an article on ‘In-door Games’ and instructions on how to make ‘A Bell-Hamess For Boys ... worked in tapestry, and ... decorated with tiny ... bells’, is the first in a series on ‘Colouring Photographs’: ‘A very profitable and pleasing occupation [for which the] delicate handling and more refined manipulation of the female hand has been found to be pre-eminently suited’ (244). The series begins with painting portrait photographs with watercolours, then moves on to landscape and the use of oils, in three successive weekly instalments. On February 14th, a detailed review of the ‘The Exhibition of the Photographic Society’ is preceded by a summary of the development o f photography, from the experiments at the beginning of the century o f ‘our great chemist, Sir Humphrey Davy, aided by Mr. Thomas Wedgwood’, and ending with ‘Mr. F. S. Archer’s discovery of the application of collodion’ which has led to the ‘universal diffusion o f photographic knowledge and practice’ (285). A month later, the whole of the front page is taken up by an image o f ‘Her Majesty the Queen, With the Princess Beatrice on Her Knee (from a photograph published by A. Marion and Co., 152, Regent-street). Mother and daughter are both looking at a photograph (see Figure 6.1). Engravings from photographs were by then usual front page material in women’s magazines, normally accompanied by various articles. On the 18lh of April, the portrait engraved on the front cover is of the ‘Hon. Mrs. Norton, from a photograph by John and Charles Watkins, 34, Parliament Street’. This is accompanied by a biographical article on this early nineteenth-century writer of poems and fiction, together with a ‘Description of Our Sheet of Coloured Fashions’, and an article on the ‘Melancholy Death of an Artist’ - a ‘Mr. J. Hardy’. Other front covers engraved from a photograph in the same year include on the l l lh of April ‘The Maharaja Duleep Singh, K.S.I.’, who, the article tells us, was among the ‘Royal Personages’ who attended ‘the marriage o f H.R.H. the Prince of Wales’. In this issue the ‘Description’ does not refer to the ‘Separate Sheet o f Paris Designs’ advertised at the bottom of the page, but to a ‘Yellow Supplement’ of embroidery and calligraphic patterns, printed on heavier yellow paper. On May the 2nd, the front page is graced by a portrait o f ‘Signorina Carlotta Patti. From a photograph by Mr. Bassano, 122, Regent-street’. She, we are told, is the sister of the ‘celebrated Adelina P a tti..., a prima donna of remarkable excellence’, and as accomplished in music as 1

Henceforth Lady's Newspaper.

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Women s’ Albums and Photography in Victorian England

in ‘the sister art of Painting’. On the same page, the biographical article is juxtaposed with short items on the appointment of private secretaries to the ‘Earl de Grey and Ripon’, and to the Marquis of Hartington; a report o f the first target meeting of ‘The Bath Archers’, giving the names of the ladies and gentlemen who won prizes; and an announcement regarding the exhibition o f ‘Wedding Presents to the Princess of Wales’ to take place that week at the South Kensington Museum. By 1863, photography was a regular presence in women’s magazines such as the Lady’s Newspaper, as the original from which engravings had been taken, as an item in exhibition reviews, and as one of the surfaces to be decorated by accomplished feminine hands. Years before photographs could be reproduced directly onto print, women’s magazines had introduced them in their repertoire of celebrities and beauties, novelties and pastimes, cultural reports and ‘fashionable intelligence’ on the comings and goings of the ‘Upper Ten Thousands’. I am particularly interested in the use of photographs in the decorative projects that were a big part o f these magazines, mediating between the world of exhibitions, fashion and shopping, and a more private, intimate domain of domestic comfort, defined by objects made by female hands. The same period that saw the initial development of photographic literacy, textual print culture became available to a wider social spectrum of women, and several studies investigating the figure of the woman reader have been published.2 Less attention has been paid to how women may have looked at, used and valued the images that new forms of visual culture such as photography were making available to them. In this chapter I begin to explore the relationship between photography and nineteenth-century feminine culture, to show the role this played in constructing photography as a suitable feminine interest. To transfer the notion of the woman reader to one of the woman ‘looker’ is, however, problematic. As the slang use of the term suggests, for a woman to be a ‘looker’ is a reference to how she looks to others, not the description of an activity she herself performs. Mary Ann Doane discusses this paradox in her study of the woman’s film of the 1940s, ‘Western culture has quite specific notions of what it is to be ... a woman looking. When a woman looks, the verb ‘looks’ is generally intransitive (she looks beautiful) - generally, but not always’ (177).3 Like Doane’s, my historical investigation favours instances of women looking and being instructed in how to look, in genres aimed at women. This involves a reevaluation o f feminine culture that is also a re-evaluation of domesticity, one of its main ideological contexts. As feminist historians such as Elizabeth Langland have argued,4 we need to shift ‘from class defined in economic terms to class defined through cultural representation’ (6) - a definition which is also closer to nineteenthcentury conceptualizations of rank as being determined by upbringing and gentility

2 Janice Winship, Inside Womens Magazines (London and New York, 1987); Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (Oxford, 1993); Margaret Beetham, A Magazine o f Her Own? (London and New York, 1996); Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnson eds, Gender and the Victorian Press (Cambridge, 2003). 5 Doane, The Desire to Desire (Basingstoke and London, 1987). 4 Langland, Nobody’s Angels (Ithaca and London, 1995).

