In 1798 the family moved to Whitehaven in Cumberland, and thence to London, where she found herself hired as a governess at the age of only sixteen: I point this out because there are nannies and au-pairs, and then there are baby-sitters and governesses, in that order of post-nappy supervision and education: you don’t get to be a governess at sixteen if you cannot provide the latter in abundance, and she had learned by doing it from childhood for her four younger siblings. Which is a claim you can make at an interview, but how do you substantiate it? In Anna’s case by presenting a copy of her first book, or at least its first published instalment, because she went on adding to it right through the 1820s: “A First or Mother’s Dictionary for Children” was its name, a vocabulary primer.
Being governess in a wealthy family (she worked for many over many years but the first was the Marquess of Winchester) always included you in their overseas adventures, of which Anna’s first (she was now governessing for the Rowles family of Bradbourne Park in Kent), in 1821–2, also led to her first - or at least earliest known - published poem, “Farewell to Italy”:
FAREWELL to the Land of the
South!
Farewell to the lovely clime,
Where the sunny valleys smile in
light,
And the piny mountains climb!
Farewell to her bright blue seas!
Farewell to her fervid skies!
O, many and deep are the thoughts
which crowd
On the sinking heart, while it
sighs,
“Farewell to the Land of the South!”
As the look of a face beloved,
Was that bright land to me!
It enchanted my sense, it sank on
my heart
Like music’s witchery!
In every kindling pulse
I felt the genial air,
For life is life in that sunny
clime,
’T is death of life elsewhere:
Farewell to the Land of the
South!
The poet’s splendid dreams
Have hallowed each grove and
hill,
And the beautiful forms of
ancient Faith
Are lingering round us still.
And the spirits of other days,
Invoked by fancy’s spell,
Are rolled before the kindling
thought,
While we breathe our last
farewell
To the glorious Land of the
South!
A long, a last adieu,
Romantic Italy!
Thou land of beauty and love and
song,
As once of the brave and free!
Alas for thy golden fields!
Alas for thy classic shore!
Alas for thy orange and myrtle
bowers!
I shall never behold them more, -
Farewell to the Land of the
South!
The book got her noticed though, probably by other writers too, but it was the barrister Robert Sympson Jameson who noticed her enough to ask her for her hand in marriage three years later. She accepted, then changed her mind, then accepted again, and regretted it almost as soon as they had moved into the marital home in Bloomsbury. Four years later they separated - he had accepted a judgeship in Dominica and she had absolutely no interest in accompanying him to what was a judgeship over slavery - childless unless you count her books: “Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns” in 1831, and “Characteristics of Women”, which is mostly a study of Shakespeare's heroines, in 1832; both intended for a female readership, the second the one that really brought her to the attention of the literary world; and when she couldn’t earn enough from books, or when writing them still failed to end her ennui, she returned to governessing, or to travel.
To Germany, armed with letters of introduction, to meet the novelist Ludwig Tieck and the philosopher Wilhelm Schlegel, to tour the new royal palace in Munich with its architect, Leo von Klenze, and especially to become a close friend of Goethe’s niece Ottilie. She returned to Germany often enough over the years that she could publish “Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad” in 1834.
To Canada, temporarily reconciled with hubby because he couldn’t be attorney general of Upper Canada without a wife, and pleaded with her; and she couldn’t become a serious travel-writer if she didn’t do some serious travelling, so she told him to stop pleading, and starting in October 1836 wrote lengthily, and beautifully, especially “Winter studies and summer rambles in Canada” in 1838, which records a two-month trip by bateau and canoe to three of the great lakes, Simcoe, Eyrie and Huron. She also did the book’s rather splendid illustrations - remember that her dad had been a miniaturist, and taught her how - and then left hubby to his politics, and went home.
To England once again. Hubby came too in fact, though not till 1842, promoted to the headship of the Chancery; and she, having now done travel-writing and diary and needing a new focus for her insatiable intellectual appetite, plus the discovery of artistic skills as well as interest, took up the study of art history, which led inevitably to art criticism as well, contributing for the rest of her years to “The Athenaeum”, to “Art Journal”, to “Monthly Chronicle”, and to “Penny Journal”, for the latter of which she wrote a series of profiles of 14th century Italian artists that were then collected as a book, “Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters”, in 1845. People who wanted to be seen to appreciate art, but hadn’t a clue what the difference was between good art and less-so, turned to Anna Brownell Jameson for their opinions.
