Written by Curatorial Advisor, Hilary Underwood.

Please Note: part of this blog discusses maternal and infant mortality. Although statistics show that on average, as modern Western women, we are very fortunate compared with our Victorian ancestors, you may not wish to read on, if this subject is painful or difficult for you.

Marriage and motherhood played a much larger part in the lives of Victorian women than they do for women today, particularly for Victorian women of the middle and upper classes. We can see this very clearly in the lives of the Pattle sisters, their mother and daughters, subjects of Watts Gallery’s current exhibition, Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters. Most of their talents and energies were expressed through their roles as wives and mothers. The most famous of them, Julia Margaret Cameron, the second Pattle sister, only took up photography at the age of 48 when her children were grown up. Her married daughter, another Julia, knowing her interest in photography, gave her a camera to amuse her while her husband was visiting his estates and sons in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Sara Prinsep was the third sister. Even her success in creating a celebrated social and literary ‘salon’ at Little Holland House in Kensington can be seen as an extension of a wife’s responsibility for organizing entertainment in the home. Only some of the Pattles’ daughters and granddaughters began to question traditional female roles and are known for achievements in their own right.

In the Victorian period, there were strong cultural pressures on women to regard marriage and child-rearing as their natural and divinely sanctioned destinies. As Mrs. Beeton declared on the very first page of her influential Book of Household Management (1861), quoting the 18^th century writer Goldsmith, ‘The modest virgin, the prudent wife, and the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life, than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances.’

Today, in this era of expensive property, dual income mortgages and the acceptability of separation and divorce after relationship breakdown, most women work, even after motherhood. This is recognized in law, with statutory maternity leave and the preservation of jobs for mothers to return to. All professions are open to women. There may be glass ceilings, but theoretically a woman could rise to any height. In the early Victorian period, middle class women had few alternatives to marriage. The professions were closed to them and so was rigorous education – although individual women and a growing feminist movement began to push against these restrictions from the middle of the century. Earning was largely unacceptable. As Mrs. Ellis wrote in 1869, ‘As society is at present constituted, a Lady may do almost anything from motives of charity or zeal … but as soon as a woman begins to receive money … the heroine is transformed into a tradeswoman.’ These prevailing attitudes emphasize that Julia Margaret Cameron was mould-breaking in marketing her photographs professionally through the London art dealer Colnaghi.

Even with the help of servants, the larger families of the Victorian era gave mothers larger responsibilities. Today reliable and acceptable contraception allows women in the UK to choose when to have children, and how many to have, although those choices often have to be made on economic grounds. Most UK mothers now have only one or two children and the average birth rate is less than two per women. Adeline De L’Etang (1793 – 1845) married James Pattle (1775 – 1845) in 1811. They had ten children in India. As well as the seven sisters listed in the table below, their only son, James, was born and died in 1813, Eliza Ann lived from 1814 – 1818 and Harriet was born and died in 1825. The pattern of Adeline and James’s childbearing is typical of a young and fertile couple not practicing any form of family limitation. As breastfeeding has a contraceptive effect, it is also probable that Adeline used a wet nurse, although from the late 18^th century mothers were encouraged to breastfeed for an extended period. Mrs Beeton asserts that ‘when all circumstances are favorable, it should never be less than nine, nor exceed fifteen months,’ although she recommends introducing supplementary foods as soon as possible. Adeline and James produced a baby every year between 1812 and 1816, then the rate slowed down as Adeline reached her late twenties.

It is notable that none of Adeline and James Pattle’s daughters, despite their young marriages, had such large families. Natural fertility levels and breastfeeding may play a part. In some cases husbands were working in India, while their wives remained in Britain – Sophia Dalrymple’s pregnancies can be linked to marital visits. And in the absence of frank diaries or correspondence one never knows the intimate or the medical history of a marriage. Virginia Pattle married Viscount Eastnor (later Earl Somers) on 2 October 1850. Their first child, Isabel, was born on 3^rd August 1851 and the second, another Adeline on 24^th September 1852, a further daughter was born possibly as a twin, possibly in 1856 (my information is conflicting). Despite the need for a son to secure the continuance of the title, they had no more children. Her first birth is recorded as difficult. Physical damage or medical recommendations may have stopped her having more children. Such repeated childbearing could be dangerous. Adeline’s eldest daughter, Adeline Mackenzie, married in 1832 and had three daughters in rapid succession. Further harmed by inept medical intervention, including bleeding, she died in 1836 on a sea voyage for her health on her fourth wedding anniversary. Julia Margaret Cameron’s only daughter, Julia died in childbirth in 1873. She had married fourteen years before in 1859 and had had six children in that time.

The sisters’ grandchildren, born later in the nineteenth century, reveal a more varied pattern. There is one very large family – the 11 children of Mia Jackson’s daughter Mary Fisher (one of whom became the first wife of composer Vaughan Williams) but most of the families are threes and fours. Middle class families generally declined in size in the later nineteenth century, as clean water and better hygiene reduced child mortality at this social level, religious values which prohibited family limitation began to slacken, and parents sought to focus love and resources on a smaller number of children. The means of contraception are largely hidden in the private domain, but Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf states that Virginia believed herself to be an ‘accident’ which suggests contraceptive failure. (She was the sixth child of her mother Julia’s seven, from two marriages.)

