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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A CIRCLE OF SISTERS

  ‘A delightful book. Flanders takes nothing at surface value; alongside a scholar’s appetite for research she has a novelist’s delight in inferring the human reason why things happen … A Circle of Sisters surely marks a significant moment both in the onward march of group biography and in the understanding of the Victorian woman’ Lynne Truss, Sunday Times

  ‘A Circle of Sisters gives an extraordinarily vivid sense of what it was like to be alive a century ago’ Rachel Barnes, Guardian

  ‘This family would make a fine subject for any competent biographer, but Judith Flanders is far more than competent. Having read her, you could imagine meeting all these women and knowing immediately which was which and what to talk to them about … Within her enthralling and often amusing narrative are innumerable snapshots of other characters whose lives touched on those of the sisters: Rossetti, for instance, and William Morris, Gladstone and George Eliot, all of them caught unbuttoned and unposed, and all the more intriguing and convincing for that. And the details of Victorian life are marvellous … she brings Victorian England alive’ Sue Gaisford, Independent

  ‘A most impressive debut: a scholarly, entertaining, constantly interesting biography’ William Trevor

  ‘This is a terrific book – a biography of four remarkable sisters, all at a go, and also a pageant-like exhibition of Victorian artistic and middle-class life, public and domestic. The astonishing skill of its complex narrative, and the sustaining wealth of allusion and social comment, makes it seem almost incidental that one of the sisters should have been the mother of the Prime Minister and another the mother of Rudyard Kipling’ Jan Morris

  ‘A Circle of Sisters is a revelation. The Macdonald sisters, each interesting in herself, but also an astonishing foursome, blow away all the tired platitudes about “Victorian women”’ Roy Porter

  ‘The Macdonald sisters were four remarkable women from a humble background, who rose to eminence and helped weave the web of power and influence in Victorian England. Judith Flanders recreates their inner and outer worlds with wit, sympathy and insight’ Hilary Mantel

  ‘A scintillating debut. The author gives fascinating insights into the lives of this brilliant group, holding her huge cast of characters firmly controlled and vividly realized in a finely maintained structure – no small feat – as she weaves her complex web of relationships, beliefs, values and social mores. An engrossing chronicle. I turned the last pages of this real tour de force, with its ingenious mix of turbulent private lives and fascinating background material, with real regret, and its aroma has haunted me for days’ Penelope Hughes-Hallett

  ‘Provides compelling insights into the extraordinary lives of the four Macdonald sisters … Accessibly but informatively written, this is an intriguing journey of an obscure family of women on their way to a life of splendour and influence’ Time Out

  ‘A Circle of Sisters wears its learning lightly, weaving the supporting evidence into the fabric of this curious tale of four sisters who fortuitously made rather good marriages … This is a book with fascinating range and admirable control – definitely recommended’ Penelope Lively, Daily Mail

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Judith Flanders is a writer and journalist. A Circle of Sisters is her first book. She is currently working on her next book, on domestic life in the nineteenth century. She lives in London.

  A Circle of Sisters

  Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones,

  Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

  JUDITH FLANDERS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2002

  12

  Copyright © Judith Flanders, 2001

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-1935256

  For F.M.T.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Family Tree

  A Note on Names

  Introduction

  I. Childhood

  1. Inheritance

  2. ‘So entirely domestic’: 1835–1850

  3. ‘A moving tent’: 1850–1853

  4. London: ‘enchanted ground’: 1853–1858

  II. Marriage and Children

  5. Travelling in New Worlds: 1859–1862

  6. The Industrious Apprentices: 1862–1866

  7. ‘Love enough to last out a long life’: 1866–1871

  8. Spartan Mothers: 1872–1877

  9. Faith and Works: 1877–1882

  III. Empty Nests

  10. The Families Square: 1882–1884

  11. Leaving Home: 1884–1888

  12. The Cousinhood: 1888–1892

  13. Settling Down: 1892–1894

  14. Separations: 1895–1898

  IV. Old Age and Death

  15. ‘A pack of troubles’: 1898–1906

  16. ‘The pain of parting’

  Afterword

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Inset 1

  George and Hannah Macdonald, c. 1865 (Reproduced by courtesy of the Librarian and Director, the John Rylands Library: University of Manchester; by courtesy of Helen Macdonald)

  Harry, Caroline, Fred and Edith Macdonald (By courtesy of Helen Macdonald)

  Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa Macdonald (By courtesy of Helen Macdonald)

  Edward Burne-Jones, King’s Daughters, 1858 (The Trustees of the Bowood Collection)

  Alice and Lockwood Kipling, c. 1864–5; Rudyard Kipling, c. 1871 (Reproduced by permission of the National Trust)

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Georgie Burne-Jones, 1860; Georgiana Burne-Jones, woodcut; Edward Burne-Jones, early 1860s (Private collection; the Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum; The Maas Collection)

