Fingers to the fire: Christina Rossetti’s mental health crisis

 

IT’s years since I published my biography of Christina Rossetti in which I speculated that her teenage ‘breakdown’ may have been linked to sexual trauma or abuse, and I have not kept up to date with much Rossetti scholarship, while nonetheless applauding the ongoing critical attention her verse now receives.  But I ought to have been aware of the article by Simon Humphries in Notes & Queries, March 2017, where a summary account of Rossetti’s mental state by the physician who attended her in 1845 extends biographical understanding of these mid-teen years

Mackenzie Bell, Rossetti’s first biographer, consulted Dr Charles Hare around 1895-6.  After some delay, Hare, whom obits described as a meticulous correspondent, explained he had sifted through over 8000 case notes to locate Rossetti’s, replying on 2 November 1896, when he was aged 78 (he died just two years later).  As Humphries shows, meticulously, the diagnosis of a nervous breakdown caused by ‘religious mania’ was not made by Hare but by other commentators. But Hare did describe Rossetti when he was first consulted in November 1845 as ‘then 15’  (she was four or six weeks short of this birthday ) ‘and of a highly neurotic disposition and character.’    He was the fourth medic to be called, which must reflect the family’s acute anxiety.

Although then denying that he was disclosing the ‘medical memoranda’ or patient records which would ‘under no circumstances whatever’ be made public, Hare continued to quote his case notes as ‘matters of observation open to anyone at the time or mentioned in ordinary conversation’.  They actually read like a record of what his patient told him.

‘Has been out of health for several months & a marked change has taken place in her manner & in her way of speaking. When walking out would suddenly leave her mother & turn back home, or run forward without any cause & when asked why, said she did not know. Has said very odd things—has also spoken of suicide; her spirits have been low & she does no drawing or work of any kind.

‘She tells me that she feels low & heavy & has a pain & heat almost constantly over a small spot at the top (vertex) of the head; this part is hot to the hand applied.—Is aware that she does not always express herself correctly but she cannot help it; she does it from impulse.

‘She is usually very unwilling to go out for a walk—feels too listless to do so: she does not like the effort necessary to prepare for a walk though when out she does not object to the walking. She tells me that she has a very strong impulse to burn her fingers as by putting them on the hot bars of the fireplace: she knows that she will have pain to suffer in consequence and she ‘does not like that better than anyone else’; but yet she cannot help burning her fingers; she has done so 3 or 4 times the same morning.’  

This reads as a vivid description of behaviour in extreme psychic distress.

Hare continued to attend Rossetti on a regular basis for the next five years (he recorded over 100 notes) and observe some improvement in her condition. However, in 1849 he was again summoned, when she was ‘very weak’ and ‘confined to the sofa’, with pains and ‘confusion in the head’.

‘I found that the headache had become more frontal: her dreams were usually ‘frightful’ ones, & she had besides, ‘frequently the sensation of vertigo or rather the sensation of things around her—furniture, the walls, the floor—moving; the walls appear to be falling gradually forward & the floor to have an undulating motion, & she sees creeping things on the floor around her: mind sometimes wanders, she says very odd things & is rather contrariant’ [sic]’

These alarming symptoms diminished ‘in a couple of months’, although the pain in her head persisted.  On 9 June she composed the poem,  ‘Looking Forward’, writing out a copy for Hare ‘in her own neat handwriting’, whose title one could interpret as evidence that she had resumed writing – although the content remained suicidal:

Sleep, let me sleep, for I am sick of care;

Sleep, let me sleep, for my pain wearies me…

Sweet thought that I may yet live and grow green,

That leaves may yet spring from the withered root,

And buds and flowers and berries half unseen;

Then if you  haply muse upon the past,

Say this:  Poor child, she hath her wish at last;

Barren through life, but in death bearing fruit.

 

All these symptoms, but most especially the impulse to touch fire-hot bars, which allies with the ‘cutting’ incident recalled by her brother when she scored her arm with sharp scissors, surely record the kind of self-harm often associated with severe teenage anguish - now termed an ‘acute mental health crisis’ rather than a nervous breakdown.  The migraine-like headaches, nightmares  and hallucinations suggest  a post-traumatic recurrence four years after the original attack.

 

Of course I don’t know what caused or precipitated Rossetti’s crisis in 1845 or its return in 1849.  Those with professional knowledge of teenage mental health whom I consulted in my turn spoke of self-harm, dissociation and suicidal impulses being recognised traumatic symptoms of sexual abuse, which in the context of Rossetti’s otherwise warmly affectionate family life seemed a plausible suggestion.   And I wish I had known of Hare’s notes  when I was researching her life.