Motherhood was more likely to bring the great grief of the death of a child. The level of child mortality in Adeline and James Pattle’s marriage is shocking to our eyes, although comparable to some still experienced in the developing world. In the UK in 2020, for instance, the number of children dying under the age of 5 per 1,000 live births was only 4. (Analysis of the data for 2023 by the office of national statistics suggest that most of these tragedies stemmed from premature births and physical and genetic disabilities, although deprivation and ethnicity were also factors.) The equivalent statistic for Adeline and James’s family would be not 4 but 300. India was seen as particularly unhealthy for Europeans. About one third of European colonists died prematurely, mainly from malaria and cholera and other waterborne illnesses. English children were often sent back to Britain at a young age to be brought up partly for the sake of their health, leading to heart-wrenching maternal separations. Thackeray recalled his dispatch to England at the age of about five after the death of his father, ‘A ghaut, or river stair at Calcutta; and a day when, down those steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose mothers remained on shore.’ Mary Watts and her two older sisters were sent to their grandparents at Aldourie castle in Inverness shire after the death of their mother in India in 1851. It is unusual that the Pattle sisters remained in India for so much of their upbringing, although they spent extended periods with their grandmother in Paris and Versailles, braving the risks of extended sea voyages.

Even in England, children’s lives were fragile in this period. As Mrs Beeton stated, ‘We see elaborate care bestowed on a family of children … and every precaution adopted that medical judgement and maternal love can dictate…; and find, in despite of all this care and vigilance, disease and death invading the guarded treasure.’ It is hard to work out exact figures for the period before 1837 when state registration of births marriages and deaths began, but the ‘statistica’ website suggests that the child mortality rate in Britain between 1800 and 1830 was also over 300 per 1,000 births and remained over 200 until the end of the century. These death rates were conspicuously higher among the poor but could touch the wealthiest. Virginia, Virginia Somers’ youngest child, developed diphtheria early in 1859. Despite summoning a medical specialist from London as well as Lord Eastnor’s cousin and close friend family friend, Coutts Lindsay, to comfort the child, she passed away in January, to the family’s great grief. Subsequently, and understandably, Virginia became almost neurotic about the health of her two remaining daughters.

The large age gap between Adeline de l’Etang and James Pattle was common in this period and is duplicated in many of their daughters’ marriages as was the bride’s young age at marriage. She was about 18, he was around 36. Such large age gaps between husband and wife – here about 18 years - were more common in the nineteenth century. Well-to-do and prudent families would check that a daughter should not suffer a drop in her living standards upon marriage, and that her husband would be able to support a growing family. It encouraged a young man to delay marriage until he had established himself. This could lead to long engagements but was equally likely to lead to a man in his thirties looking for a bride among young and eligible women. The death of a wife (sadly common, often though childbirth) could also lead an older man to remarry, particularly if he was left with a young family to bring up. After Adeline Pattle’s death, her husband Colin Mackenzie remarried, although not until seven years after in 1843. Mary Seton Fraser Tytler, later G. F. Watts’s wife, grew up with a stepmother.

Generally, the Pattle sisters’ marriages followed the pattern of young brides wedding older men. This is probably most easily shown in a table.

In a well to do family where marriage was the best destiny for daughters, they were encouraged to marry early, although among the working classes women would often delay until their mid-twenties, working as servants or in shops and factories and saving with their fiancés to set up a home. Virginia Somers’ two daughters were married into the aristocracy also at a young age. Isabella married Lord Henry Somerset in 1872, not yet 21, and Adeline married the Marquis of Tavistock (later the 10^th Duke of Bedford) in 1876 aged 23 or 24. None of the Pattle sisters’ husbands had married before although Charles Hay Cameron is known to have acknowledged and supported two earlier illegitimate children. There was greater acceptance of a man taking a mistress than there was of a woman having an affair. Men whose income and social position was already determined could afford to marry earlier: Viscount Eastnor, heir to an Earldom, was 31 – although as the only son he would have faced pressure from his own parents to marry young and secure the family inheritance and title, but the husbands of his two daughters were only a little older than they were. The Pattle sisters Adeline, Louisa and Sophia’s relatively young husbands deserve more investigation, especially as John Warrender Dalrymple’s title and estate were a late inheritance from a childless elder brother.

Only some of the descendants of the sisters began to break from traditional roles. Isabel Somerset, after a marital breakdown and inheritance of her father’s estates, devoted her attention to the temperance movement with particular support for women with alcohol problems. Adeline, Duchess of Bedford worked with a charity supporting poor women and prostitutes in the neighbourhood of Victoria station, spent twenty years as a prison visitor, campaigned for political prisoners in Portugal and during World War One was the chair of the European War Fund, visiting and supporting wounded soldiers, for which she was honoured. Note that both these women are working in the traditional philanthropic sector, and both after the ends of their marriages – most of Adeline’s charitable work was done in her widowhood after 1893. It was only in the early twentieth century that two of the Pattle grandchildren achieved radical change. Julia Jackson’s daughter Virginia Woolf became a ground-breaking modernist novelist, and her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, a key feminist text. Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, became a leading modernist painter within the Bloomsbury group and in her triangular relationship with her husband Clive Bell and the Bloomsbury painter and her affair with the critic Roger Fry quietly asserted her right to sexual choice and autonomy.