  Edward Burne-Jones, Georgie at the piano, early 1860s (© Christie’s Images/Christopher Wood)

  The Burne-Jones and Morris families, c. 1874 (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Edward Poynter, Agnes Poynter, 1866; Edward Poynter, 1883 (By courtesy of Helen Macdonald; National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Edward Poynter, Louisa Baldwin, 1868; Stanley Baldwin, 1876; Alfred Baldwin in later life (© reserved; Hulton Getty; Worcestershire Record Office)

  Inset 2

  Alice Kipling; Lockwood and Rudyard Kipling, 1883; Bikaner Lodge, Lahore (By courtesy of the Kipling Society; Helen Ma
cdonald; by permission of the British Library)

  Alice Kipling; Trix Kipling with her sais (By permission of the British Library; Helen Macdonald)

  Elsie, John and Josephine Kipling, 1898; Rudyard with his son, John, 1909 (Fotomas; © reserved)

  The garden of the Grange (Hulton Getty)

  Philip Burne-Jones, c. 1900 (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Margaret Burne-Jones in 1886; Angela Mackail with Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1892 (Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local History Centre)

  Edward Poynter, c. 1884; Ambrose Poynter during the First World War; his brother, Hugh, c. 1885 (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery; Helen Macdonald)

  Alfred Baldwin in 1897, as MP for West Worcestershire; Stanley Baldwin, c. 1909, as MP for West Worcestershire (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa (By courtesy of Helen Macdonald; the National Portrait Gallery, London; Helen Macdonald; from Stanley Baldwin by Adam Gowans Whyte, Chapman and Hall, London, 1926)

  Text illustrations

  Self & Family, Edward Burne-Jones (Private collection. Photo: © reserved) 112

  William and faney Morris, Edward Burne-Jones (Peter Nahum, Leicester Galleries, London) 113

  Maria Zambaco and Self, Edward Burne-Jones (Sotheby’s Picture Library, London) 120

  A letter from Edward Burne-Jones with caricatures of himself and the cleaning lady, 1890s (Photo: © reserved) 166

  A wood-carver, John Lockwood Kipling, Simla, 1870 (Fotomas) 190

  Kipling as seen by his father, 1899 (Princeton University Library) 294

  Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to correct in future editions any error or omission brought to their attention.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following for their help in writing this book: Juliet Annan, Meryl Macdonald Bendle, John Christian, Robert Cohen, John Dee, Peter Funnell, Robin Gibson, Charlotte Greig, Tonie and Valmai Holt, Alison Inglis, Gráinne Kelly, Sharad Keskar, Andrew Kidd (who came up with the title), Jeffery Lewins, Lisa Lewis, Andrew Lycett, Helen Macdonald, Sara Marafini, Fiona Markham, Jan Marsh, Douglas Matthews, David Miller, John Radcliffe, Charles Saumarez-Smith, John Singleton, John Slater, Fergal Tobin, Anya Waddington and Christopher Walker. Bob Davenport, by his sympathetic and intelligent editing, made every paragraph read more smoothly.

  I am indebted to the following individuals, institutions and libraries: the Bodleian Library; Brompton Cemetery; the British Library; the Hon. Simon Howard, Castle Howard, for permission to quote from the papers of the 9th Earl and Countess of Carlisle, with special thanks to Alison Brisby and Chris Ridgway; the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; Edinburgh University; Eton College; the Fitzwilliam Museum; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, in particular Steve Lawson; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Huntington Library; the John Rylands Library, Manchester University; the Kipling Society; the Library of Congress; the London Library; McGill University Library; the National Gallery; the National Portrait Gallery; the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, for permission to quote from the works of Rudyard Kipling; the Pitt-Rivers Museum, in particular Elizabeth Edwards; the Probate Office; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; Queen’s University, Belfast; the Royal Academy; the Royal Institute of British Architects; the Tate Gallery; the University of Birmingham; the University of British Columbia; University College London; the University of Sussex, especially Elizabeth Inglis; A. P. Watt; the Worcester Public Record Office. I am also indebted to the two individuals who allowed me access to their collections who wish to remain anonymous.

  Finally, my thanks to Ravi Mirchandani, who gave me the best advice I received. When I first began to think about this book he said, ‘Great subject. Don’t talk about it. Write it.’

  The Macdonald Family

  A Note on Names

  There are a large number of people with the same names in this book, and I have tried to rationalize usage so that the reader can immediately know which James Macdonald, or which ‘Jack’, I am referring to.

  I have called most of the characters by their first names, or by what they called each other. Louie instead of Louisa was almost invariable. John Lockwood Kipling was called John by his family, Lockwood by the rest of the world; I have settled on Lockwood so that later there is no confusion with his grandson John. Agnes was sometimes called Agnes, sometimes Aggie. I have stuck with Agnes, as to a modern ear Aggie is taken to be a nickname for Agatha (and was indeed reproduced so in one of the standard biographies of Baldwin).