Hera by Marie Spartali Stillman

Marie Spartali Stillman’s painting Hera, which although not ‘lost’ has remained fairly unknown,   features in the forthcoming exhibition Artful Stories, curated by Nancy Carlisle and Peter Trippi for the Eustis Estate museum in Milton, Boston.  It depicts Hera/Juno, the patronal goddess of marriage and fertility, carrying a pomegranate and a peacock feather, in the standard half-length format that MSS adapted from renaissance and pre-Raphaelite examples for vaguely allegorical figures.

Probably painted in Rome, Hera is likely to have been a gift to Richard and Edith Norton, who were living in Italy.  Richard was the son of Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton, whom MSS knew through her husband, W.J. Stillman and British friends like Janey Morris. It is signed with MSS’s familiar monogram, and an indecipherable date that could be 1895 or 1905.  The composition and especially horizon are very similar to other works by MSS, notably The Rose in Armida’s Garden (1894) 

and the undated, unfinished Woman with a Dove in the Laing AG, Newcastle.

Some months ago, I was sent a jpeg of the 'new' Hera/Juno, which is that at the top of this post.  One can see the rather nasty crack  running through the support just left of the face.  Happily, the Eustis exhibition has cleaned, conserved and mended the tear, so the painting looks very much better - as here below.

 

BMAG

 This is a very welcome appointment.  Birmingham's citizens are so energetic and engaged, trail-blazers for the heritage/arts sectors nationally.

Birmingham Museums Trust will have two new leaders in November when Sara Wajid and Zak Mensah step into their roles as joint CEOs of the organisation.

The announcement breaks new ground for both the trust and the sector; it is the first time the service will be led by a person of colour since it became a trust in 2012, and makes it one of just two organisations represented on the National Museum Directors’ Council to have BAME leadership. It is also one of the only instances of job-sharing taking place at the level of CEO in the museum sector.

The trust said the appointment is intended to cement its “commitment to representing the people of the city at all levels across the organisation”.

Wajid joins the trust from the Museum of London, where she is the head of engagement for the museum’s new capital project. She previously worked at Birmingham Museums Trust on a 15-month secondment, when she produced The Past is Now, the influential 2017 exhibition on the British Empire that pioneered decolonisation practice in the sector.

Mensah is currently the head of transformation at Bristol Museums, where he has played a significant role in growing the service’s income by 100% within three years, as well as leading programmes focusing on continuous improvement and technology.

The pair replace Ellen MacAdam, who stepped down in June after seven years in the role. They will be joining at a turbulent time for the trust, which currently undergoing redundancy consultations due the impact of the Covid pandemic.

Wajid said: “Being appointed as joint CEO to Birmingham Museums Trust is a very special honour for me and it’s in part thanks to the experience I gained on the arts council Change Makers programme at Birmingham Museums Trust in 2016. That's what I call effective anti-racist succession planning.

“Zak and I were inspired to apply for this role together through our involvement in Museum Detox (an anti-racist museum collective). We hope it could be a useful blueprint for others considering their future in the sector, and that we won't be in such a small cohort of people of colour leading museums for long.”

Henry 'Box' Brown Abolitionist

A new book about one of the best-known Abolitionist campaigners  in Victorian Britain is being published by Kathleen Chater.    

Here are details

From Slavery to Show Business Kathleen Chater 267 pages, $39.95 softcover, 22 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, index ISBN 978-1-4766-7922-8 Ebook ISBN 978-1-4766-3943-7 2020

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers • Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 336-246-4460 • Orders 800-253-2187 • FAX 336-246-4403 • McFarlandPub.com

HENRY BOX BROWN:

From Slavery to Show Business

Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business is to be published very soon.  McFarland is a well-known publishing company in the USA, and Henry is famous there.   I attach an order form but I’d like to tell you a bit more about how important he is in the history of both abolitionism and entertainment in Victorian Britain.

His story is familiar in the United States because of his extraordinary method of escape from enslavement in the South to the North: he was nailed into a crate and posted. This was how he acquired the sobriquet ‘Box’ which he adopted as his name.  After speaking on the abolitionist circuit for some eighteen months in New England, he fled to old England when the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made remaining in America dangerous.  Initially he spoke on the abolitionist circuit here but thereafter only occasional big events in his life are known: he won a libel case against a newspaper which vilified him; he married again to an Englishwoman; he moved into mesmerism and magic before, after 25 years, he returned to the USA.

He published two autobiographies: the first in 1849 and the second in 1851 in Manchester.  Unlike Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the most famous campaigners against American slavery, he wrote nothing more about his experiences.  He lived a full life but has unfortunately left no record of how he felt about it. With the digitization of British, American and Canadian newspapers it has now been possible to reconstruct his extraordinary journey. 