Photographs, Albums, Women’s Magazines

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as much as by titles and financial clout. Whereas men played a dominant role in earning or inheriting financial wealth, women managed these funds toward the acquisition and maintenance o f social status, producing the representations that helped to establish a family’s rank. In this perspective, the home, rather than being a possession or a haven, can be recognised as ‘a theatre for the staging of a family’s social position’ (9). The management of visual culture was one o f the practices through which women invested the economic and cultural capital o f the family to produce suitable social meanings. Clothes, decorative arrangements, dinner parties and visual representations (in albums or otherwise) would produce the family according to codes of gentility that could then be inflected to match the ‘tone and level’ o f the individual family unit, its success and expectations for the future. The process was a reciprocal one, as women were produced by domestic discourses even as they produced them; they were not, however, simply passive consumers of goods and values imposed on them by a male dominated culture. As Langland’s and other studies of consumption argues, to control ‘the production of meanings yields cultural capital’ (21) just as to control the means of production realises financial capital. Studies o f women’s magazines have tended to focus on their literary qualities;5 or on their construction of femininity in relation to notions of domesticity, fashion and the emergence o f modem forms o f advertising and shopping.6 Less attention has been paid to the visual qualities o f their illustrations and to the visual culture they promoted through features such as reviews of fine art exhibitions, decorative projects, embroidery patterns, and illustrated material throughout the magazine.7Yet these were important aspects of the constructions of femininity. Not because women necessarily did or were as represented in magazines, but because these representations constructed ideals and meanings, and gave them currency as available or desirable models which women could use to construct and represent their own identity. Women’s magazines were an important part of the context in which women’s albums circulated and were made meaningful, and one o f the vehicles through which photography was integrated within an existing culture. Here, I consider issues of the Lady s Newspaper (1847-1863); the Lady’s Own Paper (1866-1872); and the Queen (1861-1970). These titles were in print for a substantial part of the period I am interested in, and addressed women as generic ladies, rather than as Christian mothers, as evangelical publications o f the 1830s and 1840s did,8 or as part of an audience with a specialised interest in events at Court, catered for by the Court Journal (1829-1929) and the Court Circular (1856-1911). The L a d y’s Newspaper inherited some of its features 5 Cynthia White, Women's Magazines 1693-1969 (London, 1970); Alison Adburgham, Women in Print (London, 1972). 6 Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels (New York and Oxford, 1994); Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough eds, The Sex o f Things (Berkeley and London, 1996); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford eds, Consumers and Luxury (Manchester and New York, 1999); Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw (New Haven and London, 2000); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping fo r Pleasure (Princeton and Oxford, 2000). 7 But see Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch (1984; London, 1996); Penny Sparke, /4s Long as I t’s Pink (London, 1995); Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge and New York, 2001). 8 Beetham, pp. 45-56.

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Women 's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

from late-eighteenth-century weekly publications for upper-class women, which addressed themselves to a cultured and fashionable female public. The Queen was established by Samuel and Isabella Beeton, who also published and edited the more middle-class Englishwoman s Domestic Magazine. The Queen was bought out in 1863 by the publisher E.W. Cox, who merged it with the Lady’s Newspaper and re-launched the title as the Queen: the Lady’s Newspaper .9 The Lady’s Own Paper, subtitled ‘News of the Week, Music, Fashions, Novelettes, Domestic Varieties, & c.\ was one of its main competitors in the late-1860s. These were weekly publications, presenting themselves as general-interest papers for upper-class women - or women with upper-class aspirations and tastes. According to Beetham, they assumed readers had an income well above that o f the ‘respectable middle class’ (89). I compare them with the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852-1871). This was a cheaper title, aimed at women from a lower income bracket.10 In this, it was something of a pioneer, as the big expansion of magazines for middle-class women took place later, in the 1880s and 1890s. It initially included only patterns for plain sewing, and fewer fashion plates. After its re-design in 1860, it started to include more decorative embroidery and to include reports of Paris fashions, described with lots of hints on how they could be copied at home. The pricier titles addressed themselves to a more urban, well-informed readership. They reviewed the latest London plays, operas and concerts; and regularly discussed politics, under headings such as ‘Parliamentary Pictures (Sketched from the Ladies’ Gallery)’, featured in the Lady’s Newspaper during 1863. It seems just as relevant, however, to think about their differences in terms of the aspirations they reflect. Women unable to live the lifestyle represented by the more expensive magazines, might however be able to buy or borrow the occasional issue, to dream themselves into a higher sphere, while domestic servants might read and re-circulate hand-me-down issues as they did clothing. It is more difficult to imagine an aristocratic or wealthy woman taking an interest in the Englishwoman s Domestic Magazine, unless she wanted to use the plain sewing and knitting patterns for charitable initiatives. All these magazines included some poetry and serialised fiction. Illustrations were important, but they tended to be more plentiful and ornate in the ‘class’ papers, as the elite magazines were referred to by contemporaries.11 The most common front page illustration was a portrait of a woman, accompanied by a short text of a biographical nature, following the pattern established by Annuals and Books of Beauty. In the Lady s Newspaper, Lady’s Own Paper and in the Queen, the women were more likely to be titled ladies, whose beauty was represented as being the result o f their aristocratic blood, or women who had achieved success in lady-like cultural endeavours, such as artists and writers. To give just one example, an engraving from

9 Beetham, p. 92; Quentin Crewe, The Frontiers o f Privilege (London, 1961). For a while in the 1860s both titled run concomitantly, identical in their contents, illustrations and page numbers. I have continued using the Lady's Newspaper as original copies of these are easier to obtain in the British Library. 1 have at times omitted the day of publication, as month, year and page number are sufficient to identify articles in these yearly-bound volumes. 10 A two-penny monthly, while lady’s newspapers were usually six-penny weeklies. 11 Beetham, p. 89.

