Written by Curatorial Advisor, Hilary Underwood.

Motherhood played a larger part in the lives of Victorian women than it does in the lives of women today. Families were larger, and it was rare for upper- and middle-class women to have work or a career, especially after marriage. A woman’s ‘natural’ sphere was widely regarded as home, husband and children. The painter George Elgar Hicks expressed this view in his 1863 triptych shown in the Royal Academy summer exhibition, Woman’s Mission: its three canvases represented Guide of Childhood, Companion of Manhood, and Comfort of Old Age. (There are studies for the three in the Dunedin Art Gallery and Tate Britain owns the finished canvases of the last two.) Motherhood was seen as a holy destiny. In 1865, Andrew Halliday wrote an article ‘Mothers’ in Charles Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round. He stated, of maternal love: ‘It is altogether above reason; it is a holy passion, in which all others are absorbed and lost. It is a sacred flame on the altar of the heart, which is never quenched.’ The focus on marriage and motherhood is clear in the lives of the Victorian family featured in Watts Gallery’s current exhibition, Women of Influence, The Pattle Sisters. The only one of the seven sisters to move outside women’s usual roles of mothers and homemakers (which included entertaining at home) was the pioneer of artistic photography Julia Margaret Cameron – she even sold and marketed her work. But although she had a longstanding interest in photography, it is noteworthy that she only took it up at the end of 1863 when her married daughter gave her a camera. She was then 38 and all but one of her children were either grown up or teenagers*.

The Pattle sisters appear to have been devoted mothers, and (broadly speaking) very good ones who passed their devotion and their skills to their daughters. Virginia Somers (née Pattle) appears to have been the most difficult and the most possessive, constantly fussing her two daughters about their health, but she had suffered the great tragedy of the loss of her youngest daughter in early 1859 to diphtheria. Maria (Mia) Jackson (née Pattle) became the grandmother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury group, through her daughter, their mother Julia (successively surnamed Jackson, Duckworth and Stephen.) In 1927, Vanessa Bell thanked Virginia Woolf for her portrayal of their mother as Mrs Ramsay in her novel, To the Lighthouse, recalling ‘the extraordinary beauty of her character.’ Vanessa herself became a nurturing and supportive mother, who let her children follow their interests and inclinations, although she could be possessive and emotionally dependent on them. It was Virginia Woolf, childless through the potential risk to her fragile mental health, who became most critical of the self-sacrificing Victorian wifely and maternal ideal, writing satirically that this paragon ‘was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it ... Above all, she was pure.’

The Pattle sister who most clearly embodied the Victorian maternal ideal was the third, Sara Prinsep (1816 – 1887) who married Henry Thoby Prinsep (1793 – 1878) in 1835. She was clearly blessed with superabundant energy and organising ability. This allowed her to raise a family of four children, take in relatives, manage a large household (census records show that the Prinseps had eight or nine servants) and entertain on a large scale in the Prinsep’s Kensington home, Little Holland House, with regular dinner parties of twelve or more guests and large garden parties. The artist and illustrator George Du Maurier described the gatherings as ‘all that there is of swell; the nobilitee, the gentree, the litharathure, polithics and art of the counthree, by jasus!’ (Du Maurier’s satirical spelling mirrors an affected upper-class accent of the period.) In the family description of the three Pattles, Virginia, Sara and Julia as ‘beauty, dash and talent,’ it is no accident that Sara is ‘dash’. But Sara’s maternal qualities went beyond care for her own children and their children and even beyond care for members of her extended family to a wider motherliness.

Sara Prinsep had four surviving children: Henry Thoby (1836 – 1914), the eldest; Valentine Cameron (1838 – 1904), Arthur (1840 – 1915) and Alice. Alice probably lived from 1844 – 1919 although her date of birth is sometimes given as 1846: in an era where women were strongly defined by youth and beauty, they were often deliberately hazy about their true age. Sadly, Sarah lost her youngest child, Virginia, who lived only from April 1848 to March 1850. Sara had a big family by modern British standards where the average family size is less than two, but an average one for the Victorian period. She herself was from a family of ten children of which seven sisters survived to adulthood.

One of the measures of successful parenthood is the destinies of children. All Sara’s did well. Henry Thoby Prinsep the younger became a judge of the High Court in India and was knighted in 1904. Arthur Prinsep became a Major General of the Bengal Cavalry. A ‘good marriage’ was then the best option for a daughter and Victorian mothers would expend great efforts facilitating one and forestalling unsuitable matches. Love and compatibility were important, and marriage for money’s sake frowned on, but as the saying goes, ‘never marry for money, but marry where money is.’ We don’t know the details of the run up to Alice’s marriage or the texture of her relationship, but in financial terms it was good: she married Charles Henry Gurney (1833 – 1897) a member of the prominent and very wealthy Norfolk Quaker banking family. The interesting case is Valentine Cameron Prinsep. He was educated at Haileybury College, with the expectation that he would follow other family members into the Indian Civil Service. But even before he had left school in 1856, he had decided to become an artist, largely through the presence of George Frederic Watts as his parents’ house guest. In the 1850s the career of an artist was less prestigious than it became later in the century, and the chance of financial success was seen as slight. Most artists came from artistic or lower middle-class backgrounds rather than affluent ones like the Prinseps’. However, his supportive parents encouraged his vocation and funded its beginnings. He too did well, later marrying an heiress daughter of the Liverpool ship-owner and art patron, Frederic Richards Leyland, and becoming a Royal Academician.

