Trevelyan's A Pre-Raphaelite Circle

Raleigh Trevelyan, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle. London: Chatto & Windus, 1978.

Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, of whom this book s essentially a biography, was one of those fearlessly unconventional figures who give the lie to the popular image of Victorianism as monolithically stodgy and puritanical.

Witty, pert, precocious, diminutively attractive and accustomed from youth to mingling with her father’s grave scholarly friends, she grew to earn the reputation of devastating frankness and total unshockability. Her husband, Sir Walter Calverley, was 20 years older, possibly homosexual and the very model of the paternal aristocrat who first sewered all the cottages on his land and then banned intoxicants from the local inn. And yet the marriage apparently worked.

In their interests Pauline and Calverley were well matched. Energetic observers of practically every scientific, social and artistic concern of the day, they moved in the leisurely fashion of their class from a display of fossilised dinosaur excrement, to table-rapping sessions, to long cultural tours of Europe. They were present, for instance, at the famous confrontation at Oxford after the publication of the ‘Origin of Species’ when T.H. Huxley crushed Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce – and exchange which Trevelyan reports most inaccurately. Thanks to their sociability, we are introduced to such eccentrics as the naturalist Buckland who, on being shown some liquefied martyr’s blood in a church, appreciatively licked it up and confidently identified it as ‘bat’s urine’.

Charming and amusing as Pauline undoubtedly was, however, her personal claim on posterity is slight. All her diaries and journals, where her pleasing intelligence surely expressed itself most unrestrainedly, have vanished. Her own literary remains were published a century ago and are unlikely to detain even the most uncritical admirer. Rather, as the title ‘A Pre-Raphaelite Circle’ invites us to believe, it is as the patroness and mentor of artists and writers within that productive movement that she should command our attention – but this is most misleading.

Pauline had no close acquaintance with any of the seven who formed the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. D.G. Rossetti, so important to that brotherhood that William Gaunt has suggested its credo might almost be called ‘Rossettism’ she never knew at all. Dying in 1868, she had no part either in the second phase, where Burne-Jones and Morris are the key figures. Her own wide circle, then, in truth only interacted with the PRB at only three points: the minor painter W.B. Scott, who helped with the interior decoration of the family mansion; a few years of the career of the youthful Swinburne; and her long friendship with the PRB’s critical figurehead, John Ruskin.

After Swinburne had published his sensual ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ in 1865, a whisper campaign based on a general knowledge of his flagellation verse was started against him, and in response to his anguished letters Pauline gave him homely and sensible advice. As Trevelyan claims, their correspondence was forbidden public inspection in 1918; but it can now readily be found in Lang’s magisterial edition of Swinburne's letters, and nothing new emerges here. It cannot even be claimed that Pauline’s urgings for caution had any effect on the course of literature, because Swinburne went on to release his infamous ‘Songs Before Sunrise’ (1871).

Since Pauline was a longstanding friend of Ruskin and the recipient also of several letters from his wife, Effie, before she left him for the painter Millais and had her unconsummated marriage annulled, many will read this book hoping to learn more about the Ruskin-Millais-Effie triangle; though what could be left over after Mary Lutyens’ three studies it is difficult to say. They will indeed be disappointed. Pauline may well have been frank with her correspondents; they were not frank in return, not to her. Effie’s letters are trivial in the extreme, filled with details of sore throats and sightseeing. How little she regarded Pauline as a serious confidante may well be gauged from the fact that in the crisis year 1853, at about the time she was confiding to another that she was still virgo intacta, she was writing to Pauline that ‘green and brown become you’.

Much the same in true of Ruskin himself. Beyond question he felt her to be a loyal and valuable friend; equally beyond question his letters to her of the early 1850s tell nothing of strained marital relations; and even when the scandal broke he wrote her husband – not her – a long letter of self-justification. Trevelyan assumes this letter ‘must have been destroyed’. Curiously, it was not – it has just surfaced again and was published only last month in England. For the student of Victorian sexology it is far more enlightening than anything in this volume, since it more or less confirms the rumour that Effie remained virgin because Ruskin’s extensive studies in classical art had not prepared him for the revelation that women have pubic hair.