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a painted portrait o f Viscountess Jocelyn featured on the front page of the L ady’s Newspaper on the 7th o f March 1863, came with a brief biography highlighting her aristocratic lineage, marriage, Court appointments, and accomplishments. In the Englishwoman s Domestic Magazine, front-pages were more likely to be examples o f women who had excelled in charitable endeavours, such as Caroline Chisholm, a moral reformer interested in helping single women to move to the colonies, featured in an issue from 1854.12This engraving is captioned as being ‘from a Daguerreotype by Hogg, 433, West Strand’, an early example of a photograph being given as the original for the engraved portrait. As a middle-class woman, she was less likely to have painted portraits for the engraver to copy. An active interest in the fine arts was one of the defining characteristics of the figure of the fashionable lady. The Queen defined itself as ‘An Illustrated Journal and Review Containing Several Hundred Engravings o f Fine Art Subjects, Events of the Day, and Designs in Needlework’. Under the regular headings o f ‘Fine Arts’, ‘Notes on Art’ or ‘Exhibitions’, the Lady’s Newspaper and the Lady’s Own Paper reviewed shows at the Royal Academy, the Incorporated Society of British Artists, the Fine Arts British Institution, and the occasional private gallery. They regularly commented specifically on the quality of works by women artists, always referred to as ‘Ladies’. In February 1849, for example, the Lady's Newspaper praised works exhibited at the British Institution by Mrs Carpenter and Miss J Macleod, as ‘proof ... that the highest works of art can be achieved by our fair supporters - the LADIES’ (95). In 1851, beginning in May, it ran a long, extensively illustrated series on ‘The Great Exhibition - Pencilling by a Lady’ (288) which emphasised the contribution of women to the success of the exhibition, and the gentility o f their handiwork. New paintings were reproduced, sometimes with their audience. An illustration of the ‘Portrait o f the Royal Family Painted by Winterhalter’ showed the painting hung in a gallery, looked at by a crowd o f mainly women, gazing at the work or turning to their companions to pass comment.13 Fashion plates showed not only outfits, but also poses and activities. The Lady's Newspaper in March 1847 illustrated its ‘Paris and London Fashion’, a feature on evening dresses, with an image of women standing by a drawing-room table, one looking at an illustrated volume (Figure 3.1). The quality of the engraving makes it impossible to ascertain just what kind - it could have been an album collected by the hostess, or a commercial publication bought by her. Both would have functioned equally well in the context, leaving the viewer the pleasure of imagining such details. Looking at illustrated volumes while looking beautiful (as we have seen Blanche Ingram described in Jane Eyre) is part o f the mise-en-scene of fashionable and desirable feminine lifestyles.

12 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Vol. 2, 1853-1854, p. 65. Volumes of this magazine at the Women’s Library are bound in continuous page numbers without reference to the original months of publication, and occasionally without reference to the year or volume number. 13 Lady’s Newspaper, 22 May 1847, p. 490.

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Women ’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

and th e lung coda fiaiahed w ith (O ld fringe, l i u d dreas, a h a lf cap cotnpoaod of w hit* g&ua t ribbon edged w ith gold, u i d long fringad coda forming luppvta ; do m i-long glorea, w k h gold b r u c lo u .

on th* akirt.

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Figure 3.1

co o to I t u I iu

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‘Paris and London Fashions’, Lady's Newspaper (1847). Permission British Library (13 March 1847).

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In November 1849, the same section showed two women, one wearing an ‘Indoor Costume’ accessorised with a mahlstick, standing by her easel, while the other, wearing a ‘Morning Visiting Costume’, is looking intently at the painting the former has been working on.

Figure 3.2

‘Paris and London Fashions’, Lady’s Newspaper (1849). Permission British Library (10 November 1849).

Fashionable women not only looked at images, but would also be involved in making them, and women’s magazines supported such fashion plates with regular features giving instructions on drawing and painting, and other suitable feminine crafts, which ranged from wax flowers to small pieces of furniture. The Lady’s Newspaper ran, starting in July 1847, an ambitious series of ‘First Lessons in Oil Painting by Joshua Reynolds’ (40) in its regular section on ‘Drawing and Painting’. These image-making skills were complemented by instructions on ‘Etching for Ladies’ (40) - a series beginning in January 1847 - and making picture or mirror frames. Images were not just to be made, but also to be reproduced, exchanged and suitably displayed. Women could be involved at all of these stages, and magazines gave them a choice of projects to suit different skills and practical circumstances. In women’s magazines, the lady remains a cynosure of fashion and gentility, where

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Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England

these imply not only a familiarity with high society or at least its mores, but also knowledge of how to use one’s means with taste, and the ability to read manners and appearances. The Englishwoman s Domestic Magazine did not discuss exhibitions, or many other cultural events, but regularly reviewed the latest Annuals and Picture Books. Its instructions tended to concentrate on practical matters, for example how to clean paintings rather than how to paint. Nevertheless, it recommended drawing in 1851 as an ‘almost divine art’ (122) especially suitable for invalids and those caring for them, and for older women, who are described as looking better at the easel than at the piano. Accomplished women In the L ady’s Newspaper, notions of aristocratic femininity and domestic accomplishments were emphasised from the very beginning in its masthead, in which a portrait of Queen Victoria is surrounded by images of women embroidering (or, possibly, painting), making music, and gardening - cultivating beauty. In the Lady s Own paper, the masthead includes a number of vignettes of women performing similar activities, but also riding, playing croquet and watching a play - the last two in the company of men - surrounding a group of women of a variety of ages (a mother and her daughters?) grouped to read together the Lady’s Own Paper. The most explicit version of this lesson about the importance of accomplishments can be found in a popular children’s book later in the century.14 In Little Lord Fauntleroy, the lawyer sent by Lord Dorincourt to reclaim his grandson as inheritor o f the family title, first begins to think that the boy’s mother might not be the vulgar, moneygrubbing upstart his client thinks she is, when, even before meeting her, he sees the ‘many pretty things which a woman’s hand might have made’ (23), displayed in her parlour. O f course, she turns out to be a perfectly genteel, loving and beautiful young woman. This image of the accomplished female, able to use her hands to beautify and cultivate her surroundings, was not always straightforward, but fraught with complications; at once celebrated and criticised, sometimes within the same text. As Ann Bermingham shows, accomplishments such as drawing or playing the piano were supposed to provide occasions for women to display themselves, while denying that this is what they were doing.15 The contradiction was well understood at the time, and accomplishments could be treated ironically by the very publications which thrived on promising accomplished, lady-like femininity to their readers. This is from an article in the Lady’s Newspaper, September 1863, supposed to be from an exasperated ‘paterfamilias’, fed up with seaside holidays: ‘Afternoon [at the seaside], daughters all off on some sketching expedition, which means sitting on the rocks with a piece of paper and lead pencil, waiting for gentlemen to come and look at 14 Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886; London, 1994). 15 These, however, are not absolute divisions. Nineteenth-century novels suggest that accomplishments were also important for female to female display, and used by men to attract women, especially during courtship. Equally, riding or hunting could be considered as accomplishments used by men to socialise.

