Victorian Secrets Archives - Catherine Pope

The Cockney Who Sold the Alps: Albert Smith and the Ascent of Mont Blanc by Alan McNee

May 14, 2015 By catherine Leave a Comment

As someone with an aversion to the outdoors, I prefer to experience nature vicariously. Preferably with a G&T in my hand. Had I been shuffling around in the nineteenth century, I’d have no doubt found my way to Albert Smith’s ‘Ascent of Mont Blanc’ show at London’s Egyptian Hall. Audiences were mesmerised by a diorama that gave the impression they were participating in an Alpine adventure – all from the safety of a plush seat in Piccadilly.

Smith, in full evening dress, would appear on the stage giving a ‘rattling and rapid description of the journey from town to Dover; then the run across the channel and the Continent, till in a few minutes he brought the audience to Switzerland itself’. The proscenium was designed to resemble a two-storey Swiss chalet, complete with shutters and balcony. Behind it lay rocks and a miniature lake, stocked with live fish. Alpine plants adorned the display, along with appropriate accoutrements, such as knapsacks, alpenstocks, and Swiss hats. As Smith described the journey, the Swiss chalet would rise of sight to make way for the painted canvases, depicting scenes along the way. The interval was marked by the arrival of St. Bernard dogs bearing boxes of chocolates for the children. In the second act, the images moved in a continuous descending panorama to give the impression of the ascent in progress.

Audiences loved it. The first performance took place on 15 March 1852, and it ran for seven seasons – a total of 2,000 shows. Alan McNee estimates that around 800,000 people watched ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’, placing it in the league of modern West End musicals. By the second season, The Times remarked that ‘the exhibition now seems to be one of the “sights of London” – like St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey and the Monument’. Initially sceptical of the show’s appeal, Thackeray later wrote to his daughters: ‘it was so amusing that you don’t feel a moment’s ennui during the whole performance – a thousand times more amusing than certain lectures and certain novels I know of’.

While many people were content to enjoy the ascent vicariously, others were inspired to pursue a hands-on approach. Smith’s show inspired ‘Mont Blanc mania’, encouraging participation in mountaineering as a popular pursuit. Tour operators such as Thomas Cook were quick to capitalise on the opportunity, conveying eager holidaymakers over to the continent. Smith might have spiced up the leisure time of the more affluent working classes, but not everyone was happy with this transformation. Leslie Stephen (more famous now as the father of Virginia Woolf) was horrified that the Alps were no longer the exclusive preserve of the upper middle class.

Smith’s own ascent of Mont Blanc is the most remarkable episode in this absorbing story. Rather portly in stature and no Bear Grylls, he nonetheless succeeded in scaling the highest peak in the Alps. Although he benefited from local guides, Smith was using equipment that would horrify a twenty-first-century mountaineer. And for much of the ascent he was three sheets to the wind. He probably wasn’t drunk, as such, but had certainly consumed an inadvisable quantity of alcohol (even a small amount of booze intensifies the unpleasant effects of altitude). Of course, in the mid-nineteenth century, there were no dehydrated meals or sachets of high-energy gel – all the provisions for the ascent had to be carried by the party. And what an impressive list of provisions it was:

60 bottles of vin ordinaire
6 bottles of Bordeaux
10 bottles of St. George
15 bottles of St. Jean
3 bottles of Cognac
1 bottle of syrup of raspberries
6 bottles of lemonade
2 bottles of champagne
20 loaves
10 small cheeses
6 packets of chocolate

6 packets of sugar
4 packets of prunes
4 packets of raisins
2 packets of salt
4 wax candles
6 lemons
4 legs of mutton
4 shoulders of mutton
6 pieces of veal
1 piece of beef
11 large fowls
35 small fowls

Clearly, an audacious attempt on an intimidating mountain was no reason to let culinary standards slip. Smith’s story shows how far you can get with determination, perseverance, and a large dose of chutzpah. John Ruskin, however, was unimpressed, noting with contempt that there had been a “Cockney ascent of Mont Blanc”.

