Poor, lively, warmhearted and high-principled, George and Louisa MacDonald brought as much to their new friend in pleasure as Lady Byron returned to them in munificence. At the time Annabella met him, George MacDonald had exchanged his life as a country parson for badly paid teaching work in Manchester. An active frame belied MacDonald’s lifelong ill health; the following year, Annabella funded the couple’s three-month visit to Algeria, where a dry climate helped the invalid to regain his energy. In 1858, she commissioned Augustus De Morgan’s exceptionally artistic son, William, to do up the MacDonalds’ home, instructing him to combine elegance with every possible comfort. It’s likely that she also engineered MacDonald’s 1859 appointment to lecture at Bedford, the pioneering London women’s college with which Lady Byron had been closely involved for a decade.
This late-flowering friendship was one of which Lady Byron’s closest friends warmly approved. Mary Montgomery, meeting them at Lady Byron’s last London home in 1858, thought the MacDonalds were delightful. Crabb Robinson, encountering the couple there during the following spring, was impressed both by the boldness of MacDonald’s religious views, and by (Lady Byron always favoured a handsome man) the former clergyman’s arresting good looks.
George MacDonald would later become famous, prosperous and a towering influence upon other writers, notably Lewis Carroll. (Tolkien and C. S. Lewis freely acknowledged the Victorian author as their first teacher in the world of fantasy fiction.) He never forgot Lady Byron’s kindness to him in more straitened times. To their children, the MacDonalds always spoke of Lady Byron as the woman who had given George hope and practical help when he most needed it. (Help included an unexpected £300 legacy in her will.) A decade later, at the absolute height of the posthumous public attack upon Lady Byron’s reputation, George MacDonald made a point of dedicating his latest novel to her memory.
Another and more significant friendship was formed around this time. In this case, it was generated by one of the most burning topics of the day. Abolitionism was the common cause that united Lady Byron’s friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain had abolished slavery in 1834; nevertheless, by 1850, over three million African slaves in America, and in other parts of the world, remained in bondage. In 1850, Ellen and William Craft were among the tiny group who escaped from the slave-owning Southern states in America and avoided recapture in the North under the draconian terms of the new Fugitive Slave Act. The Crafts began their new, free lives in England as teachers at Lady Byron’s Ockham school. In that same year, Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the story through which its young author would help to change the course of American history.
By April 1853, when Mrs Beecher Stowe and her family arrived in London for the beginning of a four-month lecture tour, Stowe had overtaken even Dickens, to become the world’s best-known living writer. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold 300,000 copies in America during its first year of publication, despite being a banned book throughout most of the Southern states. In London, one year later, ten different dramatic adaptations of Stowe’s novel were being staged. Everybody wanted to meet and pay tribute to its celebrated author.
It was, therefore, a singularly privileged group of some twenty men and women who gathered to meet Mrs Stowe on 24 May at the London home of Elizabeth Jesser Reid. It was at this occasion that Anna Jameson (still struggling to regain Annabella’s friendship) introduced Henry Crabb Robinson to her former soulmate. Robinson’s interest in both Lady Byron and the honoured American guest did not preclude him from observing that the most impressive person in the room was William Craft, the new Ockham school teacher. Mr Craft was, Robinson respectfully noted in his diary (while employing the problematic language of that time), ‘the most intelligent-looking negro I ever saw’.
Recording at a later date the history of her friendship with Lady Byron, Harriet Beecher Stowe described that first encounter at Mrs Reid’s home. She had been struck by Lady Byron’s fetching appearance (slight, pale and silver-haired in a lacy widow’s cap and lavender-coloured gown) and appealing manner (poised, quick and graceful). The topic of slavery was instantly raised; Mrs Stowe was astonished to find how well-informed and astute Lady Byron appeared to be, and how original in her ideas. (‘Many of her words surprised me greatly, and gave me new material for thought. I found I was in company with a commanding mind.’)
In 1856, the Beecher Stowes made a second visit to Europe, both to publicise Dred (Mrs Stowe’s new novel was about the runaway slave leader of a plotted rebellion), and to attend the London stage debut of Mary Webb, the African-American actress for whom Harriet had adapted parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin into dramatised readings, entitled The Christian Slave. Arriving in the dog-day heat of August, the Stowes found London disappointingly empty of smart society. It was during this quiet period that Stowe’s friendship with Lady Byron first bloomed. Annabella, who had already offered loyal support to Mary Webb and her family, invited the Stowes to visit her at home on at least two occasions. On the second, their schoolboy son Henry was introduced to Byron Ockham, a young man whose brilliant eyes and muscular physique (comparable to the Farnese Hercules, gasped well-travelled Mrs Stowe) provided welcome distraction from the subject of the viscount’s unconventional lifestyle. A poised Lady Byron expressed her hope that Lord Ockham was proving to be a good moral influence upon his fellow mechanics at Scott Russell’s shipyard. There was talk of his setting up a new school in the East End. Really, it was quite wonderful to observe how Lady Byron looked
