A History of Britain, Volume 3 (31 page)

In 1848 Charles Cameron suddenly gave all this up and retired with Julia to Britain, where he evidently meant to devote himself again to the Higher Things and write a treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful. Through the Prinsep family – a dynasty of orientalist scholars in India and painters and poets in London – the Camerons mixed in salon society that included Tennyson and the great astronomer Sir John Herschel. While
visiting
Tennyson at Freshwater, Julia saw the pair of cottages that, remodelled, became ‘Dimbola’. There they established themselves along with their children, and Charles Cameron became, if not exactly a recluse amidst his books, then certainly the retiring philosopher whom Tennyson once glimpsed asleep in his bedroom, ‘his beard dipped in moonlight’.

At some point, probably early in 1863 when she was 48 years old, Julia was given a camera – the hefty wooden-box apparatus of the time. She swiftly converted her coalhouse at ‘Dimbola’ into a darkroom and the henhouse into what she called ‘my glass house’ – the studio. Most accounts of her career make this departure seem like the enthusiasm of an amateur who needed a hobby to fill in time between the polite rituals of middle-class life on the Isle of Wight and the rounds of Pre-Raphaelite visitors. In fact, it is evident from family papers that from the outset Julia was up to something much more serious, both artistically and commercially. With coffee harvest after coffee harvest failing in Ceylon the Camerons were becoming seriously hard-up. There was no sign of Charles, buried ever more deeply in his library, being willing or able to recover their fortunes. In September 1866 her son-in-law, Charles Norman, asking one of Julia’s patrons for a loan of £1000, wrote that ‘my father-in-law for the last two months has been utterly penniless so that his debts are increased by butchers’ bills’. So whether or not Julia had always meant to be a professional, now she felt bound to succeed for the sake of the family. Clementina Hawarden could afford to sell her work at a fête to benefit the ‘Female School of Art’; Julia had to sell hers to benefit herself. But her professionalism was not going to compromise her aesthetic standards. One of her models believed that Mrs Cameron ‘had a notion that she was going to revolutionise photography and make money’. Making money cost money. Charles, who evidently worried about his mother-in-law as well as his father-in-law, reported to a creditor that he had ‘told my mother for positively the last time that any assistance of this kind can be given her and that her future happiness or discomfort and misery rests entirely with herself’.

But then this was exactly the opportunity Julia Margaret Cameron was looking for – to make her own way. And she had the toughness to persevere. Although some of her Tennysonian images of luminous madonnas and gauzy damozels reinforced, rather than undermined, the more fantastic stereotypes of women as embodiments of the pure and the passionate, there was not much of the angel about Julia herself. Unable to afford assistants, she did all the mucky work of the wet collodion process herself: staining her fingers and dresses with silver-nitrate sensitizer, making sure the glass plates were exposed while still wet, washing and
fixing
images, and developing the prints. Since she depended on natural light, in the not invariably sunny Freshwater, to obtain the intensely expressive effects of light and shade that characterized both her portraits and her ‘poetic’ studies, she needed extraordinarily long exposures, sometimes of 10 minutes or more. Not only her own children, and domestic servants who obediently posed, but also the good and great – the artists George Frederic Watts and William Holman Hunt; Carlyle, Sir John Herschel and Tennyson – all were bullied into keeping stock-still for unendurable periods of time. Herschel – one of the most distinguished men in Britain – was told to wash his hair so that Julia could fluff it up with her blackened fingers to get just the right look of back-lit electrified genius. As is evident from the famous portraits – some of the most mesmerizing face-images in the history of art – Carlyle did fidget. But the photographer turned this to advantage. His head, she had thought, was a ‘rough block of Michelangelo sculpture’. But Carlyle’s personality was also notoriously edgy and mercurial. So she gives us a head that is both monumental and energized – the authentic hot tremble of the Carlylean volcano, the burning ‘light in the dark lantern’.