In researching his life I have been struck by his bravery, not just in his method of escape, but in his break with the abolition movement and his willingness to reinvent himself (he also made forays into acting).  The partnership between him and his second wife, a Cornish schoolteacher, was a revelation.  Almost nothing has been known about her but it is now possible to understand the role she played in his professional career as well as in their personal life, which overturns some stereotypes of the Victorian woman (and man).

He became well-known, appealing not to the bien-pensant middle classes but to the working classes, and is often mentioned in the press as an example of a popular entertainer.  Surprisingly the two ‘firsts’ in English history that he achieved have never been recognised – and you need to read the biography to find out what they were.

I hope you will be as intrigued by this extraordinary life as I was in discovering it.  If you need any more information, please contact me.

Kathleen Chater  

untoldhistories@live.co.uk

The box in the illustration was made by Rory Rennick, an American performer who does a magic act based on Henry’s

What was it about those Whistlers?

 

Sponsor Tate Britain: Remove the racist and harmful “Pursuit of Rare Meats” mural at Tate Britain’s Rex Whistler (change.org)
Petition against Racist Rex Whistler

The current   condemnation of the depiction of a captive Black child led like an animal, and then chained running behind a carriage  in Rex Whistler's whimsical mural in the Tate Britain restaurant is especially remarkable in that it has elicited no public attention hitherto, despite the well-publicised restoration of the 'Pursuit of Rare Meats' art work in 2013.  I myself have never eaten in the [high-priced] restaurant, but had one known of these racist images efforts would have been made to view and condemn them.  

They are exceptionally offensive and really quite inexplicable in an allegedly pastoral scene.

The artist Rex Whistler, who died in WW2, was not related to his earlier namesake, the American James [Jimmy or Jem] McNeil Whistler, who settled in London in the 1860s, but both held racist views. Jimmy Whistler did not as far as I know depict Black figures in his paintings, but he boasted of assaulting a fellow-passenger on a transatlantic voyage.  In telling the tale, Whistler dubbed his victim, from Haiti, 'the Marquis of Marmalade'.  At the dinner table, Whistler first flung insults and then hit his fellow-traveller so  hard that he injured his own hand. As a result, the ship's captain arrested Whistler and locked him in his cabin.

Whistler's explanation was that 'This passenger was simply a Negro among several forced upon our company on the voyage.  The degree to which he offended my prejudices (as a Southerner) who for the first time found Negroes at the same table, led finally to our coming into collision.'  The next day, when reproved for such disgraceful and  'ungentlemanly' conduct, Whistler hit the Captain with his uninjured hand, and was duly punched in the face and subdued in return. 

Rex Whistler  less combative, perhaps,  but something about Black people stirred his prejudices.  He inserted a Black coachman or footman into a fancy portrait of   two upperclass young women, the Dudley Ward sisters, in 1933, historicizing the composition as an 18th-century picnic so as to evoke the social and visual difference of Black and White commonly deployed in earlier aristocratic portraiture.  

And there is somewhere a  mural depicting Circus performers, including a naked acrobat, which  I've only seen in a photo of Rex by his pal Cecil Beaton, reproduced on a book jacket.

.  

Mary Seacole portrait bust plus update

UPDATE 30 JULY  at today's sale, the hammer price reached £101,000    - a tribute to Seacole's historical significance but which sadly probably means the portrait won't be going to a public museum.

31 JULY    @RacingGreenUK

 is thrilled to announce that producer owner Billy Peterson won the bid for the Mary Seacole terracotta bust today at auction. The company hopes to feature it in the upcoming movie 'Seacole' starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw

A second cast of the delicate terracotta bust of the famous Victorian healer Mary Seacole has unexpectedly come to light.  Dated to 1871, it was modelled from life by sculptor Victor Gleichen  and exhibited at the Royal Academy in summer 1872.

The bust was previously known from a black-and-white photograph from the 1870s and a version now in the National Museum of Jamaica in Kingston, which was loaned to Manchester Art Gallery in 2006 for the Black Victorians exhibition curated by Jan Marsh.  Both are the same half-lifesize dimensions and both show Seacole wearing the replica medals commemorating her service to British soldiery during the Crimean War.

The appearance of a second cast is unusual, because terracotta – the fired version of the original clay portrait modelled by hand during sessions with the sitter – is not often reproduced in the same medium.  While conveying a warm colour that is more attractive than bronze or marble in relation to the human head, terracotta is fragile and prone to chips and stains.

