The Value of Religion in Women’s History, Part 1: Identities

 Old Woman saying Grace, known as ‘The Prayer without End’, Nicolaes Maes, c. 1656

Religious principles are a frequent theme in didactic literature of the long nineteenth century. Religion was vitally important to women and was often used in arguments to improve their position in their family and society.

It gave women a voice and was significantly valued by the women themselves – as religion formed their identities, as mothers, wives, and their relationship to their communities. For many women of this period, the Christian God of the Bible was a pre-eminent force in their lives, directing them by his providence and preparing them for an eternal future with him and other believers in an eternal home. Love and service for God – in whatever manifestation that presented – was supreme.

This three-part blog series will demonstrate the importance of understanding the religiosity of women in this period, highlighting how religion shaped identities, helps us understand debates over women’s position in society, reveals agency, offers opportunities and catalyses activism. This first post will focus on religion and identity.

While it would be remiss to suggest that all women in the long nineteenth century were religious (they weren’t), those who were eminently religious did not consider it a tangential part of their lives; religion was the axiom which underlay their other activities; whether political, family-orientated, or career-driven – religious experience was central.

The importance of faith is especially evident in diaries and letters of nonconformist women (Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians and Congregationalists) which I have examined from 1780-1850. Anna Braithewaite, a Quaker minister in the early nineteenth century, comments in a letter (in July 1823) to her husband how greatly she missed him and her children – and yet considered her love and service to God as the greatest priority:

“My mind was brought to a close sense of the separation between me and all who are dear to me… I felt to the full the reality and bitterness of the sacrifice, yet I desired to be preserved in a cheerful surrender of my all unto Him whom I love, and whom I feel utterly unworthy to serve.”

Another Quaker woman, Elizabeth J.J. Robson, noted that the greatest happiness could only be found in Christian religion, in her diary in 1844:

“I have thought that we cannot be perfectly happy, unless we be true Christians, self-denying, cross-bearing Christians.”

Jane Attwater, a pious Baptist lady, frequently wrote prayers in her diaries. In March 1782, she praised God for his goodness, and chided herself for being less than fully devoted to Him:

“How little alas can I do for such infinite goodness, o for a heart intirely devoted to thy service.”

Many women believed that they ought to love God, in light of all that he had done for them, and that this ought to manifest in obedience to his calling upon their life. Religion was not a peripheral part of life for these pious women – it was the centrepiece.

Faith provided happiness and purpose. Whether women found themselves committed mainly to domestic work, or active in the ‘public sphere’, religious women believed their lives were to be both directed by and towards God. Identity was found in their love and service to God, who was pre-eminent in their lives.

Angela Platt is a PhD student in Royal Holloway’s Department of History. Her thesis explores the lives of nonconformist families in England between 1780 and 1850. The next post will explore how concepts of ‘separate spheres’ and agency can be better understood through religion.

Christiana Herringham: Artist, Collector, Campaigner

Christiana Herringham, Portrait of a woman wearing a black bonnet with a pink and white bow, c.1900

On 14 January 2019, Royal Holloway opened a new exhibition on Christiana Herringham (1852-1929), the first exhibition dedicated to her in almost seventy years. It is co-curated by Michaela Jones, a PhD student at Royal Holloway whose thesis focuses on the Herringham Collection, and by Dr Laura MacCulloch, the college curator. It is the culmination of almost four years of research and aims to explore Herringham’s extraordinary and multifaceted achievements.

Christiana Herringham (from 1914, Lady Herringham) was a dedicated supporter of women’s rights, working alongside her friend Millicent Fawcett in the fight for women’s suffrage by organising petitions, donating money, and creating banners for the cause. Her independent wealth meant that she was also able to support other women artists, by commissioning and purchasing the work of painters such as Annie Swynnerton.

She was also able to establish herself as a successful artist and a noted authority on art. In 1899 she published a translation of Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte. Originally written around 1400, the work is a treatise describing how to prepare panels, grind colours, and apply gilding to paintings and frames. Herringham’s translation established her as a leading figure in the emergent British Tempera Revival; a position which was cemented in 1901 when she co-founded the Society of Painters in Tempera.

Herringham travelled extensively to Europe and beyond in pursuit of her art. She travelled to India on three occasions between 1906 and 1911, purchasing Indian art and undertaking an ambitious project to create a series of copies of the ancient frescoes in the Ajanta Caves.

In Britain, her legacy lives on through the work of the Art Fund. In 1903, she donated £200 to cover the initial start-up costs of the organisation; an achievement acknowledged by the Art Fund by their financial support of the exhibition.

Despite her numerous achievements, she was largely forgotten in the decades following her death. Her erasure from the art historical record seems to have been at least partly due to her admission to a mental asylum in 1911, following her final trip to India, and where she remained until her death in 1929.

 

A rare photograph of Christiana Herringham taken in India, c.1906-11, RHUL Archives

The Herringham Collection forms approximately one-third of the fine art collection at Royal Holloway, and comprises both Herringham’s own work, and artworks which formed part of her own private collection. This collection, in addition to many of Herringham’s books and photograph albums, was originally gifted to Bedford College by her husband, Wilmot Herringham, who shared his wife’s interest in women’s education and served as the chair of the committee of Bedford College.

After the merger of Bedford College and Royal Holloway in 1985 many of the items, including Herringham’s photograph albums and a portfolio of 120 of her sketches and watercolours, were misplaced and forgotten. These items were not rediscovered until 2014.

