CHARLOTTE SMITH: the Brighton poet

BIOGRAPHY

Charlotte Smith was born on 4 May 1749, the first child of Anna Towers and Nicholas Turner in the Turner’s town house in King Street, St James’s Square, London. Nicholas Turner had inherited two estates: Stoke Place near Guildford, which had been bought in 1718 by his father, and Bignor Park1 on the river Arun. Charlotte had two younger siblings, Anne and Nicholas but her mother died giving birth to Nicholas Junior. Nicholas Turner immediately left the three children in the care of Anna’s unmarried sister, Lucy, for the next six years whilst he went abroad. They lived at Bignor Park. Charlotte went to school in Chichester when she was six and later she had drawing lessons with George Smith.2 In 1757 the children and Lucy moved to the London house and just used Bignor for holidays. On their father’s return, young Nicholas was sent to Westminster school and the girls went to a Kensington school. Charlotte excelled at dancing and was already writing poetry. Whilst abroad Nicholas senior had developed a gambling addiction and was forced to sell Stoke Place in 1761 to try to pay off his debts.

Charlotte’s schooling ended at the age of twelve and she was introduced into society. She was fairly precocious and received an offer of marriage at fourteen. In 1764 Nicholas senior wanted to marry Henrietta Meriton but she would only agree if Charlotte did not live with them. Charlotte was introduced to Benjamin Smith, the younger son of a West Indian merchant and Director of East India Company. He was 23 and potentially very rich but had no interest in business. Charlotte married him when she was just 15 in February 1765 and they started married life in an apartment over his father’s warehouse in Cheapside. Nicholas Turner senior died around 1776. Benjamin’s father, Richard Smith, who had made a fortune from trading West Indian sugar and cotton3, gave them an allowance of £2,000 a year. Richard Smith was married to a hated step-mother-in-law but, after she died, Richard married again choosing Lucy Towers who had brought up Charlotte.

Charlotte soon started producing her large family. The first son was born in 1766 but died a year later the same day she gave birth to her second son, Benjamin Berney.4 Richard Smith agreed to buy Benjamin a small house in Southgate so they could be more independent. Charlotte’s next child, William Towers, was born in 1768, then Charlotte Mary in 1769 and Braithwaite in 1770.5 Charlotte was just twenty-one coping with four tiny children. She used her spare time to extend her reading but she was very unhappy with her life and Benjamin’s failings. She equated her marriage and marital sex with a form of enslavement. The Southgate house was now too small so Richard Smith bought them a house in Tottenham where they would be closer to Richard and Lucy. Charlotte became more involved with the Smith family firm and helped with the finances as if she was a trained clerk. She continued to produce more children: Nicholas Hankey in 1771, Charles Dyer in 17736, Anna Augusta in 1774.7 Richard Smith did consider letting Charlotte run the firm but, in the end, he decided to realize some of his assets to provide for his grand children and released Benjamin from his partnership in the firm to prevent him from syphoning off money to pay off his gambling debts.

In 1774 Charlotte and Benjamin moved to a house with 100 acres in Hampshire which had previously been used as a centre for cattle-breeding. It was known as Lys Farm, Brookwood Park, Hinton Ampner near Selborne. Charlotte became a good friend of Henrietta Boyle.8 More children arrived: Lucy Eleanor was born in 1776 followed by Lionel and Harriet.9 In 1776 Benjamin’s father, Richard Smith, died leaving Charlotte a Trust Fund to provide an annuity for maintenance and education of the children and a lump sum when the grandchild married or came of age. It was part of a very complicated will and caused Charlotte trouble all her life. It was designed so that Benjamin would not get any money but he managed to do so, mostly because Charlotte, as a woman, had no proper rights. Benjamin was involved with contracts for the American War. As his debts increased, the creditors closed in and, in December 1783, he was sent to the King’s Bench Prison for debt and embezzlement of his father’s Trust Fund. Lys farm was sold and the bailiffs took their possessions. Charlotte sent her children to be cared for by her brother, Nicholas, now a clergyman and who had inherited Bignor Park. Charlotte’s sister, Catherine, had married Michael Dorset, an army captain, and she was also living at Bignor whilst her husband was abroad. Nicholas took a house near Bignor Park to house Charlotte’s family.