The newly-discovered bust has suffered some knocks, but is generally robust.  It clearly shows the marks of the sculpting tools, and the firing seams. It belonged to Jack Webb, antique dealer and collector who haunted the shops in Camden Passage and specialized in militaria.

Jamaican-born Seacole, whose career has inspired generations of nurses and whose statue now stands outside St Thomas’s Hospital, was voted ‘greatest Black Briton’ in 2004.  She

Undeterred, she financed her own voyage to the war zone

“I have seen her go down, under fire, with her little store of creature comforts for our wounded men and a more tender or skillful hand about a wound or broken limb could not be found among our best surgeons’,  wrote the Times’s war correspondent.  Nightingale loathed Seacole for selling alcohol to the troops – doubtless much-appreciated amid the wintry Crimean conditions.

One of the officers among the British forces was a German-born nobleman known as Count Gleichen von Hohenlohe-Langeburg, who was related to Queen Victoria.  After the Crimean War he trained as a sculptor and had a grace-and-favour residence in St James’s Palace.   Gleichen was one of the British officers who raised funds for Seacole when she was left bankrupt by the sudden ending of the war.  

Sculpting the portrait bust over a decade later seems an additional gesture of gratitude and support. It appears to have been made in an edition of four or six, in accordance with sculptural practice, so there should be other copies awaiting discovery.

British History (aspects of)

In the context of the deposition and drowning of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, one can reflect on Britain’s relationship with its slaving past.  Which is important because the nation’s mercantile and financial history was built and is based on the banking, insurance and investment systems developed to support the slave trade and slave produce from the 1660s onwards  – later augmented to profit from exploitation in India and Asia.  Over a century later, in 1780, the humanitarian campaign began against shipping human beings like cargo or cattle, and then in the 1830s colonial slavery was eventually abolished (except in India).  At which point, Britain switched from being a leading slave nation to self-congratulatory emancipation.

Abolition happened to coincide with the 1834 destruction of the Houses of Parliament by fire.  As it was rebuilt in High Victorian Gothic by Sir Charles Barry, attention turned to interior decoration in form of mural paintings and sculptures.  This occupied years and years, although early on it was agreed to chose scenes from British history – plus, in some proposals, scenes from English literature.

These were many and various, and apart from the vast depictions of the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar that were eventually painted and are still in situ, many if not most of the suggestions did not progress further.  However, in 1847 there was a specific proposal for six scenes to decorate the central corridor, with three depicting antiquity and three illustrating modern subjects.  The contrast was between ancient Britain ‘sunk in ignorance, superstition and slavery’ and the Christian [sic] Britain  of the present, ‘instructing the savage, abolishing barbarous rites and liberating the slave.’  A good spread of self-congratulation that presumably also commended itself by not obviously depending on military conquest.

So the three ancient topics were to be:  Phoenicians in Cornwall; Druid sacrifice; Anglo-Saxon captives in Rome.  [I’m unclear as to why ancient Phoenicians represented ignorance, but the others were familiar subjects from then-prevailing history].  The three modern scenes were wonderfully illustrative of the then-prevailing view of Empire: Captain Cook in Tahiti, protesting against human sacrifice; the suppression of sati in India; the 'emancipation of Negro slaves' - all matters to applaud.  None of these subjects was actually commissioned for the Palace of Westminster.  But they do convey Britain’s erasure of its own barbaric practices in favour of a benign global mission. In a generation colonial enslavement had been transformed into liberation.

And a century further on, when the subject was revived in 1924-5, a new scheme illustrating the ‘Building of Britain’ was commissioned, which according to today’s account ‘brought together images important to the development of the Nation. These included the importance of naval defence, and of transporting expeditions overseas, both essential for an island race; the nobles who protested against oppression; the long struggle for religious freedom; the daring adventure to find the New World in the Elizabethan age; the start of English [sic] influence in India; and the union of Scotland and England in 1707.'

One of these stirring scenes was in fact Richard I departing on the first crusade, painted by Glyn Philpot.  Which doesn’t seem to fit the forgoing list but presumably still popularly represented the defence of Christianity. Another was the embassy to the Mughal court of Jahangir in 1614, painted by William Rothenstein.  It shows how ‘Sir Thomas Roe, envoy from King James I of England to the Mogul Emperor, succeeds by his courtesy and firmness at the Court of Ajmir in laying the foundation of British influence in India.’

No doubt in the 1920s the question of the Raj was important but problematic, especially in terms of possible pictorial representation.  This episode, of which I was previously ignorant, marks the beginning of the East India Company’s activities in India.  Not exactly a topic for celebration, but as ambassador Roe returned to London without a trade agreement, it perhaps seemed relatively neutral.