Written by Assistant Curator, Eleanor Stephenson.
In the heart of colonial India, amidst the vibrant atmosphere of bustling markets and rivers of West Bengal, seven sisters grew up in a world shaped by the British Empire. The Pattle sisters, remarkable women with a unique heritage, were born into a life entangled with the East India Company and, after 1858, the British Raj, yet their story resonates deeply with the human experience of family, identity, and belonging.
The Pattle sisters’ story begins in colonial South Asia, where generations of their family lived and worked. The Pattles sisters’ father, James Pattle, was born in December 1775 at the East India Company's trading post in Beauleah, now Rajshahi, Bangladesh. An East India Company man, James descended from a lineage of merchants in India for at least two generations.
Barrackpore, derived from the word ‘barracks’, housed the East India Company’s first major military base in India, highlighting its strategic importance for controlling Bengal and the surrounding regions.
This was the home of James Pattle’s father, Thomas. James and Adéline Maria may have also lived there.
Writing on 4 March 1795, the Company directors lamented James Pattle’s transfer to the Supreme Court at Murshidabad, noting he was ‘the friend of every friend ... so courteous in reception that, to use the language of Mr. Piozzi, “Pattle and Politeness were ... synonymous”’. High acclaim found in private family papers that calls into question his later reputation as the ‘greatest liar in India’. James Pattle’s popularity saw his career flourish, earning promotions almost every year until 1829, making him one of the longest-serving civil servants of his time.
On 11 February 1811, James married 18-year-old Adéline Maria de L’Étang, daughter of Thérèse Josèphe de L’Étang (née Blin de Grincourt). They tied the knot in Bhagalpur, Bihar, an East India Company outpost located upriver from Calcutta. Adéline Maria had also been born in South Asia, in the port city of Pondicherry, shortly after British forces besieged the city, which was then under French control. It is believed that Adéline’s great-great-great-grandmother was a Bengali Hindu from Chandernagor who converted to Christianity, marrying a French officer in Pondicherry on July 2, 1703. This inter-imperial context shaped Adéline's identity and the identities of her daughters. Indeed, the Pattle sisters had English, French, Bengali, and Swiss ancestry, meaning that they had a multicultural heritage.
The newlywed Pattles soon moved to Calcutta, where they primarily resided in their homes on Chowringhee Road and Garden Reach, the city's most fashionable areas. It was in this city that almost all of the seven Pattle sisters were born. One exception, ‘Mia’ Pattle, was born on 7 July 1818 aboard the William Miles while sailing from India to England, highlighting her family's ties to India. Throughout their lives, Calcutta was their home at various points, affording them an early colonial experience that shaped their outlooks forever.
The view from Garden Reach over the Hooghly River that would have been familiar to the Pattle sisters.
The Pattle sisters enjoyed unique privileges, including access to a high-quality education and the opportunity for transcontinental travel. Like other European children in India, the Pattle sisters were sent back to Europe for their health and schooling. At just three years old, Julia Margaret travelled with her sisters, Adeline Maria (aged six) and Sarah (aged two), to live with their maternal grandmother, Thérèse Josèphe, in Paris and Versailles. While Adeline Maria returned to India four years later, Julia Margaret and Sarah remained with their grandmother until their late teens, receiving a private education. Julia excelled in music and literature, showcasing her talent on the piano and later publishing poetry. The sisters thrived in a matriarchal family environment that emphasised the importance of education.
Sara Pattle’s father-in-law, John Prinsep, is portrayed seated on the left of the scene, with an Indian household servant refilling his hookah pipe. Prinsep established the indigo and cotton-printing industries in Bengal and amassed immense wealth.
The Pattle Sisters remained deeply connected to British colonial life in India through their marriages. All the sisters, except Virginia, who married Charles Somers (later the 3rd Earl Somers), married men working for the East India Company and the British Empire in various capacities. Sara, for instance, married one of her father’s friends, Sir Henry Thoby Prinsep, on May 14, 1835, in Calcutta. Henry Thoby was an influential figure in British colonial governance. Through their marriage, the Pattles joined one of the most prominent families in British colonial society.
John Prinsep
The Pattle sisters, known for their beauty and charm, became prominent figures within Calcutta’s elite circles through their marriages and in their own right. The reputation of the sisters was such that F. Leveson-Gower remarked during his visit to Calcutta in 1850 that ‘wherever you go in India, you meet with some member of the Pattle family. Every other man has married, and every other woman has been a Miss Pattle’.
From 1839 to 1846, Julia Margaret (by then married to Charles Hay Cameron) was known as the foremost hostess in Calcutta, organising elaborate events for the governor-general of India, Lord Henry Hardinge, after whom she named her fourth child. In this role, Julia shaped the social landscape of this colonial outpost, anticipating her and her sister Sara’s salons at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and Little Holland House in Kensington, respectively.
Sophia is portrayed wearing a Kashmiri paisley shawl, draped over her right hand, like a sari, the typical dress for women in the Indian subcontinent.
Even as most of the Pattle sisters relocated from India to England, their Bengal beginnings came with them. The large noisy gatherings at Little Holland House were around tables loaded with Indian food, especially lobster curries, with what Virginia Woolf would later call, a ‘fervour of hospitality’. They often dressed in ‘rare Indian stuffs’, decorated with ‘the clustered pearls, the delicate Indian jewells’, rejecting the rigidity of Victorian crinolines and whalebone corsets. In a world where their choices could have been heavily curtailed by societal expectations, the Pattle sisters instead emerged as vibrant embodiments of the dynamic interplay of the Anglo-Indian society from which they originated. Their colonial cultural identity left an indelible mark on the history of British culture, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Bloomsbury Group.
Growing up between cultures, languages, and continents gave the Pattle sisters a distinctive sense of self. They understood empire not as an abstraction but as a lived environment, and they would carry that sensibility with them to Europe. Their Bengal beginnings shaped the way they connected, socialised, and created community, foreshadowing the salons and friendships that would define their later lives.