Smith’s successes were legion, but he didn’t get to the top without making a few enemies along the way. His bumptiousness made him a divisive figure, and his relentless drive to seize every opportunity often gave the impression of a grasping and ruthless nature. He numbered William Makepeace Thackeray, George Augustus Sala, and Charles Dickens among his friends, but fell out with all of them at different times. Most notably, he made an enemy of Dickens after becoming embroiled in the unpleasantness surrounding Dickens’s affair with Ellen Ternan.

Although he died aged only 43, Albert Smith managed to pack much incident into his short life. He was robbed by highwaymen in Italy, narrowly escaped death in a hot air ballooning accident, and dodged arrest in Paris during the June Days Uprising of 1848. Ever the showman, he made good use of these events in his journalism and also on the stage. Even Queen Victoria described him as “inimitable”, an epithet that Dickens famously liked to apply to himself.

I must confess that I’d never heard of Smith before I received the proposal for this entertaining and enlightening book. I was delighted to meet him, albeit at a distance of 150 years. As a man, he’s hard to like, but as a showman he’s impossible to resist.

The Cockney Who Sold the Alps: Albert Smith and the Ascent of Mont Blanc by Alan McNee is available in paperback and Kindle editions.

Sowing the Wind by Eliza Lynn Linton

February 8, 2015 By catherine 2 Comments

Eliza Lynn Linton is an unlikely heroine for me, given she is best known for her anti-feminist articles ‘The Girl of the Period’ for the Saturday Review. While her journalism alerted readers to the dangers of the New Woman in all her guises, Linton’s novels – quite literally – tell a different story.

First published in 1867, Sowing the Wind features an emancipated woman who bears a remarkable resemblance to Linton herself. Like her creator, Jane Osborn works as a journalist on a daily newspaper, managing to thrive in a masculine environment and to earn the respect of her male colleagues. Linton was actually the first woman journalist in England to earn a salary, and was described by Charles Dickens as “good for anything, and thoroughly reliable”.¹ Jane works to support her mother, an endearing but unworldly woman, and her recently discovered cousin, Isola.

The bewitchingly beautiful Isola leads a stultifying existence as the wife of St. John Aylott, a tyrannical popinjay more interested in his appearance than in her happiness. He is a grotesque caricature of the Victorian husband, denying Isola her subjectivity and insisting they must share one mind – i.e. his. As an independent and capable woman, Jane is horrified by her cousin’s circumscribed life:

Sacrifice yourself for a good cause if you like – for the progress of principles, for truth, freedom, humanity – but not to foolish whims and fancies like your husband’s.²

Jane memorably dismisses St. John as an “idiotic bit of millinery”, unable to see the point of a man who is neither manly nor strong. She encourages Isola’s steady transformation from passive ornament to woman of convictions, offering both moral and financial support. Once Isola displays even a modicum of resistance to her husband’s demands, he quickly descends into paranoia, then madness. His tempers and pettifogging are contrasted with Isola’s poise and Jane’s unflagging good sense. As a few scholars have identified, there are marked similarities between Sowing the Wind and Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, published two years later.

By pathologising St. John’s behaviour, Linton emphasises that his behaviour is exceptional, rather than representative of Victorian husbands. Yet Isola’s situation is emblematic of that faced by many women before the legal reforms of the late nineteenth century. With no right to control her own money, she is entirely dependent upon the whims of a domestic god. Having recently separated from her husband, Linton was painfully aware that marriage had very different implications for men and women. She might have been terrified by the potential repercussions of a powerful women’s rights movement, but Linton was far too independent-minded to accept the role of conventional wife. Surely, it is the author who speaks through Jane when she declaims:

Ah, you may talk as you like, Isola!—babies, and love, and the graces and prettinesses are all very fine, I dare say, but give me the real solid pleasure of work — a man’s work — work that influences the world—work that is power! To sit behind the scenes and pull the strings[.]³

Jane Osborn is an intriguing avatar. She is described as a “rude, unlovely boy-woman”, and her colleagues call her “good fellow”, Jack, or Johnnie O. Her ‘otherness’ is stressed throughout the narrative – particularly her unkempt appearance and refusal to acknowledge male superiority – but she is undeniably the hero(ine) of the story. Almost twenty years later, Linton would perform an act of literary transvestism by telling her life story as a man in The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885). Perhaps influenced by the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, she felt that she was the soul of one sex in the body of the other. With lesbianism yet to be or understood, she could express her sexuality only through male-identification.