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them’ (195). As we have seen, the privatisation o f polite society and the influence of romantic notions of sensibility had given value to accomplishments as the cultivation of authentic individuality and inferiority. As Bermingham demonstrates, however, accomplished femininity remained ambiguous. It could be used as a pose to fashion oneself as desirable, as ‘a commercial and fabricated mode of subjectivity’ (185), and as a way to express oneself. The two were not necessarily different, or possible to tell apart, and the article here might be also making fun of men not realising this impossibility. Drawing and painting, dancing, deportment, music, what to read, and how to write elegantly were accomplishments originally emphasised in aristocratic education, which aimed to achieve a balance between cultivating knowledge and understanding, and the social skills that would enable men and women of the aristocracy to shine at the social occasions that punctuated life at court or in diplomatic circles.16 Drawing was also a relevant skill for the management and renovation of estates, and the commissioning of bespoke objects.17 In practice, however, drawing and painting were never important occupations for upper-class men, and while male education stressed the importance o f a balance between knowledge and accomplishments, the education of women was often confined to the latter. Girls learned drawing and painting, together with reading and writing, needlework, dancing, singing and music. These were to be pursued as amateur skills, rather than as professional activities, even if the standard achieved might be the same.18 This curriculum was criticised because it turned women into useless decorative objects, unfit to dedicate themselves to either the pursuit o f knowledge that would enable them to interact with men on an equal intellectual footing, nor to the care of family and home, making women dissatisfied with their roles as wives and mothers.19 This was a particular risk for middle-class women who could delegate fewer of their duties to servants. Nineteenth-century social commentators continued to disapprove of the fact that middle-class girls were educated not to achieve academically or professionally, nor to work at home, supervising and supplementing servants, but to prepare them for courtship and marriage to a successful man, whose work would enable them to live like ladies - like an aristocrat. Yet accomplishments were important as a means of social advancement. Successful commercial and professional men, rising in rank financially, needed accomplished wives who knew how to rise in rank socially. At the same time, it was considered wrong for a young woman to use her accomplishments to marry above her sphere, and was liable to be criticised as shallow and superficial, if not morally wrong. As an object of display on behalf of fathers and husbands, however, the 16 Ian Pears, The Discovery o f Painting (New Haven and London, 1988); John Brewer, The Pleasures o f the Imagination (London, 1997). 17 Francina Harwin, ‘Amusement or Instruction? Watercolour Manuals and the Woman Amateur’, Women in the Victorian Art World, Campbell Orr ed. (London and New York, 1995), pp. 149-66. 18 Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot’s Images o f Women (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992). 19 Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class (New York, 1992); Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life (New York and London, 1997).

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Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

accomplished woman was valued for her elegance and refinement. She could then be seen as softening and civilising middle-class men, brutalised by their contact with the competitive world of work.20 For this role to be maintained, accomplishments, and the women practising them, had to be seen to be removed from the world of commerce and capitalist or professional competition. Roles within the socially aspirational middle-class home were specialised not only across divisions of gender, but also of class - men worked for money, women fashioned themselves as ladies. Middle-class men were different from the gentry and the aristocracy because they were economically active, even if the ideal might still have been to amass enough capital to live off its returns. Middle-class wives and daughters, however, were like the aristocracy, living off someone else’s economic activity. Their work within the home was reconfigured as a combination of fulfilling a biological destiny and cultivating lady-like activities, represented as leisure. With this increased specialisation of gender roles, men concentrated on the sound knowledge they needed in the world of work, leaving women free to cultivate their artistic and cultural accomplishments, required to give gentility to the family unit. In the context of this division of roles in relation to work-for-money and work-for-gentility, the success of middle-class parents was to see their daughters educated to marry further up the social (and income) scale. To educate a daughter for work, whether in or out the house, would be a public admission of failure, of financial instability and dubious rank.21 This contradictory relationship with aristocratic femininity seems to me to be at the heart of nineteenth-century debates on domesticity, gentility and fashion. Gentility was a powerful yet undetermined concept, straddling moral qualities and cultural know-how. It could be used to reconfigure women’s activities within the home as not only signs of upward-mobility, but also as the best use of their powers for moral and civilising influence on their immediate family. If, as Rosalind Coward and Janice Winship show, being sexy is one of the main tropes of desire in twentieth-century women’s magazines, gentility, being (like) a member of gentry and aristocratic elites, was its nineteenth-century equivalent.22 This desire to imitate the aristocracy by consuming like them was also crucial to economic interests. New forms of media, like women’s magazines, provided visually rich and suggestive manuals to new modes of modem, genteel femininity. They could tap into middleclass desires to be like the aristocracy to promote goods and services that were successful because they could be (represented as) sold to both. Sara Stickney Ellis, in The Women o f England, is highly aware o f the possible conflicts between notions of gentility as moral conduct, and notions of gentility as

20 See also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (London, 1987); Carol Dyhouse, ‘Mothers and Daughters in the Middle-Class Home c. 1870-1914’, Labour and Love, Lewis ed. (Oxford and New York, 1986), pp. 27-47; Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880-1939 (New York, 1989). 21 This situation is gently satirised in Margaret Oliphant, Phoebe, Junior (1876; London, 1989). Well educated, ‘she was not allowed to go in for the Cambridge examinations’ as her father thought people would ‘imagine he meant to make a schoolmistress o f her, which he thanked Providence he had no need to do’ (18). 22 Rosalind Coward, Female Desire (London, 1984).