The exhibition at Royal Holloway brings together many of these recently rediscovered works for the first time. Combined with research undertaken by Michaela for her PhD, it highlights both a significant aspect of the college’s art collections and the achievements of a woman who has largely been forgotten and is just now beginning to be restored to the historical narrative.

The exhibition is taking place in the Exhibition Space of the Emily Wilding Davison Building, and is open daily from the 14 of January to the 8 of March 2019. Admission is free, and a series of talks and events are being held throughout the exhibition’s run.

Michaela Jones is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, in the final stages of completing her thesis entitled ‘Christiana Herringham and the Art Collections of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.’

 

‘Electrifying’ the Public with ‘Delight’: Exhibitions of Julia Margaret Cameron’s Photographs

‘May Day’, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866, © Victoria and Albert Museum (no. 933-1913).

‘Julia Margaret Cameron’, V&A Museum (28 Nov-21 Feb 2016) and ‘Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy’, Science Museum (24 Sept-28 March 2016)

Famed photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) wrote in 1866 that with her photography she hoped to ‘Electrify you with delight and startle the world’. Two recent exhibitions present the opportunity to explore her success in achieving this aim. As famed then as she is now, her trademark was in her deliberate rule-breaking of nineteenth-century photographic conventions: her albumen printed, sepia tinged photographs were often out of focus, with scratched marks and etchings such as moons, the occasional fingerprint or pressed fern, and a dramatic use of lighting.

Charles Darwin, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868, © V&A Museum (no.14-1939).

These two exhibitions have worked alongside each other to commemorate the bicentenary of Cameron’s birth. The V&A also marked 150 years since her first museum exhibition, which was held in 1865 at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A). Cameron is best known for her captivating portraits of figures such as Charles Darwin but also her portraiture of those at home: family, friends, and servants, whom she dressed up to represent characters from biblical, historical, and allegorical stories; as depicted above in ‘May Day’.

Her oeuvre was especially pertinent at a time when Victorian society was engaged in the process of determining whether photography constituted art or science. Cameron’s juxtaposition of photographing famed male artistic and literary ‘geniuses’, alongside her selection of beautiful young women whom she adorned with flowers, provokes interesting questions about Cameron’s own conceptualisations of morality and gender roles. Her name was often to be found in the Victorian press, occasionally misspelled as ‘Mr Cameron’, where critics debated her merits and often criticised her modern, experimental style.

Cameron’s artistic career began at 48 when she received a camera as a present from her daughter and son-in-law, when she was based at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight. In a letter accompanying the camera, her daughter wrote: ‘It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater’. Evidently pleased with her gift, two years later Cameron had sold a number of her photographs to the South Kensington Museum, where they were exhibited to a curious public. Cameron’s late start to her career, and her role as an upper-middle-class woman, did little to stop her quick rise to fame as an artist at the centre of the development of innovative photographic processes and artistic style.

The V&A exhibition ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ showcased over 100 of Cameron’s photographs from the museum’s collections. The gallery had crimson-painted walls, which provides the perfect backdrop when gazing at Cameron’s timelessly evocative prints. The exhibition was organised around 5 letters that represented her career and friendship with the V&A’s founding director, Sir Henry Cole. This narrative frame helped the visitor to understand the chronology and impact of her career alongside the support she gained from her friendship with Cole (and also with the painter G.F. Watts).

‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ succeeded in showing the physical labour behind photography (to make one photograph Cameron and her servants had to pull nine buckets of water from the well) as well as the arduous exposure time. Cameron’s wish for commercial success (and financial reward) in her letters to Cole was also explored. This frank correspondence helped to dispel frequently over-exaggerated perceptions of Victorian middle-class women as too societally constrained to discuss financial matters.

Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1866, © V&A Museum (no.31-1939).

Cameron’s photographs provide a powerful connection with the past; the straight-on gaze of a 24 year old widow titled ‘Mrs Herbert Duckworth’ is particularly haunting.

Her prints evoked paintings in their style, in some cases obviously composed in emulation of religious art, in others deconstructed, intimate, and startling in their economy of representation: the stripped-back style of her portrayals of contemplative figures strikingly prefigures the work of twentieth-century photographers, in particular Diane Arbus and Francesca Woodman.

The Science Museum exhibition, ‘Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy’, focuses its energies around an album Cameron compiled in 1866 for John Herschel. Here can be found a surviving camera lens, alongside a carved wooden album within which she placed her prints. A high point is the 8 photographs taken in the British colony, Ceylon, where Cameron and her husband returned to their coffee plantation in the 1870s. Cameron photographed local residents, alongside her servants, capturing rare insights into daily life.

Both exhibitions effectively explore the impact of her own life on her art: in particular her religious beliefs, her privileged artistic networks forged through her membership of the bourgeois middle-classes, alongside her sadness about her separation from her children.

Broader contextualisation of Cameron’s role would have been helpful at both exhibitions. Those less knowledgeable of the period may be left wondering whether her style of photography was unique or common. There is little reference to other early female photographers such as Anna Atkins who used photography to illustrate her botany books or Lady Clementina Hawarden who converted the first floor of her South Kensington home into a studio where she photographed her daughters. Even a brief mention of these women would have helped to place Cameron within her historical world more effectively.

Zoë Thomas, PhD Student and Bedford Centre Administrator