t h e l e t t e r s of e l i z a be t h r igby, l a dy e a s t l a k e Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas1 1 06/05/2009 14:29:32 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas2 2 06/05/2009 14:29:33 LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake Edited by Julie Sheldon Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas3 3 06/05/2009 14:29:33 First published 2009 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU This edition copyright © 2009 Julie Sheldon The right of Julie Sheldon to be identified as the editor of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book 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 written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978–1–84631–194–9 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by the MPG Books Group Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas4 4 06/05/2009 14:29:33 Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 The Letters 1830 29 1834 30 1835 33 1836 42 1837 45 1840 45 1841 46 1842 64 1843 77 1844 85 1845 89 1846 102 1847 111 1848 118 1849 120 1851 123 1852 125 1853 131 1854 134 1855 169 1856 176 1858 181 1859 189 1860 198 1861 207 1862 213 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas5 5 06/05/2009 14:29:33 vi th e letters of lady eastlak e 1863 216 1864 219 1865 225 1866 239 1867 259 1868 278 1869 298 1870 314 1871 341 1872 354 1873 362 1874 381 1875 403 1876 411 1877 426 1878 453 1879 474 1880 481 1881 495 1882 510 1883 517 1884 530 1885 540 1886 553 1887 563 1888 583 1889 594 1890 603 1891 615 1892 626 1893 634 Chronological Bibliography of Works by Elizabeth Eastlake 643 Select Bibliography 646 Index 650 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas6 6 06/05/2009 14:29:33 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following libraries and archives for granting permission to publish letters: The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre; The British Library; The Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge; Huntington Library; National Gallery Archive, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery; Manuscripts and Special Collections Department, University of Nottingham; Nottinghamshire Archives and Southwell Diocesan Record Office; Pierpont Morgan Library; Powys County Archives Office; Royal Botanical Gardens Archives Kew; Bristol Record Office; the John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester; the Archives of the Stirlings of Keir; Special Collections, UCL Library Services; The Mistresses and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge; the Norfolk Record Office. I am grateful to Henry Ropner for his permission to publish the letters to Henry Sandbach and to Christopher Barker for his permission to include the letters to Hannah Brightwen here. I have met with great generosity in all my transactions with librarians and archivists during the course of this research. I am indebted to Virginia Murray for her many kindnesses to me at Albemarle Street. I thank Alan Crookham at the National Gallery Archives for his prompt and patient attention. I also thank Rachel Beattie, Ruth Boreham, Elspeth Hector, Richard Knight, Sheila Mackenzie, Christine Nelson, Catherine Richards, Mary Robertson, and Norma Watt. I have been greatly assisted by the generous and unstinting attention of Christopher Barker whose family papers have been such an invaluable source of interesting and candid letters. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Susanna Avery-Quash for generously sharing her research on Charles Eastlake for her forthcoming scholarly edition of his travel notebooks. I have profited greatly in my research from Joan Gibbons, Alex Kidson, Suzanne May, Edward Morris, Sara Stevenson, and Monica Thorpe. I thank Penny Marney and Sue Wellings Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas7 7 06/05/2009 14:29:33 viii th e letters of lady eastlak e for their kindness to me at Framingham Earl. I am indebted to my good friend Pam Meecham for her cheerful support and, with Neil Hall, for all their hospitality. Lynn Halliday is thanked for her help. Anthony Cond, Andrew Kirk and Helen Tookey at Liverpool University Press have been encouraging in the preparation of this edition and I thank them for their attention to detail. Rosemary Mitchell is thanked for her helpful comments. I thank Colin Fallows for all his encouragement and support throughout the duration of the work. Finally I acknowledge the support of the Getty Research Center for making me the fortunate recipient of a Library Research Grant and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art for a Research Support Grant. Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas8 8 06/05/2009 14:29:33 Abbreviations Standard reference works and bibliographical material relating to Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake’s publications are abbreviated thus: J&C Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake , 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1895) LSB Letters from the Shores of the Baltic , 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 2nd edn, 1842) BL The British Library BRO Bristol Record Office CLS Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre GC Girton College, Cambridge HL Huntington Library ML Morgan Library and Museum, New York NASDRO Nottinghamshire Archives and Southwell Diocesan Record Office NCM Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery NG The National Gallery Archives London NLS National Library of Scotland NOTT Manuscripts and Special Collections Department, University of Nottingham NRO The Norfolk Record Office PCA Powys County Archives Office RBGA Royal Botanical Gardens Archives Kew SRA Strathclyde Regional Archives, Glasgow (The Archives of the Stirlings of Keir) TCC Dawson Turner Correspondence, Trinity College Cambridge UNC General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas9 9 06/05/2009 14:29:33 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas10 10 06/05/2009 14:29:33 Introduction On his deathbed in 1851, the painter J. M. W. Turner was reported to have said ‘I saw Lady Eastlake’.1 The object of Turner’s hallucination was Elizabeth Eastlake, a 42-year-old reviewer, translator and essayist who had been married for nearly three years to the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Eastlake. Just why the President’s wife should appear to the most famous English artist as he drifted in and out of consciousness will never be known. Perhaps her statuesque physique left an impression upon the diminutive artist, or perhaps his mind was wandering back to dinner parties at which he had met the socially confident and opinionated lady with a reputation for being something of a bluestocking. Whatever the reason, by December 1851 Elizabeth had impinged upon the consciousness of most artists and writers in London society in one way or another – charming some and offending others – to become one of the most articulate and well connected women in the Victorian art world. As the letters printed here demonstrate, Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake was happily situated in the Victorian literary and art worlds, linked by birth and friendship to an intellectual aristocracy of reputable artists, writers and influential figures. Although never a part of Bohemian or radical intellectual circles, she occupied a prominent position in conventional Victorian culture. Today her name is remembered, if at all, for one of three reasons. She wrote one of the first articles on photography, she reviewed Jane Eyre and Modern Painters , and she married Sir Charles Lock Eastlake. The article on photography and the marriage to Eastlake bring approbation. She continues to be credited in the history of photography for her acumen and foresight 2 and no account of Charles Eastlake fails to credit her part in his career. The reviews of Jane Eyre and Modern Painters , however, have cast her in a villainous bit part in the biographies of Charlotte Brontë and John Ruskin,3 and Elizabeth’s pert opinions have proven a rich source of quotations for scholars in need of soundbites representing the worst of Victorian opinion.4 However, Elizabeth Eastlake was responsible for much more than acerbic prose and a fortunate marriage and her reputation is in need of a thorough Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas1 1 06/05/2009 14:29:33 2 th e letters of lady eastlak e overhaul. The biography written by Marion Lochhead in 1961 is now rather outdated.5 David Robertson provides more informative and erudite work on Elizabeth in his study of Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World of 1978.6 Beyond this there has been little scholarship on either of the Eastlakes; although, ironically, many scholars of the Victorian art world express their bewilderment about the collective amnesia that has condemned the Eastlakes to relative obscurity.7 In The Consort of Taste (first published in 1950) John Steegman expressed surprise that Elizabeth Eastlake had yet to receive ‘the recognition due to her’, warning that ‘the reader of this book will find [her] recurring so often that she becomes nearly as prominent as Ruskin’.8 In 1957 Bernard Denvir remarked upon the fact that both of the Eastlakes had ‘suffered an undue amount of neglect’.9 In 1980 Francis Haskell recommended Elizabeth as ‘one of the most articulate, representative, and influential figures of Victorian England’.10 However, while all parties are keen to point out just how significant the name of Eastlake is in the cultural life of the nineteenth century, with the noble exception of an article by Adele Ernstrom there has been little contibuted. While Elizabeth’s peers Anna Jameson, Emilia Dilke, Lucie Duff Gordon, Harriet Martineau and Maria Graham, Lady Callcott have had recent biographies,11 she remains without any significant interpretation, contextualization or discussion of her life and work. Elizabeth’s now rather obscure status appears to me to stem from the perception that she was a woman writer without being a women’s writer. By this I mean that she appears to have little to recommend her to historians