  Those with the same names have proved more difficult. Burne-Jones was called Ned Jones in youth, Edward Burne-Jones thereafter. I have followed the chronology for his last name, but as his brother-in-law was also an Edward – Edward Poynter – I have usually called them Burne-Jones and Poynter. Where these would have appeared silly – ‘Burne-Jones and Georgie’ for example – I have used Ned for Burne-Jones and Edward for Poynter. Margaret Burne-Jones and Trix Kipling both married men named John and called Jack; I have used their last names as much as possible, as no one ever called either of them anything but Jack.

  Introduction

  I first came across the Macdonald sisters when reading a biography of Rudyard Kipling. Around him as a little boy in Southsea were his mother’s sisters: one the wife of Burne-Jones, another the mother of Stanley Baldwin, a third the wife of the director of the National Gallery, Edward Poynter. Looking further, I saw that all the many biographies of the men in the family – of Kipling, of Burne-Jones, of Baldwin – mention that the sisters were the wives or mothers of famous men as an interesting fact, but not an important one. There have been two biographies of the sisters, one by Stanley Baldwin’s son Windham Baldwin in 1960, and one by Ina Taylor, in 1987, but neither was received in the way the ‘male’ biographies were. This made me think more about biography, and what its function is. Can it really be that our families have so little influence on our lives that they can safely be tucked away in Chapter 1, and thereafter disregarded?

  It seemed to me that families are one of the two most important influences in our lives – families and domestic life. Yet it is only in the last decade that biographies treat both in anything other than a subsidiary fashion. They are women’s topics, not important enough in the big male world for full-scale treatment, and until recently they have been traditionally displaced into the ‘women’s read’, which is fiction. While families and domestic life are what we all share, so much of history was being written off with a brief ‘They were just like us.’ Was this the case? Is this why there is such a lack of interest in families and family life? Because they (we?) are all the same? An exploration of the creation and dissolution of a family at a different period, a look at how families lived in the mid-and high-Victorian periods, seemed a way into the mindset of a different time, and could be used as a proving ground: how were these people different from our own families? How were they the same?

  *

  The Macdonalds were fascinating people at a fascinating moment of time. They were there at the death of the nineteenth century – Burne-Jones, although later embraced by the Symbolists, was old-fashioned even at the height of his career, painting mythological pictures and illustrations of courtly legends while Manet was producing Olympe. The next generation, in particular Baldwin and Kipling, was at the forefront of the new wave, and helped create the way we perceive the twentieth century – Kipling, in his life so reactionary, was a daring modernist in his work; Baldwin was the first British politician to embrace twentieth-century techniques of campaigning such as radio and film.

  Parallel to the men’s story was another one which fascinated me. This was the story of domestic life. I was interested in seeing how families lived; what the ingredients were that went into making up lives. The Macdonalds gave me a wide range to cover. They started as
a family that was middle class by the skin of its teeth, with little prestige and less money. The women married within their social circle, and yet by the end they were managing town houses and country houses, out in a world that as children they could barely imagine. These women were not the meek little stay-at-homes of fiction. Georgie Burne-Jones ran for local-government office the very first time women could be elected; Louisa Baldwin wrote novels; Alice Kipling published poetry. Yet their homes were the focus of their lives.

  The range of possibilities for women varied both with the society each woman found herself in and with the woman herself. Before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 – when an engaged woman could not dispose of her property without her fiancé’s consent; when on marriage all her property, personal and real, passed to her husband; when she could not make a will without permission, nor enter into a contract, nor go to law, nor keep her own earnings or her own inherited money – what hope had any woman of a separate intellectual existence? After all, she had, in law, no separate physical existence: she could not sue her husband, because legally they were the same person. A modern scholar notes that ‘Under married law women were classed with criminals, lunatics and minors – legally incompetent and irresponsible.’1

  John Stuart Mill thought women’s suffrage one of the most important questions of the day; in 1866 he would petition Parliament for its consideration, and in 1869 he published his On the Subjection of Women. But Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, published between 1854 and 1863, was more popular, with its blend of premature death, sticky sentiment and frigid women whose life’s purpose was to serve men. Tennyson followed this same pattern, creating a raft of passive, patient heroines who waited to be acted upon, rather than acting themselves. His Mariana, waiting for her man, can stand in for all of them: ‘ “My life is dreary/He cometh not,” she said.’ The poet William Allingham, who was briefly engaged to Alice Macdonald, had noted that he ‘could not put up with a wife without Genius’, but her genius was to be ‘in appreciating’.2 (It is perhaps not surprising that his engagement to Alice was short-lived.)