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attempting to follow the behaviour of the aristocracy.23 Her book is indicative of the complex efforts, evident in many other representations of women of the period, to reconcile these two different notions of gentility, one associated with inner values, the other with displays o f cultural consumption. Ellis quite carefully defines the women she is addressing: well educated, they have ‘no pretension to family rank’ (19), as they are the daughters, sisters and wives of tradesmen, small manufacturers and professional men of limited incomes. They live in neat houses in suburbs, and can employ one to four servants. They are, however, living in times o f change, in which fortunes can be made and lost rapidly, so that they might rise to aristocratic status, or be ‘compelled to mingle with the laborious poor’ (20). They need, therefore, to be able to move with ease and dignity in both high and low ranks of society. While most o f the advice literature detailed the skills needed by women moving up in society, Ellis is different in emphasising those needed to maintain gentility even if the family fortunes declined. She is critical of false notions of refinement, which induce trades­ people to turn their daughters into young ladies who might be good at drawing but no longer fit in the lifestyle of the parental home, and in which people become valued only insofar as they display the capacity to consume luxuries, forcing men to work too hard, or compromise their business integrity, to satisfy never-ending female desires. Ellis is aware that women will not embrace domesticity convinced by moral or practical arguments alone. Domesticity has to be made fashionable and desirable, ‘most lovely, poetical, and interesting, nay, even heroic’ (39), by being reconciled with fashionable accomplishments. This is achieved by idealising women’s manual involvement with the creation and care of the fabric of the home as transcending practicalities. Women should be taught manual skills, even if servants can be employed, because the care o f a loving hand is better than a hired hand. A woman’s physical contact with her environment gives it moral and affective meaning, making it truly welcoming and comfortable in a way that transcends the price and the usevalue of objects, and gives her an outlet for affective self-expression. Thus, in the perfect bedroom prepared for a visiting friend: With her own hand she must have placed upon the table the favourite toilet-cushion, worked by a friend who was alike dear to herself and her guest. With her own hand she must have selected the snow-white linen, and laid out, not in conspicuous obtrusiveness, a few volumes calculated for the hours of silent meditation, when her friend shall be alone. (195)

Such activities can be pleasurable and appropriate to ‘receive company in the most ... lady-like style’ (311); yet also morally good, especially when performed without seeking admiration or the ‘attentions of the other sex’ (227). Ellis invests this kind of accomplished work with the power to save men from the alienation of mechanised labour, and men and women from the temptation inherent in a competitive capitalist 23 Ellis, The Women o f England (London, 1839). More than seven editions were published of this book between 1839 and 1853, and it was still in print in 1895. Ellis also wrote several variations on the theme: The Daughters o f England, (New York, 1842; London, 1846); The Mothers ofEngland (London, 1843); The Wives o f England {London, 1843).

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society to succeed at the cost of moral integrity. In this role women can attain a wider sphere of influence than the home, and a heroic role important not only to their family, but to society at large. Ellis (herself a working woman, even after her marriage) is not in principle against women working outside the home for money. She thinks that lower-middleclass women, those most likely to need to earn a living, should be trained in suitable activities, beyond working as a governess. It is ironic, however, that the trades she considers most suitable are commercialised or mechanised versions o f the accomplished skills necessary for fashionable displays: ‘fancy millinery’, ‘the art of engraving’ and textiles design (347). I have discussed Ellis in some detail to highlight how this well known articulation of the ideals of domesticity invests women’s manual skills with the power to be at once entertaining and decorative; a possible vehicle for pleasure and self expression; but also morally good. Women’s involvement with the fabric of their domestic surroundings, using their practical and visual skills, resolves the dichotomies between the image of the accomplished lady as a fashionable but selfish creature, seeking admiration, consuming beyond her means, and attempting to seduce men from a high rank; and the image of the domestic woman, loving and giving, too focused on the comforts of her family to shine in polite society. A good and accomplished woman, no matter from which rank, would be able to enjoy the satisfactions of both models: to marry for love, but to a good provider of suitable rank; to use her accomplishments to make her home loving and comfortable, but also attractive to genteel visitors, especially those the family might entertain to help husband and children in their careers or marriage prospects. This is also how accomplishments were presented in women’s magazines. A tactile involvement in making or decorating by hands things that could be put on display, either on the body or in the home, allowed women to be fashionable and domestic at the same time; to express themselves, and to be dedicated to family comforts; to shine with gentility for visitors, but not for personal vanity. At the same time, drawing and painting as feminine accomplishments continued to be valued by the aristocracy and at Queen Victoria’s Court, noted for eschewing frivolous entertainment such as dancing.24We can get a taste of the role that sketching and looking at each other’s sketches played amongst Ladies at court, in the letters that the Honourable Eleanor Stanley, Maid o f Honour to Queen Victoria, wrote home:25 [To her mother, 21 November 1852] I saw L. Conning’s sketches of this summer on Friday last; they are lovely and I think they are the best I have ever seen o f hers; ... She is so sweet and kind, and nicer than ever. She has some sketches with her done by Lady Waterford from nature ... ; horses, peasants, etc., quite beautiful and equal almost to any artist. (221) [To her father, 30 November 1852] The Queen looked at my new drawings ... and begged me to do her a copy of a sketch I had done at Taymouth when I was there; she was very kind and gracious. (224) 24 Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria (London, 1990); see also Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R. I. (London and Sydney, 1983). 25 Eleanor Stanley, Twenty Years at Court, 1842-1862 (London, 1916).

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Women’s drawings and their willingness to share them are an integral part of their graciousness, and a valuable currency in courtly exchanges. The Court also sanctioned the value of albums as aristocratic objects, by routinely giving as a present David Bogue’s Court Albums, which contained portraits of the female aristocracy engraved from drawings by John Hayter, accompanied by short historical texts.26 The culture in which photography was introduced, as we will see first at Court and then in women’s magazines, valued as genteel and fashionable women’s amateur activities as viewers, producers, and collectors or curators of images in their own spaces, whether these spaces were rooms, courts or albums. Women’s relationships with images often emphasised their social function as vehicles o f affective and personal exchanges and meanings, rather than their intrinsic aesthetic value.

Lady photographers and photography for ladies As we have seen, one way to understand the material collected by Mrs Birkbeck is as traces to remember people by. Her album is too early to include photographs, but very similar longings for traces were animating early experiments attempting to fix the image formed by a camera obscura onto a light-sensitive surface. As most histories point out, the optical and chemical principles which made photography possible had been known for a long time. As Geoffrey Batchen demonstrates, these well known principles were applied to photography only when romantic ideas of subjectivity and the picturesque made it desirable to develop a method of obtaining images that could be conceptualised as spontaneous traces of nature itself.27 Batchen traces these ideas back to Rousseau’s writings about the origins o f painting and language, which quote the ancient Roman myth o f the invention of painting. The tale o f the Corinthian maid who invented drawing when she traced with a charcoal the shadow cast by her lover as he slept before going off to war, was particularly popular between 1770 and 1820, and represented in a number of paintings and drawing.28 This was also the period in which silhouette portraits were at the peak of their popularity. Batchen problematises notions of photography as a realist medium, to show how the interest of early experiments with the medium were animated not only by positivist concepts of knowledge and objective vision, but also by romantic longings for love, nature, spontaneity and individuality, which gave value to gathering and collecting traces of nature and people. This was well understood by early writers on photography. David Brewster, for example, in one of the earliest articles on ‘Photogenic Drawing’ (1843) placed the development of photography in a grand narrative of progress, in which images made by the sun itself, and therefore indirectly by God in his manifestation as light, could contribute not only to scientific, artistic, and historic knowledge, but also to

26 27 28 (1934;

McLean, Victorian Book Design (London, 1963), p. 18. Batchen, Burning With Desire (Cambridge Mass. and London, 1997). See also Ernst Kris and Otto Kurtz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image o f the Artist New Haven and London, 1979).