By the end of the novel, Jane is still an outsider, while Isola’s appropriately feminine behaviour is rewarded. Although Linton isn’t making an especially radical statement about marriage itself, the novel is, nevertheless, highly provocative in presenting a clear alternative for women. Jane might think wistfully of a life partner, but, like Linton, she’d rather be single than married to a man like St. John Aylott. Her attraction to Isola, revealed in tantalising hints, cannot be recognised – instead, her passion must be channelled into work.

Quite apart from Linton’s exploration of sexuality and gender, Sowing the Wind is also a joyous example of the sensation novel, with themes of inheritance, concealed identity, and miscegenation. There’s even a parrot. Linton might be infuriating, but she’s never dull.

Sowing the Wind by Eliza Lynn Linton, edited by Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff, is published by Victorian Secrets and available in paperback and Kindle editions.

The cover photo for this edition was very kindly provided by Paul Frecker, who runs The Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography. The image actually shows a carte de visite of a man suffering from toothache (a curious choice), but I thought it suggested St. John Aylott’s mental anguish.

Fix Anderson, Nancy, Women Against Women in Victorian England: Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p.66 [↩]
Linton, Eliza Lynn, Sowing the Wind, ed. by Deborah T Meem and Kate Holterhoff (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2015) [↩]
Sowing the Wind, p. 248 [↩]

Elizabeth Gaskell and the Meanings of Home

January 13, 2015 By catherine Leave a Comment

Imagine if your house was given a £2.5m makeover and you weren’t around to enjoy it? Well, that’s what’s happened to Elizabeth Gaskell. Her home at 84 Plymouth Grove, Manchester has just reopened to the public after extensive renovations. The Grade II* listed villa had been languishing in a state of disrepair since the death of Gaskell’s daughter Meta in 1913, and narrowly dodged demolition.

Elizabeth Gaskell lived here from 1850 until her death in 1865, and it was where she wrote some of her most famous works – North and South, Cranford, and Wives and Daughters. The imposing nature of the house gives an idea of Gaskell’s literary success. Although the rent at £150pa might seem modest to us, a large residence demanded a large retinue of servants to run it. Gaskell sometimes felt uncomfortable with this conspicuous display of wealth – she was, after all, a chronicler of Manchester’s poor. The trouble with having all the space was also that people wanted to come and stay. Charles Dickens visited once, and Charlotte Brontë turned up three times (on one occasion hiding behind the curtains to avoid having to make small talk with other guests). Nowadays, everybody is welcome. The upstairs has been adapted to host educational. literary and community events, and visitors can also have a poke around the Gaskells’ living rooms. Most importantly, there’s a tea room, too.

One of the first events was a talk by Dr Carolyn Lambert, author of The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction. In this insightful book, Lambert explores the ways in which Gaskell challenges the nineteenth-century idea of home as a domestic sanctuary offering protection from the external world. By drawing on Gaskell’s novels, letters, and also plans of Plymouth Grove, Lambert shows how this work evinces complex ideas surrounding identity, gender, and sexuality. As the publisher of the book and a friend of Carolyn, I’m very pleased to say that it has been nominated for the Sonia Rudikoff Prize (fingers crossed for the award ceremony in April).

I haven’t yet been able to visit the house, but Catherine Hawley has written a tantalising description over on Juxtabook. You can also find out more on the official Elizabeth Gaskell House website and even follow them on Twitter @GaskellsHouse. Gaskell, I’m sure, would have loved social media.