in search of artists and writers validating a particular kind of female experience. Elizabeth has been regarded as a ‘phallic speaker’, earning herself a place with Margaret Oliphant, Mrs Humphry Ward and Queen Victoria among those since dubbed ‘Eve’s Renegades’.12 Her apparently orthodox views were articulated with confidence and aplomb but seemingly out of alignment with the campaigns of the day. As her butler later put it, ‘though not exactly a freethinker or a New Woman, [she] had opinions of her own, and a will of her own’.13 In point of fact, although she did not contribute to important women’s issues of the day, neither did she oppose them. As the correspondence printed here shows, she had little sympathy for any cases of special pleading. For instance, she supported the Society of Female Artists, and she also patronized a Society for the Employment of Women, yet she was dismissive of women’s art education. Many letters testify to Elizabeth’s other philanthropic interests, in particular her promotion of the fortunes of single women: recommending nurses to Florence Nightingale and governesses to ladies of her acquaintance, or intervening on behalf of the indigent relatives of artists. She was an enthusiastic supporter of several charities, lending her name to the causes that appealed for sponsors Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas2 2 06/05/2009 14:29:33 in the pages of The Times , and towards the end of her life she became an anti-vivisectionist. The broadest biographical details of Elizabeth’s life can be traced through the Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake , compiled and edited by her nephew Charles Eastlake Smith in 1895.14 Smith, as his aunt’s literary executor, compiled two volumes from an uneven collection of sources (a journal, an unspecified number of notebooks and miscellaneous correspondence with friends and family), extracting passages for what he calls ‘public interest’. The sources for the Journals and Correspondence are poorly distributed and only ten pages document the first thirty years of her life. Between 1840 and 1842 Smith quotes from what he calls ‘Miss Rigby’s notebooks’, a series of disconnected thoughts and aphorisms without specific reference to events in her life. The title Journals and Correspondence is misleading, since Elizabeth did not begin her journal until she was 33 and finished it shortly before she became engaged six years later. Her journal keeping was, at best, uneven, and Elizabeth views the gaps in her journal as her ‘besetting sin’.15 Moreover, her journal entries are often oblique and contribute very little to our knowledge of her life. Following the suspension of the journal towards the end of 1848, Smith tells his aunt’s story through letters to her mother and, following Mrs Rigby’s death in 1872, to a handful of close friends, most frequently to Austen Henry Layard. Smith provides continuity statements between sources and fills in the broadest biographical detail. However, as a family member Smith tends to be silent on personal aspects of the Rigbys. There were many portions of his aunt’s letters, printed here, that Smith would not have published, and there are a few instances of his bowdlerizing her letters that are uncovered here. Elizabeth Rigby was the fifth of twelve children born to Dr Edward Rigby and Anne Palgrave. She was born at her father’s medical practice in St Giles Street in Norwich on 17 November 1809. The Rigbys divided their time between Norwich and a model farm, a 300-acre country estate at Framingham Earl, six miles outside Norwich, where Dr Rigby perfected the latest techniques of animal husbandry and crop cultivation.16 The term ‘gentleman farmer’ only partially describes Dr Edward Rigby (1747–1821). He was also a noted physician and obstetrician, an advocate of public health measures and, for a time, Mayor of Norwich.17 Dr Rigby was a gregarious host, and his children were allowed to mingle freely with the many gentlemen-scholars and scientists who called at Framingham Earl Hall and St Giles Street. The picture that emerges from the very brief outline of her childhood in the Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake is a bucolic one of the Rigby children ‘climbing trees and haystacks, making fires in a dry ditch, and roasting potatoes’.18 introduction 3 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas3 3 06/05/2009 14:29:33 4 th e letters of lady eastlak e Following the custom of the time, Elizabeth Rigby, along with her five sisters, was educated at home by a governess, while her brothers, Edward 19 and Roger, were sent to the local grammar school. The Rigby daughters, like countless other daughters of gentlemen, followed a prescribed programme of studies that included French, some German and Italian, piano lessons, conventional dance steps, needlework and drawing. Dr Rigby’s death in 1821 substantially reduced the educational provision for the Rigby daughters. Mrs Rigby removed the family permanently to Framingham Earl and the ‘men of note in literature, agriculture, natural history, science, and