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knowledge of the self.29 In the ‘sphere of the affections, where the magic names of kindred and home are inscribed’ photographs are interesting not only for ‘their minute accuracy as works of art’ but also because they are ‘instinct with associations ... vivid and endearing. The picture is connected with its prototype by sensibilities peculiarly touching. It was the very light which radiated from its brow - the identical gleam which lighted up his eye ... that pencilled the cherished image, and fixed themselves for ever there’ (330-31). For Brewster, photographs were traces to understand the future, as well as remember the past and one’s own mortality. He was probably the first to write explicitly about the special value of photography as an image caused by the light reflected off the natural world, historical events, and the features o f loved ones. This special value was further theorised by Charles Sanders Peirce, writing between 1893 and 1910 about the photograph’s affinity with other indexical signs, such as footprints or mirror images, which denote objects by physically being caused by them.30 These are signs that point to their meaning, like an index finger. An icon is a sign which looks the same as the object signified, for example a portrait; and the symbol is a sign related to its meaning only by social conventions, like a name. In the photograph, iconic and indexical features come together; a photographic portrait refers to the portrayed because it looks like him or her, but it is also an index of that person, physically caused by his or her presence in front of the camera. Unlike a painting, a photograph cannot be made from memory or the imagination. Like all other iconic or indexical signs, portraits also acquire or are given symbolic significance. By the 1840s domestic ideology had identified Brewster’s ‘sphere of the affections, ... kindred and the home’ (330) as a feminine province. In this sphere photography could be valuable not because of its scientific realism or its aesthetic potential, but by virtue of its indexicality, its direct physical connection with its referent. Women’s magazines seized the potency of the photographic image as a trace, but used it to connect their readers, addressed in their private sphere of home, with the wider and more public worlds of fashionable aristocratic society and cultural pursuits. Unlike the Keepsake and other annuals, women’s magazines did not usually credit paintings as the source of the engraved portraits that featured on their front page. Portraits were no longer used to acquire high-art associations, but only to endow the magazine with a range of faces that readers could identify with and understand as personifications of the Lady addressed and constructed by the magazine. Thus, we are not given the author of a ‘Portrait o f the Duchess of Wellington’ exhibited at Apsley House, featured on the front page o f the Lady’s Newspaper on the 7,h of June 1862. The picture is surrounded not by her biography, as was usual, but by an article titled ‘The Women of England’, in which the author, ‘Monsieur Auguste’, announces that he is going to write a book on ‘the beautiful women of England’, whose superior claims can be seen ‘in the print-shop windows of London [where] there are now displayed several portraits of the beauties in the 29 Brewster, ‘Photogenic Drawing, or Drawing by the Agency of Light’, Edinburgh Review 76 (1843), 309-44. 30 Published as ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, Philosophical Writings o f Peirce, Buchler ed. (New York, 1955), pp. 98-119.

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Court o f Queen Victoria’. The title of Ellis’s well known essay on domesticity is now used to advertise a publication very similar to those ‘Books o f Beauty’ reviewers found outmoded. Not that these had ever disappeared; in March 1860, the Lady's Newspaper section on ‘Miscellanea’ announced that: A work devoted to the Female Celebrities of the present and the last two centuries is promised by Messers. Jas. Hogg and Sons in a few days.... The following lady notabilities will figure in it: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ... Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) ... Certainly an attractive list. (227)

As we have seen, by 1863 the portraits of contemporary celebrities appearing on the front pages of women’s magazines were regularly captioned as having been engraved from photographs, giving the photographer’s name and address, or the publisher if different.31 This may have been partly for copyright reasons, but I would argue that the prominence of the caption ‘from a photograph’ was also due to the positive connotations that photographs, and being photographed, were acquiring. The range of female worthies was wider than the range of Beauties featured in annuals. As well as beautiful young royals such as Princess Dagmar (featured on the Lady’s Newspaper's on the 28lh of March 1863) we also find the elderly Elizabeth Eastlake, writer of fiction and essays on a variety of subjects, including art and photography (Figure 3.3);32 and Anna Jameson, author of a number of publications on artistic and literary themes, featured on the Lady’s Own Paper on the 24th of August 1867.33A photographic source suggested not so much greater realism - the engravings were as stylised as those from paintings - but a more direct contact between the individual portrayed, the magazine, and the woman reading it. In turn, the subjects of the portraits gave photographs the aura of gentility and accomplishment these women personified. Photography as a new form of image-making had been publicised not only in the world of commerce as a new service or profession, but also, particularly in this country, on the aristocratic stage of society. Like all debutantes, photography had been introduced at Court, sponsored by a female relative who was herself known to the Queen. In 1840, Lady Caroline Mount Edgecumbe, Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria, had shown the Queen and Prince Albert an album of Calotypes by Henry Fox Talbot, who was her brother.34 Such exhibitions of visual accomplishments 31 Photographers sometimes sold the right to make what could be thousands of prints of best-selling photographs to firms, such as Marion and Co., specialising in large (photographic) print runs, often in the carte-de-visite format; John Plunkett, Queen Victoria (Oxford, 2003). 32 Eastlake is now known for her essay on ‘Photography’, Quarterly Review 101 (1857). See Art in Theory 1815-1900, Harrison, Wood and Gaiger eds (Oxford, 1998), pp. 655-62. 33 Jameson’s books include a Handbook to the Public Galleries o f Art in and near London (1842) and The Poetry o f Sacred and Legendary Art (1848). See Art in Theory 1815-1900, Harrison, Wood and Gaiger eds, pp. 41-5 and 422-26. 34 Harry Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot (London, 1977), p. 126. Carol McCusker, ‘Silver Spoons and Crinolines: Domesticity and the “Feminine" in the Photographs of William Henry Fox Talbot’, First Photographs, Gray, Oilman and McCusker eds (New York, 2002), pp. 17-22. See also the essays by Carol Armstrong, Geoffrey Batchen, and Steve Edwards in History o f Photography 26:2 (2002), a special issue dedicated to Fox Talbot.