Seventy Years a Showman by ‘Lord’ George Sanger

November 15, 2014 By catherine 2 Comments

One of the many joys of delving into the nineteenth century is meeting the numerous vibrant characters who inhabited it. I first encountered ‘Lord’ George Sanger when researching the Hyde Park celebrations that marked Queen Victoria’s accession. Over nine days in June 1838, Sanger and his circus family thrilled the crowds with learned pigs and clairvoyant ponies. Their remarkable troupe also included ‘Living Curiosities’: the pig-faced woman, the living skeleton, the world’s tallest woman, and cannibal pigmies. Something for everyone, I’m sure you’ll agree.

To my delight, I discovered that Sanger had written an autobiography. Well, it’s likely to have been ghostwritten by the journalist George R Sims: Sanger, like many nineteenth-century circus folk, was unable to write. In Seventy Years a Showman, Sanger comes across as an indulgent father and benevolent employer who managed everything through a calm benevolence, rather than with a rod of iron. My view of him then shifted after reading The Sanger Story, based on the memories of his grandson, George Sanger Coleman. He recalls how his grandfather often spoke movingly of the death of his daughter Lavinia, but omitted to mention his blind fury when she eloped with a clown. Unusually perhaps for the Victorian period, Sanger’s marriage appears to have been a genuinely happy one. No doubt his wife’s former career as a lion-tamer provided her with invaluable skills.

From the humblest of beginnings in an overcrowded caravan, the Sangers built a hugely successful entertainment business, ultimately boasting one of the world’s most distinctive brands. This achievement is set against the backdrop of an England that changed beyond recognition during the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the railways, rapid industrialisation, and unprecedented social reform. Along his journey, Sanger encounters Chartists, body-snatchers, and health and safety inspectors, all of whom are treated with equal disdain.

Sanger’s colossal pride (some might say hubris) is evidenced by the self-designated title ‘Lord’. Dismissed in these memoirs as a bit of harmless fun to trump the ‘Honourable’ Buffalo Bill Cody during a legal battle, Sanger retained it throughout his career. His grandson later wrote that it had more to do with conceit, Sanger repeatedly declining a knighthood, as it meant dropping the ‘Lord’.

There was, however, a softer side to Sanger. Notwithstanding the exploitation of the learned pig and the pig-faced lady (actually a bear), he treated his animals well. Ajax the elephant was a particular favourite, and seems to have been more indulged that Sanger’s own children. The elephant’s particularly dexterous tongue repeatedly got his own into bother. Sanger’s admirer G B Burgin remembers how he once stole the produce from a passing greengrocer’s cart:

By the time the greengrocer discovered his loss the last stick of celery had vanished, and old Ajax looked round with an air of innocent wonderment as to what was the matter.

Ajax also managed to get himself wedged in the doorway of a grocer’s shops. While the circus men broke down the brick work to free him, Ajax “stuffed himself with the contents of every biscuit tin and everything else he fancied within the reach of his trunk;” the grocer watched in impotent rage. Not everyone was pleased when the circus came to town.

Sanger’s memoirs end with his retirement to East Finchley and the admission: “I feel that the latter days of my career … have not the interest for my reader that attaches to the earlier period.” But any ideas he might have had of quietly fading away were thwarted. Although he declared “I shall remain a showman until the end of my days,” what followed was probably not what he had in mind.

On 28 November 1911, Sanger’s employee Herbert Charles Cooper attacked him with a hatchet before hurling himself under a speeding train. Sanger’s family maintained this was an unprovoked attack on a harmless old man. Less subjective accounts suggest that Sanger had tormented Cooper, provoking him beyond endurance. Whatever happened – and we can never be certain – Sanger met with an appropriately spectacular end. He was buried in Margate alongside his beloved wife, after thousands travelled to his funeral. Even in death, he attracted a crowd.

Of course, few autobiographies are truly candid, and Sanger undoubtedly exaggerates his achievements and downplays his mistakes. Nevertheless, if even half of it is true, Sanger’s was surely an exceptional life.

Seventy Years a Showman by ‘Lord’ George Sanger (with an introduction by Catherine Pope) is available as an ebook.