Charlotte stayed with her husband in the debtors prison and fell pregnant again. In the Autumn of 1784 there was an agreement with the trustees of Richard Smith’s will that Benjamin would no longer be a trustee and this freed him of some of his debts. He fled to Dieppe to set up home in a chateau near Rouen and so escape his remaining creditors. In October 1784 Charlotte and her nine children went to join him and there she gave birth to her last child, George. In all she had twelve children between 1765 and 1785 and five had died before her own death. In the Spring of 1785 an amnesty was agreed for Benjamin’s debts and they came back to Bignor but Nicholas was unhappy to have them living so close; he was now married and had a parish at Fittleworth. He arranged with Sir Charles Mill to allow them to live at Woolbeding House10, about nine miles away.

There was still no money from the Trust Fund and in June 1786 most of the family were ill and Braithwaite died. In 1787 Benjamin and Charlotte finally separated and she left Woolbeding but without any legal settlement. She and the children moved to a property in Wyhe11, not far from Stoke Place. Benjamin returned to France.12

Throughout the rest of her life, Charlotte often visited London. In the 1780s she stayed with the O’Neills at their house off Portland Place. She was becoming a celebrity and was introduced to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. She met some of the literary subscribers to the Fifth Edition of her Elegiac Sonnets, published in 1789, such as Elizabeth Montagu and other Blue Stockings. Charlotte thought they were formal and boring.13 Charlotte was still very short of money as the new decade began. William Hayley14 and Herietta O’Neill continued to back her but Richard Smith’s will was not settled and she had no regular income. In 1789 she decided to move to Brighton and lived there until 1793. Her son, Lionel, was expelled from Winchester School in 1793 for leading a schoolboy rebellion:

‘he headed a schoolboy rebellion so successfully at Winchester the troops had to be called out, to whom he surrendered with full military honours and on being sent home he told his mother not to worry as the only difference it made was he would have to become a general instead of a bishop.’15

Charlotte initially backed the French Revolution but began to change her mind as the news arrived of the Terror. She was a Girondin16, not a Jacobin. By 1792 she was organizing refuge for some of the emigrants. In the summer of 1793 she moved from Brighton to Storrington to be closer to Bignor and Eartham although she seldom saw William Hayley after 1794. Her rheumatism was much worse. Lord Egremont took over part of the administration of the Trust but Chancery still would not let Charlotte have any money. In 1795 Augusta, her daughter, died which was a devastating blow to Charlotte. She could not bear to live in Sussex with all its memories and so moved first to Exmouth, then to 7, The Esplanade, Weymouth and on to 1 Belle Vue, Weymouth where the lodgings were cheaper. By 1796, very impoverished she went to Oxford: she wondered if she did right to bring up her family as gentlemen and ladies and whether it would have been better for them to have 17gone into service. However, she was not isolated socially or intellectually in spite of her debts. In 1797 she moved to Frant near Tunbridge Wells but spent most of the winter of 1797-8 in lodgings with Mary Barker, a friend of the Southeys, in Duke Street and Upper Baker Street. Ideally she would have liked a house in Clapham. By 1798 William Godwin18 had become a close friend. That year her son, William, returned to England after thirteen years abroad but he promptly lost all his savings in the London gaming houses.

Charlotte’s brother, Nicholas, had been living at Bignor Park all this time but he, too, was not very good with money and so the estate was handed over to their younger sister, Catherine. Richard Smith’s will was still not settled and Benjamin now controlled the monies Charlotte had earned from her literary publications. Charlotte fell out with Lord Egremont after he suggested her problems would be solved if she lived with Benjamin again.19 She had to deal with his steward, William Tyler, who was loathed at Petworth. Charlotte was now very fat from dropsy. ‘She continued to visit Bignor and London, and moved frequently in these years from the Frant house near Tunbridge Wells which she sub-let, to lodgings in Hastings, back to Frant again, to Brighton briefly, then in 1803 to Elstead and finally to Tilford, both close to Guildford and Stoke Place. 20