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Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

were part of the daily exchanges between Ladies in Waiting and visitors at Court. Fox Talbot’s early experiments with photography included a familiar repertoire of images: picturesque views, reproductions of art objects, and portraits. The only remarkable thing about the album Lady Caroline showed at Court would have been its technique, which is likely to have been discussed. 1 1} R : t ; . k r,

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Figure 3.3

‘Lady Eastlake’, Lady s Own Paper (1867). Permission British Library (9 March 1867).

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During the next thirty years, the Royal couple purchased large quantities of photographic equipment to set up a number of studios and darkrooms. In 1853 they became patrons of the newly established Royal Photographic Society,35 began collecting photograph albums, and started visiting photographic exhibitions. They had themselves and their family photographed by several photographers, including Richard Beard, who took a Daguerreotype portrait of Prince Albert in 1842, and Henry Collen, who photographed the Queen using Talbot’s Calotype method in 1844 or 1845.36 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert also commissioned or bought photographs of many other subjects, from copies of well known art works to images intended as works o f art in their own right. The royal photographic activities were noted by courtiers, whose latest news from Court must have been a sought-after currency for drawing-room chit-chat. Eleanor Stanley wrote home to her father from Windsor castle in 1855: [16 January 1855] We have been amusing ourselves looking at the Queen’s private album of photographs; rather amusing, all the children in all sorts of groups and dresses, a good many of the household; and the Queen and Prince themselves in every variety of attitude; such as his sitting looking into a book and she with her arm round his neck standing by - or she turning away as if saying no to something, while he is leaning over her as they sit on the sofa as if trying to convince her and bring her round to what he wishes - and many less interesting. (325)

Looking at photographs in albums becomes part of an established pattern of exchange and conviviality at court. The photographs Stanley described were probably those taken by Roger Fenton at Buckingham Palace in March 1853, comprising a number o f formal and informal poses of the Royal couple, singly, together and with their children, and a number o f tableaux vivant of the Royal children in costume. Fenton also gave them photography lessons and helped them set up a darkroom at the palace.37 Photography started to appear as a feature of important society events, and the fact was duly noted in The Times, reporting, on the 18,h of July 1848, that: ‘Mr Beard has for some days been occupied in producing photographs of the Lords and Ladies who figured in the Quadrille of the Kings and Queens of England, arranged by the Marchioness of Londonderry ... The following members of the aristocracy ... have sat in costume to Mr. Beard’ (6). By 1857 Lady Eastlake could list people practising photography as including ‘the nobleman, the tradesman, the prince of blood royal, the innkeeper, the artist, the manservant, ... and, though last, not least, the fair woman whom nothing but her own choice obliges to be more than the fine

35 The Photographic Society was founded in January and became Royal in June 1853. Founders included Sir Charles Eastlake, its first President, and Dr Ernst Becker, librarian to Prince Albert, who later taught photography at Court; Frances Dimond and Roger Taylor, Crown and Camera (Harmondsworth, 1987). 36 Margaret Homans, Royal Representations (Chicago and London, 1998), p. 44. 37 John Hannavy, Victorian Photographers at Work (Princes Risborough, Bucks., 1997), pp. 34-5.

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Women s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

lady’ (89).38 In her article Eastlake discussed photography as an activity suitable for commercial enterprise, artistic endeavour (or at least, freeing artists from serving the lower end of the market), and as another accomplished cultural pursuit that could connect educated people from different ranks and stations in life. So that ‘every sanguine little couple who set up a glass-house at the commencement o f summer, call their friends about them, and toil alternatively in broiling light and stifling gloom’ (89) producing photographs. In his book Photographic Pleasures, first published in 1854,39 Cuthbert Bede (Edward Bradley, writer of widely circulated humorous books on a variety of subjects), explicitly integrated photography in the repertoire of accomplishments that served young people on the marriage market: Photography is, of all others, the science for amateurs. It is equally adapted for ladies and gentlemen, which cannot be said of the generality of sciences ... if a young lady should take up chemistry ... it is all over with her! She must either end up ... a vestal virgin, or else, finish herself up with a Philosopher. No. The only way a young lady amateur can take up Chemistry, is, when it has been married to Mr Photography [his emphasis]. (47-49)

But the real boost to the popularity of photography came in 1860, when John Edwin Mayall photographed the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace and then published the images in a Royal Album*0 This was the first published (as opposed to home-made) carte-de-visite album, ‘with printed title and contents page, and 14 visiting-card portraits of the Royal Family’.41 It was a great success, and the beginning of the carte-de-visite craze. This is how it was reviewed in The Times, on the 16th of August 1860: The illustrious personages are shown without those stately appurtenances which are usually copied in portraits, and are represented as the members of a private circle, engaged in domestic pursuits alone. Her Majesty reads a book ... nurses the Princess Beatrice, then she stands alone ... wholesale publishers have demanded no less than 60,000 sets. (9)

Mayall decided to produce a second set o f Royal photographs, as reported in the Ladys Newspaper in September of the following year, in their ‘Notes on Art’: Mr. Mayall of Regent-street has obtained her Majesty’s permission to take a new and extended series of Royal Photographs similar to those produced last year, and so generally known as cartes-de-visite. The charm of these photographs is that they represent the Royal personages without the slightest ostentation, and in the ordinary employment and attire of domestic life. (14-15)

38 Eastlake ‘Photography’; reprinted in Photography: Essays and Images, Newhall ed. (New York, 1980), pp. 81-95. 39 Bede, Photographic Pleasures (London, 1859). 40 Mayall, The Royal Album: Portraits o f the Royal Family o f England Photographed from Life (London, 1860). ‘Photographed from Life’ indicated that these were not photographic reproductions of painted portraits. 41 Helmut Gernsheim, Incunabula o f British Photographic Literature (London, 1984), p. 30. See also Homans, pp. 48-57.