other branches of learning’ ceased to call. In the move to Framingham Earl Mrs Rigby was pinning her family’s fortunes to land, at a time when the future of the agrarian economy was uncertain. Economies were made to the girls’ education: the French governess was retained but the tutors in Italian, arithmetic and geography were paid off. Elizabeth was retrospectively critical of her education, complaining in later life about its deficiencies.20 In 1827 the Rigby family moved to Heidelberg – in Smith’s version of events, so that Elizabeth could convalesce from a severe attack of typhoid fever.21 Just why the family should move to Heidelberg to aid Elizabeth’s recovery when they already inhabited a model farm in the East Anglian countryside is a mystery. Smith only gives half a page to the two and half years that the Rigbys spent in Heidelberg and, as some of the letters reveal, Elizabeth preferred to draw a veil over the time abroad. The most likely explanation is that long-standing money worries caused the Rigbys to retrench. In a letter of 1824 to her sister Mary, wife of Dawson Turner, Mrs Rigby appeals for help in finding out about the ‘economy’ of living in Germany: Dear Mary I write to you, as to you I am indebted for all the information I have obtained on the subject of my expatriation, and beg you to accept my thanks for it; and to allow my further troubling you with further questions – would Mr. Turner write ... for the purpose of learning those further particulars, concerning education of females, economy of living etc – which it is needful I should know before I quit these peaceful abodes ... I am fully aware of the painful step I shall be obliged to take provided I left my house in the manner I have prepared; and that the increase of distance will serve only to extend the aggravation of my separation from home – but the inevitability of this necessary step loses of its horrors, when on looking at the other side of the picture, I see and feel poverty paralyses every effort I have to make. There I stand Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas4 4 06/05/2009 14:29:33 between two evils, on examination, the former as more endurable, for a space, than the latter. I can encompass the former the better educating my children – with the latter they and their education must submit to every privation – and the term, three years, will I hope do much for them ...22 The choice of Heidelberg was probably on account of Edward Rigby, who was at the start of a promising career in medicine. He matriculated from Edinburgh University on the day of his twenty-first birthday in 1825 and went to Berlin University in 1826 and then to the lying-in hospital at Heidelberg to study midwifery. There is little to be gleaned from the two and half years that the Rigby family spent in Heidelberg, although three of the Rigby daughters – Anne, Maria Justina and Gertrude – became engaged to Balto-German barons. The unhappy fate of her three expatriated sisters in Estonia came to colour Elizabeth’s view of Germans. In a letter to her cousin Hannah Brightwen she describes a visit to the city years later in 1873, remarking, ‘Heidelberg is full of pathetic recollections. Sisters sacrificed to a dream’.23 The ‘sacrifice’ of her sisters to apparently advantageous marriages that failed to live up to either material or marital expectations is hinted at in some of the letters. But her antipathy towards the Germans is a blatant and recurring theme in the letters, for example in those addressed to Layard. The diminished Rigby family returned to Norwich in 1829. In the early 1830s Elizabeth made her first efforts at establishing a career for herself as a writer. Although I have been unable to find either piece, Smith informs us that she wrote a short story for Frasers in 1829 24 and a letter printed here confirms that she produced an article of unknown designation or description on Passavant early in the 1830s.25 Throughout her youth, Elizabeth entertained ambitions to be an artist, claiming ‘my pen has never been a favourite implement with me; the pencil is the child of my heart’.26 She continued to draw regularly, leaving two thousand drawings to a niece on her death. Those that survive date mainly from the 1820s and 1830s and illustrate something of the young Elizabeth Rigby’s world – a portfolio of unnamed portraits of friends and family in comfortable surroundings: women seated, women sewing, elderly women asleep in their chairs, sleeping children, men in profile and three-quarter views of elegantly dressed young women. In Norwich Elizabeth and her sisters were taught drawing by John Sell Cotman 27 and the artist E. T. Daniell also appears to have been co-opted into her art education.28 According to Smith, Elizabeth was talented enough to warrant the short-term investment of a year in London from July 1832 to July 1833, in order to study under the tutelage of Henry Sass.29 Although she was never to be a professional introduction 5 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas5 5 06/05/2009 14:29:34 6 th e letters of lady eastlak e artist, the