To pay her expenses and to prevent Benjamin from inheriting them, she sold her library of about 1,000 books. In 1806 Catherine sold Bignor Park for £13,500 to John Hawkins, oriental explorer and travel writer, who rebuilt the house. During Charlotte’s final two years she was often immobolised. She had three servants but they were often unpaid. Benjamin died in 1806 aged sixty-four while in prison for debt in Berwick-on-Tweed. His death freed up £7,000 for herself and those of her children who really needed it: Lucy, Harriet and George. She died on 28 October 1806 and was buried at St John Stoke-next Guildford. Her epitaph recalled ‘a life of great and various sufferings’21

On 22 April 1813 the Court of Chancery made the final settlement of Richard Smith’s estate, thirty seven years after his death.22 All that was left was £4,000 which went to the husband of Richard’s grand daughter by his eldest son. Charlotte’s family received nothing. Of the properties associated with Charlotte, King Street, her birthplace, was bombed; Stoke Place was demolished in the 1960s; Lys Farm is now an international school, remodeled and extended.


LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS

Charlotte’s earliest sonnets survive from a melancholic and introspective time in her life around 1777 when her son Benjamin died of TB. Her affiliations were with the poets of Nature, James Thomson and Thomas Gray. She first started to try to sell her poems as a means of raising money to pay off her husband’s debts. After much negotiation in 1784 Elegiac Sonnets and other Essays was published by J Dodsley.23 During the 1780s and 1790s she was associated with the revival of the sonnet form. ‘In 1802 the Critical Review noted that "the sonnet has been revived by Charlotte Smith: her sonnets are assuredly the most popular in the language, and deservedly so" ... Smith's Elegiac Sonnets became the standard for the sonnet in the early Romantic period’24.

Whilst she was in France she started to translate Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and in 1786, after her return to Sussex, the translation was published by Thomas Cadell, William Hayley’s publisher. The sales were disastrous. She then translated tales of some famous court cases from Gayot de Pitaval’s Les Causes Célèbres and it was published as The Romance of Real Life in 1787. This was popular. She now turned to novel writing and produced Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, one of the first works of fiction to take a Gothic castle as its setting25 It was published in four volumes in 1788. It received a critical review from Mary Wolstencraft and a very bad review from the poet, Anna Seward but the first edition sold out at once. The Fifth Edition of the Elegiac Sonnets was published in 1789. There were 815 subscribers including the Duchess of Cumberland and the Archbishop of Canterbury plus Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter and Mary Delany. There were five illustrations including two by Thomas Stothars, a friend of Blake and Flaxman.26 In 1789 her second novel was published: Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake. Eventually published by Cadell , she believed he might be cheating her and indulged in her own sharp practices by offering it to another publisher, George Robinson. It was set in the Lake District and the reviewers were enthusiastic. Mary Wolstoncraft wrote:

‘Mrs Smith writes like a gentlewoman: if she introduces ladies of quality, they are transcribed from life, and not the sickly offspring of a distempered imagination, that looks up with awe to the sounding distinctions of rank and the gay delights which riches afford.’27

The same year she started to write Celestina. It took her nineteen months and was published in four volumes in 1791 by Thomas Cadell. In November 1790 Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared. He used the metaphor of an old castle to represent the state and careful preservation or demolition of the castle as metaphors for traditional loyalty or revolutionary violence. Burke was outraged by the attempt to destroy the law and institutions. However, in spite of Charlotte’s use of castles as metaphors, she sympathised with the early aims of the revolution. Desmond, a novel in three volumes was published in 1792 by Robinson as it was too radical for Cadell . The first part was set in Brighton and it was her most overtly feminist novel but was not very successful as it moved away from her original ‘young girl’ market. The Old Manor House, a novel in four volumes in 1793 was published by J Bell. The manor house, a code for England, was set somewhere between Bignor and Eartham. In the book she attempts to create a system opposed to Burke’s ideas. The reviews were less favourable than those of her fist three heroine-centred works. ‘It had a profound effect on Jane Austin as she adapted the house metaphor and aspects of the plot for Mansfield Park twenty years later’.28 ‘In her (Jane Austen) teens she enthused about Charlotte Smith, the Daphne du Maurier of the 1780s and 1790s and still entertaining today, with her thrilling heroes and gorgeously picturesque scenery ... and the rambling narratives. Austen alludes to Smith several times in her juvenile writings ... Smith’s heroines, tearful innocents prone to fainting and falling off horses, slighted and ill-used by their social superiors are like nothing in Austen (unless you count Fanny Price, their very distant cousin). But Smith’s romance is vigorous, well written and genuinely imaginative and you can see why Austen took pleasure in it, and defended it with “if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”’29 In 1793 Charlotte also finished The Emigrants, a poem in two books published by Thomas Cadell.