Photographs, Albums, Womens Magazines

71

It is at this point, when photography was established as fashionable and genteel yet also widely available on the market, that women’s magazines took it up fully in their visual repertoire. The Queen's first issue on the first of September 1861 included as a special supplement a small oval photograph of Queen Victoria, taken by Mayall. The accompanying editorial proudly declared this to be ‘the first attem pt... to give the public with a printed journal a photographic portrait’. The magazine planned to continue this practice by occasionally issuing ‘photographic portraits of men and women distinguished by station, beauty, talent, or moral worth’ (14-15). This must have proved impractical or uneconomical, because the only other example was a companion photograph of the Prince Consort, given as a supplement two weeks later. In the second issue, ‘Mayall’s Portrait Galleries’ were advertised with a quote from the Athenaeum: ‘Mr Mayall stands supreme in portraits ... [they] appear more dignified, self-possessed, and aristocratic, than those of any other photographer’ (3). Photographic exhibitions were added to the usual range of reviews, especially when attended by Royal visitors: [Lady’s Newspaper, February 1861] Last week Her Majesty and Prince Albert honoured the Photographic Exhibition with a visit, and stayed for nearly an hour beyond the time fixed for their departure. It is well known that the august personages take great interest in the art of photography, and that they even practice it themselves. ... An album of portraits is in preparation for presentation to the Queen by the Stereoscopic Company. (116)

As before, ‘the very beautiful contributions of the lady exhibitors’ were singled out and separately treated ‘in order to do greater honour to these accomplished photographers’:42 The “Four Views of Broadlands, Hants,” by Lady Jocelyn, evince considerable skill, and much taste in choice of subject, while Mrs. Vershoyle’s “Six Views of Nice”, done by the Collodion-Albumen process, deserve equal praise. The charming studies by Viscountess Hawarden, give evidence of the combination of the artist’s mind and taste with the skill of the photographer. Her models have been happily chosen; their attitudes are true to nature, the tone is good, and the effect of the pictures, in every respect, highly satisfactory. (285)

The reviewer here assumes a certain familiarity, not only with photographic terminology-the ‘Collodion-Albumen process’-b u t also with names that would have been recognised by readers o f ‘Fashionable Intelligence’ in women’s magazines. Lady Jocelyn had been Lady o f the Bedchamber at Queen Victoria’s Court and remained a good friend o f the Royal family; Viscount Hawarden was Lord in Waiting at Court at various times between 1841 and 1886.43As we have seen, Lady Jocelyn’s portrait and a biography (which however did not mention her photographic activities) were later published in the same magazine. In the review, separation marks gender difference, 42 Beta, ‘Exhibition of The Photographic Society’, Lady ’s Newspaper, February 14, 1863. 43 W.A. Lindsey, The Royal Household, 1837-1897 (London, 1898). On Jocelyn’s photographic work, see Isobel Crombie, ‘The Work and Life of Viscountess Frances Jocelyn’, History o f Photography 22:1 (1998), 40-51; on Lady Hawarden, see Virginia Dodier, Clementina, Lady Hawarden (London, 1999).

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Women ’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England

and discreetly sets these women aside as amateurs: unlike many of the other names mentioned, they did not work on commission or regularly sell their photographs. It is worth remembering that work defined as ‘by amateurs’ did not yet necessarily imply lower standards of quality, only that it was not for sale to provide an income for the photographer. As recent writers on photography have observed, the condition o f the amateur could be an enabling one, leaving individuals free to work creatively, outside the conventions and strictures established by commercial practice.44 This was noted even at the time. ‘Beta’ in the Ladys Newspaper, for example, criticised the commercial portraits by Claudet for his over use o f ‘the conventional carved oak chair, the well known balustrade, and, above all, the unmeaning curtain’ (285). Photography was thus added to the range of image-making accomplishments declared suitable for ladies. Wealthier or more ‘sanguine’ ladies (as described by Lady Eastlake) such as Lady Jocelyn and Lady Hawarden, took photographs. This was an activity witch remained complicated, messy and time consuming, until the development of Kodak processing services and easy cameras. Those less inclined to take up photography could still use photographs as a new source o f images and surfaces to be copied, painted or decorated with hand-made arrangements. In the Lady’s Own Paper, in October 1868, Georgiana C. Clark gave details of ‘A New and Easy Process of Painting in Oil Colours’, using photographs as the basis for a method enabling ‘even those totally unacquainted with art ... [to] make pleasing pictures’: ‘Not only may ladies or young persons by cultivating this really pretty art preserve for themselves the likenesses of relatives and friends, but they may make a variety of charming pictures to decorate their rooms or to give away as remembrances and tokens of friendship.’ (258) Instructions on how to colour photographs proved particularly popular, and in February 1869 the Lady’s Own Paper was still reporting that: ‘we have received numerous letters ... asking for specific directions as to the colouring of photographs’ (100). By 1861 albums like Mrs Birkbeck’s were seen as old fashioned, even by a relatively conservative magazine like the Englishwoman s Domestic Magazine: Albums! What visions of by-gone times does the word conjure up! ... Yes, I seem to be transplanted to ‘auld lang syne’ ... I have an album - but then I am not [as young] as I have been - and whenever I feel lonely, or long for company, it is always called into requisition. (231)

The article went on to describe the type of album referred to: a collection of verses, drawings and short writings by friends. An old fashioned album, collected by a woman who was young before photography was available, was being used by its owner to stand in for the company of people. The practice of album making, however, was being revived by photographs and represented in women’s magazines as the latest fashion. In the Lady s Own Paper of January 1869, we read in the section on ‘London and Paris Fashions, Toilet etc.’:

44 1998).

For example, Lindsay Smith, The Politics o f Focus (Manchester and New York,

73

Photographs, Albums, Women s Magazines

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