Predictably, the extreme manipulation of focus and exposure did not meet with the approval of the eminences of the Photographic Society, who sneered at Julia’s ‘series of out of focus portraits of celebrities’ as tawdry vulgarities in which technical incompetence masqueraded as poetic feeling. (‘We must give this lady credit for daring originality,’ a typically snide review in the
Photographic Journal
commented, ‘but at the expense of all other photographic qualities.’) The more popular she became, the nastier they got: ‘The Committee much regrets that they cannot concur in the lavish praise which has been bestowed on her productions by the non-photo-graphic press, feeling convinced that she herself will adopt an entirely different mode of reproduction of her poetic ideas when she has made herself acquainted with the capabilities of the art.’ The subtext of this was, of course, that women, with the rare exceptions of noble amateurs such as Clementina Hawarden, had no business prematurely parading their work without mastering the one quality by which photographic excellence was properly judged: crispness of definition. Crispness, of course, like the heavy lifting and chemically saturated processes of photography, was a matter of self-effacing mechanics; a stiffupper-lip kind of art, definitely not the flouncy, dreamy, mushy thing that they believed Julia Margaret Cameron executed.

But crispness repelled Julia. She had no interest in making dumbly literal facsimiles of nature. Her aim was to make a poet out of a lensed machine. The great ‘heads’ that so disconcerted the Photographic Society
were
meant to take Romanticism’s exploration of the external signs of interior emotions (anger, sorrow, elation, ecstatic vision) a step further – to create expressive images of the thinker/artist-as-hero. Although she also bathed children, servants and obedient friends in the more diffused light she needed for her poetic costume dramas, Cameron was capable, on occasions, of deliberately, even cruelly, playing with the self-consciousness of sitters in their allotted roles. Her sublimely beautiful portrait of the 16-year-old actress Ellen Terry (who had gone on the boards at nine) as ‘Sadness’ is as poignant as it is precisely because her marriage to the much older Watts was evidently already falling apart on their honeymoon in Freshwater. At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum are the photographs of Cyllene Wilson, the daughter of a repent-or-be-damned evangelical preacher who had been adopted by the Camerons. To get just the right look of despair on Cyllene’s powerful face, Julia was not above locking her in a cupboard for a few hours until the expression came naturally. Perhaps this was, in the end, too much for Cyllene, who ended up running off to sea, marrying an engineer on an Atlantic steamship line and dying in her 30s of yellow fever in Argentina.

Julia was successful but not, it seems, quite successful enough. Held at arm’s length by the photographic establishment, she had secured crucial patronage from one of her husband’s old Etonian friends, the banker Samuel Jones Loyd, Baron Overstone, to whom she assigned some of her most extraordinary albums in return for his investment. She showed and sold at Paul Colnaghi’s gallery and entered into a contractual arrangement with the Autotype Company to publish carbon reproductions. To ensure herself against piracy, Julia registered 505 of her photographs under the recent Copyright Act (1869), giving the impression that she meant to profit as much as she could from her originality and popularity. Thanks to the efforts of dealer and publisher, her work became famous. But it never held ruin at bay. In 1875 she and her husband, with their fortunes evaporating, returned to Ceylon, where she died in 1879. Although there was a flourishing Indian-Oriental photo-industry under way, views of temples and tea parties were not Julia Margaret Cameron’s line. The images petered out and then stopped altogether. But the power of her accomplishment was already enough to have wiped the sneer from the face of those who condescended to ‘lady artists’.

It is almost certain that, through Cameron’s photographs to illustrate Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ (1874–5), a poem associated in the queen’s mind with the memory of Albert, Victoria knew of her work and would not have disapproved of a woman photographer. A woman doctor, on the other hand, was a great deal more shocking. The very idea of girls
familiarizing
themselves with the gross details of human anatomy, much less dissecting corpses in the company of men, was, needless to say, perceived by the queen as a revolting indecency. And those who took the first courageous steps in this direction could only do so while pretending to study for the acceptable work of nursing – paradoxically regarded as less shocking despite nurses’ equal familiarity with living anatomy. In the year of Prince Albert’s death, 1861, Elizabeth Garrett was – to the consternation of the examiners at the Middlesex Hospital, who had not realized that ‘E. Garrett’ was a woman – placed first in the teaching hospital’s qualifying examinations. The daughter of a rich Suffolk businessman, Garrett had left school at 15. But instead of grooming herself (perhaps through a Ruskinian education in reading and drawing) for the altar and parlour, she had quite other ideas. A speech by Elizabeth Blackwell changed Garrett’s life. Blackwell, born in Bristol, had been transplanted to the United States where in 1849, at the age of 28, she had become that country’s first accredited woman doctor. After losing the sight of an eye while working at the obstetric hospital of La Maternité in Paris (where women were welcomed, according to her, as ‘half-educated supplements’ to the male physicians), Blackwell had returned to America, set up a one-room dispensary in 1853 in the New York tenements, and eventually, in 1857, opened the New York Infirmary and College for Women. She was, in short, a living inspiration.