By now, with Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte was the most successful Gothic novelist of the time; the two writers borrowed freely from each other. She achieved a considerable critical reputation; Coleridge and Southey admired her work, as did Scott.30 Wordsworth visited her in Brighton in November 1791 as an admired nature poet, novelist with a passion for sublime scenery and a fellow radical. He was twenty one and had had nothing published. Paul Kelly argues that her ‘To the South Downs’, Sonnet V, directly influenced his first publication, ‘An Evening Walk’.31 In poetry and prose, Charlotte had always been admired most for her landscapes and her ‘interest in green leaves’.32 Following her disillusion with the French Revolution she began to celebrate a Rousseauesque green world outside the politics of the left and the right. She began to write childrens’ books to encourage the development of sensibility through living in the country, a study of nature and helping to relieve the suffering of the poor; Rural Walks was published in 1795. Over the next ten years she published further children’s books and a play, What is She? In February 1807 James Johnson published Beachy Head, Fables and Other Poems, just three months after Charlotte’s death. Beachy Head was symbolic for Charlotte as it was where the Downs, the landscapes of her childhood, met the sea. It also meant death as it was a notorious place for suicides.33 She was defining in verse what Turner was doing in painting. This was the period of massive literary reaction against industrialism and a more pared down diction. William Wordsworth described her as a ‘lady to whom English Verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’ and praised her ‘true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English poets.’34


CHARLOTTE SMITH AND BRIGHTON

It is not known when Charlotte made her first visit to Brighton. ‘Charlotte had memories of holidays here before her marriage, when she had been “a gay dancer at Balls, and a lighthearted Equestrian on the Hills”.35 In 1784 she and her nine children sailed on the packet ship for Dieppe to meet Benjamin, her debtor husband, in France. They sailed from the embarkation point near the Ship Inn. She spent several days at the Ship In waiting for the wind to change. The lightermen loaded the passengers into rowing boats which took them the hundred yards to the ship.36 On the family’s return to England, Charlotte had to meet with the creditors in Brighton to negotiate a settlement.37

She decided to move to Brighton properly in 1789 where she would be based for three and a half years,’though with many visits to London, to other parts of Sussex and Surrey and perhaps as far as Ross-on-Wye. Her restlessness was astonishing and increased as she grew older. I have not tried to chart every brief lodging and visit after she came back from Normandy; or to be more accurate, I have tried and failed in the effort to follow her.’38 ‘Two years earlier she had complained of pain in her hands and difficulty with writing. This was probably rheumatoid arthritis, though she thought it gout, which ran in her family; it was to increase as she went into her forties. Brighton was famous for its sea-bathing and medicinal waters as well as for its fast and fashionable society.’ So in the summer of 1789 she ‘took pleasant lodgings close to the sea’. 39

Lodging houses at this time were normally rented for between one and six months. Most Georgian houses had their services in the basement or at the rear and their main rooms on the first and second floors, regardless of whether they were terraced or detached. The occupiers and their visitors entered the house by walking up a flight of steps to the main entrance on the ground floor. Here there would be a small hall and two small parlour rooms, one for eating. There would be a narrow staircase at the rear lit by windows on the back of the house. On the first floor the drawing room would have spanned the width of the house with the best bedchamber behind it. The next floor would have two bedrooms with two more in the attic above. The raising of the ground floor enabled the builder to light the lower ground floor. Here was the housekeeper’s room and the kitchen. The privy, well, sink and pump were either housed at the rear or in a lower, basement floor. Servants would have slept in the attic or the basement or in outhouses40. The bedrooms could usually house two people so a standard lodging house could accommodate ten to twelve people.