pencil remained the ‘child of her heart’ and she even published some engravings after her drawings in her various books.30 The obstacles to women’s writing were arguably relatively fewer than those that prevented women from becoming professional artists in Victorian England. For instance, literary success was not predicated on entry to an academy. Elizabeth, in common with other women writers, began her literary life as a translator, electing to translate Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in England with Notices of Private Galleries, and remarks on the state of Art In common with other women, she was employed on translating standard reference works into English.31 Translating was an area of expertise in the family,32 although it was still relatively unusual for women to be fluent in German. In 1838 Elizabeth made her first journey to the Baltic to visit her two elder sisters Baroness Maria Justina de Rosen and Baroness Gertrude de Rosen. ‘Justina’, as her family called her, and Gertrude had married into one of the old established families of the ‘Balto’ overlords, members of the Teutonic aristocracy who had the governance of the Estonian peasantry under the Russian government. This extended visit was recorded in her first book, Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (hereafter referred to by its title in subsequent editions, Letters from the Shores of the Baltic ). In distilling the narrative thrust of Letters from the Shores of the Baltic readers followed a vague topography as Elizabeth moved between various country estates in Estonia and the elite Toompea district of the capital, Reval (now Tallinn). In her bulletins home, she created vignettes of daily life in the Baltic, dwelling on what was distinctive in the habits of the Baltic German nobility and the native Estonian peasants. English readers were regaled with anecdotes about substandard living, quaint customs, strange meals, and the idiosyncrasies of the Lutheran faith. Readers would also learn about the petty tyranny of the Estonian nobility, and the iniquities of its government. The attribution of the experiences and views of the writer to a lady were important to the reception of the book. Lady travellers were acquiring a reputation for insight that their male counterparts lacked, and Elizabeth’s authorial posture is an interesting blend of affinity for her Balto hosts and pity for the Estonian peasants.33 A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic was published by John Murray in 1841. Following the success of the book, she was invited to write for the Quarterly , an arrangement that was to last, on and off, for the rest of her life. It is not certain whether it was John Murray or John Gibson Lockhart, the editor of the Quarterly , who gave her the first commission to write a review. Both men seemed to have a flirtatious relationship with her; in particular Lockhart. Lockhart gave Elizabeth at least three soubriquets (‘Lofty Lucy’, ‘Miss Esthonia’ and ‘Queen Bess’) and some observers expected him to Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas6 6 06/05/2009 14:29:34 propose in 1844.34 Harriet Martineau wrote to Jane Carlyle in 1844: ‘For these two years nearly I have been hoping she wd marry [ John] Lockhart. [ John] Murray is far too good for her. She & Lockhart will match exactly; & the whole world will be saved from the peril of marrying either of them.’ 35 A candid letter written to Margaret Outram in 1844 tells of her unchaperoned meetings with Lockhart in London while she was visiting the Murrays between February and April: I have many friends to see here, among them the redoubtable Mr. Lockhart, who is a kind friend to me. I shall see how he pleases me this time, for I have seen much of men and manners since I last saw him, but entre nous the impression he left on my mind was that there were few men who could win so much by their warmth, as he by his coldness . I know you won’t approve this, but this is only an observation in the abstract. I am as safe from him as he from me. Our mutual situation however is odd and piquant – a man of such mental power and extraordinary personal beauty, and a young woman to be closeted together to talk of Quarterly Reviews, strikes me sometimes as thoroughly absurd, and is a new leaf in my many-leaved book of experience ...36 In October 1842 Elizabeth, her mother and her two sisters Jane and Matilda moved to Edinburgh. Mrs Rigby sold Framingham Earl, unable to maintain the rambling estate any longer. Again, it is not entirely certain why the Rigbys should have chosen to live in Edinburgh. Perhaps the city’s reputation for intellectual society suited Elizabeth’s literary aspirations, or perhaps it suited the family purse. Elizabeth arrived in Edinburgh equipped with letters of introduction from John Murray to the city’s society, and the Journals and Correspondence show that she was swiftly admitted into the best drawing rooms, a distinction that was unprecedented: ‘No one can more enjoy the kind of society with which we here mix, and which, except abroad, we had always been