Elizabeth Garrett was determined to do for Britain what Blackwell had done for the United States. Initially horrified by her bone-headed temerity and obstinacy, her rich father was eventually won round – enough, at any rate, to subsidize her ostensible education as a nurse, which included her attendance at medical college lectures. Despite being ostracized by the male students and prevented from full participation in dissections, Elizabeth was undeterred, buying body parts and dissecting them in her bedroom.

Begged to keep quiet about the result of her examination in 1861, Garrett (possibly egged on by a number of articles in the
Englishwoman’s Journal
that advocated the creation of a corps of women doctors specializing in female and paediatric medicine), chose instead to publicize it, scandalizing the profession. Her application to matriculate at London University was denied – but only after a divided 10:10 vote in the Senate, with the Chancellor, Lord Granville, voting explicitly against the recommendation of his Liberal party colleague Gladstone, an early admirer of Garrett’s. In 1865 she took and passed the examination of the Society of Apothecaries, who, horrified at their oversight, passed a statute retroactively excluding women from the profession. In 1870, after performing
two
successful surgeries and passing written and oral examinations in French, the University of Paris awarded her their medical degree. But this was by no means the end of the battle for women’s medical aspirations. In the year that Garrett achieved her French licence a group of five women, led by Sophia Jex-Blake, were subjected to the physical intimidation of a near riot when they attempted to take the Edinburgh University medical examination. When a path was cut through the jeering crowd to the examination room, a flock of sheep was pushed in after the women. Whether it rankled or not, it was, inevitably, often a supportive marriage that gave these women power. When Elizabeth Garrett became Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, as the result of marrying a steamship owner, she was finally in a position to open her New Hospital for Women.

Her refusal of what had been the accepted confines of proper women’s work was becoming less of a rarity by the 1870s, a decade when the Victorian litany of the Great Exhibition – Peace, Prosperity, Free Trade – was starting to sound off-key. The great pillars of commerce had been shaken by a series of bank upheavals and mergers in the late 1860s. In Europe, the Pax Britannica seemed helpless to stop the wars of national aggression by which new nation states and empires were being roughly forged. Irish violence and Balkan massacres were beginning to supply the sensation-hungry popular press with headlines. But something even more explosive had been set off in the libraries and debating circles of the Victorians and that something was Darwin’s
Descent of Man
(1871).

In their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation, the urgent longing to be, above all, useful – beyond the duties set out by Mrs Beeton – had been filled by Christian works of healing and charity. But although Darwin himself often protested that the implications of his theory were no threat to faith (starting with his own), there was at least an element of disingenuousness in the protest. The fact was that the great sheltering dome of faith – authority based on direct revelation – had been shattered by Darwin’s vision of a morally indifferent, self-evolving universe. Once it was read, digested and believed, it was hard, if not impossible, for at least some young women born around the time of the Great Exhibition to surrender themselves to the male-governed kingdom of prayer. In place of the old gospels of Church and Home, they now needed the new gospels of Education and Work. And since competition, the struggle for survival, seemed to be the truth of the way in which the world worked, why should they themselves flinch from the fray? Against Ruskin’s appeal that the ‘queens’ stand above and against the noisy, frantic shove and bustle of the world, the champions of women’s higher education and more ambitious fields for women’s work argued that, on the contrary, it was direct
experience
of the wider world that would make them better wives and mothers, and at the very least better women. The queen needed to get out of the garden and into the urban jungle.