Nor was it only Art through these years - a person with an Advanced Diploma in Higher Education cannot be expected to ritalin her boredom with just one set of pills. Public speaking earned fees, and with her dad’s finances fallen apart, she was now supporting her sisters from her income and so needed the extra. On what did she speak? “Social issues” was the technical term then, though today we would simply call it “feminism”. But from a perspective of expertise, not just personal experience: she was married to a lawyer, so she had access to the facts, and could orate with them and not just passion on the legal and educational position of women. You can read the speeches for yourself, some published as “Sisters of Charity” in 1855, others in “The communion of labour” in 1856 (click here).
I find myself wondering what it must have been like to be Robert Sympson Jameson, a father of no children, in a marriage of mutual convenience but very little commonality, and probably a deep suspicion that his wife had more than an intellectual interest in several of those women who visited them regularly. Quite a circle it was too, and not just women, though Robert Browning probably came because he couldn’t bear to be even hand-holding distance from Elizabeth Barrett at that time, and it was Anna who did the arranging for their elopment; but Fanny Kemble, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Lady Augusta Byron (until they had a falling out). Maria Edgeworth too, though that only happened on her visits to Eireland, the meeting in 1847, the return for the opening of the Irish Exhibition in 1853. But hubby only watched the turnings of this circle from a legal distance: the separation was formalised as soon as they returned from Canada, with an understanding that she would live independently of him but receive a small annual stipend (to which I should note that she spent the next several years in such financial difficulty that her friends eventually got together and arranged a civil list pension in 1851, and then an annuity of £100 in 1855, after her husband died but failed to mention her in his will).
Go
back for a moment to 1840, while he was still in Canada and she returned to
Bloomsbury long before Bloomsbury was Bloomsbury, but she about to become one
of the founding reasons why it became that. Her first literary endeavour in the
sphere of Art was an introduction to the English translation of “Peter Paul Rubens” by Gustav Friedrich Waagen. She had
witnessed art in Germany, written about it in her much-read travel-book, and
now made the case that the German interpretation of iconography was both
broader and deeper than one taken by most British art critics. Contravercy!
What intelligent thinking brains do best!
Two
years later “A Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and Near London”
didn’t simply offer a dummy’s guide to what was viewable around the city, but attacked
vigorously the mono-national policy of what was supposedly, by name, and
therefore, surely, rightly, an exclusively National Gallery. Anna disagreed: a national gallery needs to be
a national collection of world art, not an island of local self-aggrandisement.
So successful was she, a sequel was commissioned, and “Companion to the Most
Celebrated Private Galleries of London” came out in 1844 - exactly the same
moment that John Ruskin’s
book about Turner
appeared, but a full decade ahead of his fuller appraisal of British art, “Modern
Painters”, which sought to give it an equal status alongside its European
equivalents.
1848
saw the publication of the first two volumes of “Sacred and legendary art”; three
more would follow and most are still in print: she specialised in the Early
Christian, authoring the first systematic study of Christian iconography in the
English language, and in the Italian, both of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Ruskin, by the way, hated her, probably
because she was cleverer than him and men find that difficult, probably even
more when Nathaniel Hawthorne’s observation that she could read a picture like
a book went viral on the gossip web.
There were still more outlets too,
besides Art, or perhaps we should say that they were drawn out of it. Several works
on religious subject matter analysed through art sources followed, including
“Legends of the Madonna” in 1852. Several pamphlets of women’s suffrage in the
1850s, when she became part of the British ex-patriot community in Florence,
along with the Brownings and James
Jackson Jarves. At age 65 she began to write two more volumes of
"Sacred and Legendary Art", and a new work, "A History of Our
Lord"; she also contributed to “The
History of the Painters of All Nations”, and had started on another religious exegesis, "The history of our
Lord as exemplified in works of art" - completed by her friend Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake and published in 1864. Why? Because, returning from a trip to Rome, she fell ill and,
complicated by arthritis and failing eyesight, succumbed to pneumonia on March 17 1860. Lady Eastlake not only completed the "History..." but was also the executor of
her estate - adding to the rumour that Ms Jameson may have preferred women to
men.
Two portraits of her are still in existence, though neither in their original forms. The first was painted by her father when she was sixteen; the one at the top of this page is Henry Adlard's cover version at the National Portrait Gallery (click here); the other is an 1836 reworking by Richard James Lane of a lost original from the previous year by Henry Perronet Briggs - click here for more on that. The other image of her (I haven't pasted it because frankly I think it's horrible), below, is John Gibson's bust, also viewable at the NPG (for which click here)
Amber pages
Sandro Botticelli, Italian painter, died today in 1444
Edward Jenner, developer of the smallpox vaccine (rather than my second cousin out of Poland who just happens to have the same name), born today in 1749
Érik Satie, gymnopédist, born today in 1866
You can find David Prashker at:
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http://davidprashker.net/
https://www.facebook.com/TheArgamanPress
http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersartgallery.blogspot.com
http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/
http://thebiblenet.blogspot.co.uk/
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