debarred from’.37 From the Rigbys’ rented house in St Bernard’s Crescent, in the New Town of Edinburgh, Elizabeth made a concerted effort to assume a literary life and she published numerous articles and stories in this period. The Jewess: A Tale from the Shores of the Baltic appeared first as a slim John Murray publication in 1843, followed by ‘The Wolves of Esthonia’ for Fraser’s Magazine in 1845 and a collection of Livonian Tales in 1846. She also began to write for the Quarterly Review , contributing on topics such as ‘Books for Children’, ‘Evangelical Novels’, ‘The Lady of the Manor’, and ‘Biographies of German Ladies’. She complained mischievously about her allocation to John Murray III: ‘I see that you and the Editor of the Q:R: persist in keeping me to the articles about “women on women”’.38 Of her first article on children’s books in introduction 7 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas7 7 06/05/2009 14:29:34 8 th e letters of lady eastlak e 1842 Lockhart writes to her that he has ‘read it with more pleasure than I can well express. It seems to me one of the most admirable specimens of review-writing I ever met with – full of sense and taste, equally instructive and interesting.’ 39 And again in 1843 Lockhart praised her contributions: ‘You seem to have it in your power to render the “Q.R.” an instrument of great improvement among classes of readers that have hitherto probably given no attention to its contents. You are the only lady, I believe, that ever wrote in it except Mrs. Somerville, who once gave us a short scientific article; and I had long felt and regretted the want of that knowledge of women and their concerns which men can never attain, for the handling of numberless questions most interesting and most important to society’.40 The judgements she expressed in her Quarterly reviews reveal her confidence in the quality of her opinions and the certainty that she is articulating the shared values of Tory society. Their tone occasionally caused offence. Harriet Martineau measured Elizabeth’s articles as evidence of her distant cousin’s character; citing her review of German women in the Quarterly she warned her friend Jane Carlyle: Learn her from her own works: but, my friend, beware of her . She is dangerous ... As for Eliz th ’s talents ... her feelings will never rise above a superficial sentimentality, nor her wit above smartness: while her virtue will always consist of mere got up invective ag st whiggish religion and politics. Be sure, dear, not to trust her, not put yourself in her power in the least thing, till you are satisfied yourself of my being mistaken in all this. My very heart wails over these literary women who are not true to their womanhood – to responsibilities far far exceeding those they spend themselves on.41 The journal shows that Elizabeth generally took around two months to complete her articles and that she was in more or less constant employment. The journal fails to illuminate her emotional or intellectual life in Edinburgh, instead painting a sociable picture of Elizabeth as a benign flirt, escorted into dinner by a succession of Edinburgh men and taking an immodest delight in recording the comments of attentive dinner guests. There are several photographic images of Elizabeth from the mid-1840s by the Edinburgh partnership of Hill and Adamson that corroborate this bookish and yet vivacious sense of self, some showing her contemplative and others showing her posing in her best apparel, in the manner of contemporary fashion plates.42 Elizabeth was often described by her contemporaries as a ‘handsome’ woman, code perhaps for her striking but not conventionally beautiful features. Her unusual height (she was almost six feet tall), combined with her rather Roman nose, made her ‘imperial looking’, in the words of her nephew. From the very few images we have Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas8 8 06/05/2009 14:29:34 of Elizabeth in later life we can see that she retained her fondness for styling her hair in two braids, fixed with pins, around her ears. The photographer David Octavius Hill certainly found her attractive, recalling years later that his ‘old sweetheart Elizabeth Rigby’ was ‘the tallest, cleverest & best girl of these parts’.43 It is not known exactly when Elizabeth first met the painter, former Keeper of the National Gallery and Secretary to the Fine Arts Commission, Charles Lock Eastlake. Eastlake was a frequent guest at the Murrays’ and it can be deduced from a letter of 5 May 1843 that the two had first met shortly before, thereafter sporadically renewing their acquaintance at various dinner tables. John Murray observed enough to think that Eastlake was ‘a little in love’ with Elizabeth as early as 1845.44 The feeling may have been mutual since Eastlake is mentioned gratuitously in some of her Quarterly reviews and flatteringly in her journal.45 Charles Eastlake and Elizabeth Rigby became engaged in January 1849. We can only speculate, albeit with some confidence, that theirs would have been an utterly punctilious and protracted courtship. Eastlake’s