Charlotte must have just settled in when she received an invitation to go to Shane’s Castle to stay with Henrietta. As it was too good an opportunity for her to miss, she decided to leave the children in Brighton and arrange for someone to look after them. Her aunt, Lucy, still lived in London and was an obvious candidate. In the past Charlotte had consulted Lucy’s doctor, Dr Thomas Shirly, about herself and some of her children’s complaints. She wrote to him:

’If my aunt would come down and inhabit my house, I should leave my Girls without being uneasy; she would have a comfortable house without any expense ...The two little ones will be at day school, and the old Lady will have no trouble with them; the elder Girls will be I suppose rather pleasant to her,and she will have a spacious dining room and a bedchamber adjoining within two hundred yards of the sea. An easy staircase and a Sedan chair may always be had to carry her down to the sea so that, consulting her own health only, perhaps she could not do better ...Will you,if you think that change of air and company may really be useful to her, promote her coming if she names it to you? I shall write to her on Monday about it, and you will doubtless be consulted when you will of course say what you think right without adverting to secret influence’.41

‘The Shane’s castle scheme came to nothing but Brighton was becoming too exciting for her to wish to leave it for long. For it was “chiefly at Brighthelmstone’, Catherine (Charlotte’s sister) says in her memoir,” where she formed acquaintances with some of the most violent advocates of the French Revolution,and unfortunately caught the contagion, though in direct opposition to the principles she had formerly professed, and to those of her family”.’42 Brighton was often the first to hear of the happenings in the French Revolution. Volume one of Desmond, published in 1792, has a background of Brighton. whilst volume one of the poem Emigrants begins on Brighton Beach.

‘She could afford to go to Paris, went often to London, and as a literary celebrity was visited by travelers to and from France. William Wordsworth visited her home at Brighton, on the way to France, in the autumn of 1791. "I was detained," he wrote shortly afterwards from Orleans to his brother Richard.

at Brighthelmstone from Tuesday till Saturday Evening which time
must have past in a manner extremely disagreeable, if I had not
bethought me of introducing myself to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, she
received me in the politest manner, and shewed me every possible
civility. This with my best affection you will be so good as to
mention to Captn. and Mrs. Wordsworth.... Mrs. Smith who was so
good as to give me Letters for Paris furnished me with one for
Miss [Helen Maria] Williams, an English Lady who resided here
lately.43

A note on 27 November 1791 to a London friend, Mrs Thomas Lowes who evidently visited Brighton often, also refers to this meeting:

Madam,
I intended to have done myself the honour of waiting on you yesterday, but Augusta told me at one period of the morning you were out, and I was afterwards detain’d by Mr Wordsworth (whom I could not take leave of till he embark’d) till it was too late to have the pleasure I entended. This morning I am summoned to London and thus deprived of an opportunity of paying my respects to you here,but if you will allow me to wait on you in Town where I am likely to be a fortnight, I will avail myself of that permission with great pleasure. My abode during that time is at “The Hon’ble Mrs O’Neills, Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square” where, if you favour me with intelligence of your being at your London residence,I will take the earliest opportunity of assuring you personally that I am, Madam, Your most obedient and obliging Servant, Charlotte Smith44

Thomas Lowes later added an addendum to this note:

I saw a great deal of Charlotte Smith one Autumn at Brighthemstone and bating a democratic twist (which I think detestable in a woman) I liked her well enough for some time, but she disgusted me completely, on the account arriving of the Massacre of the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries by saying that they richly deserved it: I observed that they did merely their duty, and if they had not done what they did they w’d have been guilty of Treason and that I thought they deserved the pity of every person who reasoned and felt properly. After this I never would see Charlotte, but she and Mrs Lowes sometimes met.’45

After 1790 there were many French refugees arriving in Brighton. Charlotte first offered shelter in November and December of 1792 and enlisted William Hayley’s help in finding long term accommodation for the refugees. Amongst the emigrants, soon after Fanny Burney met General Alexandre d’Arblay in Dorking, was Alexandre Marc-Constant de Fouille who fell in love and married Charlotte’s daughter, Augusta.