Sara Prinsep also played a motherly role for family members who needed a home or were parentless. She was well-to-do, and Little Holland House had spare capacity: the 1851 Times advert for the house to let promises ‘17 beds’. This hospitality continued later at The Briary on the Isle of Wight, near Julia Margaret Cameron’s Dimbola and later when Sara was widowed and living in Brighton. May Prinsep (1853-1931) was an orphaned niece of her husband Henry Thoby Prinsep and grew up at Little Holland House. Protective of the attractive girl, Sara would only allow her to sit as a model for George Watts, Val Prinsep and her own sister, Julia Margaret Cameron. We have Watts’s 1869 portrait of her in our collection (COMWG 88) and Val Prinsep’s painting of her with a white Persian cat features in the exhibition. It was shown at the Royal Academy in 1874, the year of her marriage, titled A Safe Confidant. May made a good marriage, to Andrew Hichens, who became Chair of the Stock exchange. Their house Monkshatch (now demolished) on the Hogsback in Surrey, brought George and Mary Watts to this area. Alice (Prinsep) Gurney’s daughters Rachel and Laura also came to live with their grandmother at Brighton, along with Blanche Clogstoun, orphaned grand daughter of Sara’s oldest sister Adeline, for whom Watts took the role of guardian. Laura and Rachel also made ‘good marriages’ becoming Lady Troubridge and the Countess of Dudley. Watts made portraits of all these girls.

Sara Prinsep’s motherly qualities are also shown by the way she took other friends into her home and into her heart. George Watts had befriended the family in the late 1840s. His connection with Lord and Lady Holland of Holland House, had helped the Prinseps to get the lease of Little Holland House in December 1850. And soon after that, as Sara Prinsep stated, ‘he came to stay three days, he stayed thirty years.’ Watts had been motherless since childhood and had lost his father in 1845. In the nurturing atmosphere of Little Holland House, with his domestic needs managed for him, Watts had the freedom for his art to flower. Mrs. Prinsep is sometimes cast as the villainess in setting up Watts’s short-lived marriage to Ellen Terry and managing its dissolution – Ellen certainly put the blame on her. But I think the story is more complex than this and I may write about it on a later occasion. George Watts’s friendship with Sara Prinsep was deep and lasting. When, many years later in December 1887, he received news of her death in Brighton, he grieved as if at the death of a parent. As his wife Mary wrote in her diary, ‘My dear love felt it much. He put is head down on my shoulders & sobbed like a child.’

In the hot summer of 1858, Edward Burne-Jones was ill in his squalid lodgings in Bloomsbury. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had taken him to Little Holland House in July 1857, and he and Val Prinsep had also worked together that summer on Rossetti’s project to decorate the walls of the new Oxford Union building with Arthurian murals. There was clearly something about the young and untried artist that had impressed and touched Sara Prinsep. As Burne-Jones’s wife Georgiana records: ‘Edward never forgot the reception of Mrs. Prinsep, who, perceiving he was in a strange world sheltered and took notice of him. Before he had seen her many times she was “Aunt Sara” to him.’ In 1858, ‘Aunt Sara’ took practical action. ‘Red Lion Square was no fitting place for him when the thermometer stood at 90 in the shade, so one day Mrs. Prinsep in the kindness of her heart drove down there and took possession of him bodily, carrying him off with her to Little Holland House and putting him under the care of a fresh doctor.’ He spent an extended convalescence there, a visit crucial to his spirits as well as his physical health. Georgiana writes,’ I could not realise then what I do now what this visit to Little Holland House must have been to him. There, for the first time, he found himself surrounded without any effort of his own by beauty in ordinary life, and no day passed without awakening some admiration or enthusiasm.’ The album of drawings for Sophia Dalrymple in the exhibition date from this visit – drawings rather than paintings, for his health had forbidden him painting. Sara Prinsep even went with her sister Virginia Somers to visit Burne-Jones’s fiancée Georgina, although to Georgiana ‘the visit was felt to be one of inspection as well as courtesy, and in spite of the gracefulness of the callers was something of an ordeal to pass through.’ Burne-Jones was also motherless – he had lost his mother a few days after he was born, to his lasting sadness. Much later he described Sara Prinsep to his friend Lady Horner as ‘The nearest thing to a mother that I ever knew.

What are the qualities that define a mother? Unconditional love, certainly, and the desire to protect and to nurture and aim for the very best for one’s child. And this can sometimes mean ‘difficult conversations’, and restrictions in the child’s best interests. But ideally, motherhood fosters the child’s own best individuality, rather than more selfish aims of moulding a son or daughter into the parents’ image or ideal. Not every woman becomes a mother or can become a mother, but those ‘motherly’ qualities of unselfish support and nurture can extend beyond family ties and can be developed by any human being.

*(The youngest, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron was born in 1852, and interestingly he is the only one of her six who took up photography and became a professional photographer for a time. One of his photographs of his mother is in the exhibition and he also made photographic reproductions of George Watts’s works.)