* A Passport to Hell: The Mystery of Richard Realf by George Rathmell (iuniverse, 2002).
* The analogy to the North Pole suggests that Howitt’s experience may have occurred at uplands, the house near Mortlake at which Annabella laughingly described an unheated chamber in which less-favoured visitors were housed as ‘the Polar Room’. Louisa Noel was among the luckier ones who was promised the cosy downstairs bedroom with its own snug German-style stove.
* Mary Shelley, who copied the play for Byron and much admired it, told its author that she had greatly preferred the task to working on his Don Juan.
* ‘I would not object to a working woman as his wife,’ Lady Byron told Robert Noel on 11 April 1857 (Dep. Lovelace Byron 104).
* It’s hard to keep count of the number of houses at which Annabella lived after Ada’s death. Besides various homes in Brighton, they included Aford House at Ham Common, uplands House at East Sheen, 1 Cambridge Terrace on Regent’s Park, a house in Gloucester Terrace, another which Ralph reported that she was buying from a bankrupt and, finally, two adjacent houses in the then unfashionable location of Primrose Hill.
† George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind (1871).
* Lushington himself chose to be buried, with equal lack of ostentation, in the churchyard at Ockham.
† William Lovelace’s second wife, Jane Jenkins, expressed strong indignation at even this veiled allegation. It was inconceivable that her late husband would have behaved in such an underhand manner, she asserted to her stepson. Posterity has sided with Ralph.
* The will was extensive. The list given here represents only a modest selection of Lady Byron’s bequests.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
O
UTCAST
Less than a month after Lady Byron’s death, Harriet Martineau decided to write Annabella’s life. In order to do so, she approached for their views – and anticipated approval from – those reformers and friends who were most likely to assist her by providing recollections of an esteemed colleague.
Initially, the response was warm. The approval of Mary Carpenter, a junior trustee, could be relied upon since she was Harriet’s close relation. Elizabeth Jesser Reid was very much in favour, as was Mrs Reid’s present houseguest, Anna Jones, a woman who had known Lady Byron for over forty years. Mary Montgomery, while herself sending along supportive messages, asked Miss Reid to convey that her own houseguest, Julia Smith (Parthe and Florence Nightingale’s formidable aunt), was ‘well pleased’ by Miss Martineau’s proposal.
That initial trail of enthusiasm went cold only when word reached Frances Carr, the senior trustee of Lady Byron’s papers. Fanny – dutifully aware of Annabella’s repetition in her will of her 1849 injunction (stipulating that her papers were to be withheld from family and public view, without exception, for a period of thirty years) – vetoed the project. She was not, however, able to prevent Harriet Martineau from publishing an expansive personal tribute to a woman for whom Martineau entertained both sincere affection and a high esteem.
Martineau’s essay appeared in the first weeks of 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly and the Daily News, the popular British newspaper for which she wrote on a regular basis. Martineau’s tone was laudatory. Lady Byron had loved her husband until the last. ‘She gloried in his fame.’ Her wealth ‘such as her husband left of it’, had been altruistically lavished upon philanthropic causes and educational reform. An unhappy marriage was blamed both for the ‘wretched health’ that made Lady Byron’s survival from year to year ‘a wonder’ even to her doctors, and for ‘the few and small peculiarities’ (the delicate topic of ‘strained affections’ was touched upon) that bespoke ‘irremediable loneliness in life’. As to posterity, Martineau felt confident in stating that Lady Byron’s death would not only create a sense of bereavement ‘wherever our language is spoken’, but that Lady Byron herself would be referred to with tenderness:
in all future time, when popular education, and the power of women to bless society with all gentle and quiet blessings, engage the attention of lovers of their kind.
In 1860, this extravagant paean of adulation attracted not a single word of criticism.
Had hostile detractors been loitering in the shadows, they might have been expected to reveal themselves in 1861, when Britain’s covert support of the slave-owning, cotton-producing Southern states in the American Civil War was matched by a waning of enthusiasm for abolitionists, alive or dead. In 1862, Annabella’s eldest grandson died of a ruptured blood vessel.
Lord Wentworth (a title which Byron Ockham reluctantly accepted, following the death of his grandmother,* but himself never used) had succeeded in his modest plan to save enough from his earnings at the shipyard to purchase (together with an unnamed friend) a small yacht. Ockham was sailing this little craft in the Solent during the summer of 1862 when he collapsed and was taken to convalesce at Wimbledon, a village on the outskirts of south London. A puzzling location – the first cottage hospital was built there in 1869 – suggests that the descendant of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, had stepped in to offer help. (John Murray III had built himself a splendid home at Wimbledon. In honour of his most lucrative client, he named it Newstead.*)
Ralph, to whom the Wentworth barony now passed, was mountaineering on the Continent in the summer of 1862. Anne, the only one of the family who maintained regular contact with her older brother after Lady Byron’s death, became a regular visitor to Wimbledon. She was holding