personality does not present itself very clearly in the letters but his contemporaries remarked variously on his circumspect behaviour, courtier-like bearing and methodical habits. His reputation as a painter was founded on rigorously academic views of the Roman campagna and history paintings. However, he was painting less frequently and increasingly acting as an administrator, in which role he was equally thorough and workmanlike. At the age of 56, Eastlake was qualified to present himself to Elizabeth Rigby. He was an established Royal Academician, public servant, writer and, more reliably, a land-owning gentleman, capable of supporting a family within the socially acceptable limits of his class.46 Following his engagement he wrote to Elizabeth’s uncle, Dawson Turner, ‘You who know the worth and excellence of Miss Elizabeth Rigby can well estimate the prospect of rational happiness which is before me’.47 His hopes of ‘rational happiness’ are entirely in character and not without foundation. Miss Rigby was a measured risk. Eastlake brought his new bride back to his home at 7 Fitzroy Square, a solid Georgian house on the east side of the square, in an area of eighteenth- century property development that had become unfashionable and often bypassed by Victorians who headed west to Mayfair and Belgravia. Inside number 7 the Eastlakes lived on the light and airy first floor, which was divided into a front drawing room with its large windows facing the square and what Elizabeth called the back drawing room. The rooms were large enough to accommodate music parties and they frequently entertained the Royal Academicians. The Eastlakes quickly became a social fixture of the London season, although the first appearances of a tall, striking-looking bluestocking on the arm of a shorter, slightly built, confirmed bachelor introduction 9 Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas9 9 06/05/2009 14:29:34 10 th e letters of lady eastlak e aroused some short-lived comment and there are some irresistibly comic sketches of the couple among the recollections of various Victorians.48 Soon after their marriage Eastlake became President of the Royal Academy and, as was customary, he was knighted in recognition of his services. The Eastlakes’ new position and responsibilities put the pair at the heart of the London season, which was unofficially opened by the Private View at the Royal Academy in May each year. They presided as gregarious and companionable hosts of what Elizabeth described as ‘the most exclusive meeting of rank and fashion, intermingled with artists and their wives’.49 The London season was over at the start of the grouse shooting season, when the Eastlakes usually left town to start their continental tour of Europe. Many letters printed here testify to Elizabeth’s feelings of ‘dissipation’ each summer, as she managed both her ‘At Homes’ and a busy schedule of evening parties. Her circle of friends extended in this period to literary and artistic residents of London, and included Euphemia (‘Effie’) Ruskin. As the letters document, Elizabeth was Effie’s close friend and confidante during the period leading up to the annulment of her marriage to John Ruskin. The letters demonstrate how Elizabeth used her position to campaign for Effie among her large circle of acquaintances, in particular marshalling the ladies to prevent her friend from becoming a social outcast. Fixed to the outside of number 7 Fitzroy Square since 1985 is a blue plaque which records that Charles Eastlake lived there for 22 years (1843– 65), not mentioning that Elizabeth lived there for 44 years. This is a particularly contemporary oversight and not, perhaps, one which would have been made in the 1850s and 1860s. The married life of the Eastlakes is one of many distinguished Victorian partnerships that contravene the early feminist indictments of ‘separate spheres’.50 To be sure, Eastlake was a public man and Elizabeth would have had dominion over the private sphere of home, but her career as a writer between 1849 and 1865 was as productive as that she had had before her marriage: she wrote nine reviews, translated three volumes of Waagen and completed Anna Jameson’s History of Our Lord . It could be observed that Elizabeth diverted her interests to those of her husband and that she concentrated her efforts on more art-historical material, as she acquired a reputation as an authority on art, although she regarded her knowledge of the history of art as ‘small’.51 Nonetheless, she was at the outer edges of the scholarship that contributed to the formation of the discipline we call the history of art. Knowledge about art history was generally in the orbit of literary people or of gentlemen artists; and despite her demurrals, Elizabeth’s credentials in the history of art, and particularly in connoisseurship, were exceptional. She had a sound practical knowledge of art, albeit one whose technical expertise was limited to drawing and watercolour; and an extensive knowledge of European art collections. Sheldon, The Letters of Lady Eas10 10 06/05/2009 14:29:34