In 1793 Charlotte decided to leave Brighton and they moved to Storrington in the Summer. It would be cheaper, closer to Bignor and Eartham and her son, George, was going to school in Midhurst.


WILLIAM HAYLEY (1745-1820) AND CHARLOTTE SMITH AT EARTHAM

William Hayley was born in the Pallants in Chichester on 9 November 1745. He was sent to Eton in 1757, and to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1763; his connection with the Middle Temple, London, where he was admitted in 1766, was merely nominal. In 1767 he left Cambridge and went to live in London. Two years later he married Eliza, daughter of Thomas Ball, Dean of Chichester. His private means enabled Hayley to live on his patrimonial estate at Eartham, Sussex46, and he retired there in 1774.

He had already written many occasional poetical pieces, when in 1771 his tragedy, The Afflicted Father, was rejected by David Garrick. Hayley won the fame he enjoyed amongst his contemporaries by his poetical Essays and Epistles; a Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter (1780), addressed to his friend George Romney, an Essay on History (1780), in three epistles, addressed to Edward Gibbon; Essay on Epic Poetry (1782) addressed to William Mason; A Philosophical Essay on Old Maids (1785); and the Triumphs of Temper (1781).47 This was so popular there were twelve or fourteen editions; together with the Triumphs of Music (Chichester, 1804) it was ridiculed by Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

Hayley is not now considered a successful literary figure; Robert Southey wrote of Hayley in a letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1802 ‘Everything about the man is good, except his poetry.’48 His importance lies in his help to young artists and the patronage he provided. He met Joseph Wright in 1772 and Hayley composed the’ Ode to Mr Wright of Derby’ in his honour. Wright painted Hayley and his wife Eliza. Hayley was introduced to George Romney in 1776 and once said ‘if you should go before me I should lose everything that is dear to me and the best friend I ever had’.49 Romney was a frequent visitor and, for over twenty years, he took his summer vacation there. A portion of the riding house was converted as a studio for him. Hayley commissioned a number of portraits of his literary friends including Edward Gibbon, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith and William Cowper.50 Romney introduced Hayley to Flaxman in 1783. Flaxman sculpted busts of Hayley and Romney and made a chimney piece for Hayley’s library at Eartham where he spent several holidays. Hayley procured the commission for Flaxman for the celebrated monument to the poet William Collins in Chichester cathedral. After Hayley moved to Felpham, he was soon joined there by William Blake. Hayley wrote to Cowper’s cousin, Lady Hesketh, of how Blake had

‘attach’d himself so much to me that he has taken a cottage in this little marine village to pursue his art in various branches under my auspices and as He has infinite Genious, with a most engaging simplicity of character, I hope He will execute many admirable things in this sequestered scene, with the aid of an excellent wife, to whom he has been married 17 years and who shares his Labours and his Talents’.51

Hayley introduced Blake to possible patrons such as Lord Egremont and Lord Bathurst.

In 1774 Charlotte Smith sent some sonnets to William Haley at Eartham, just 6 miles from Bignor. They had never met but had mutual friends such as John Sargent, the local MP . Hayley agreed to his name for the Dedication in her proposed book of sonnets.52 ‘She was curious about William Hayley, whose patronage had given her the confidence to publish at her own expense. So far she had only corresponded with him. A letter from Hayley to his cousin gives an odd unexpected sighting of her on 28 September 1784, He wrote :

... First let me say, did you hear yesterday, that a post-chaise was sent for to convey a lady, suddenly taken ill at Eartham, to her own home? So it was; and this sick lady was no less a personage than the elegant poetess of Bignor Park. About one o’clock, I was surprised by an exclamation from Nurse, “Lord, sir! there are three strange ladies in the garden” - “Find out who they are.” My ambassadress, however, did not return, but bustled about the poor invalid; and when I descended to make further inquiries, I found the veteran Charlotte Collins, with Mrs Smith and her daughter, in a piteous plight, in the parlour. Our tender sister of Parnassus had been seized with spasms in her stomach, which had obliged her to quit her horse, and creep,like a poor wounded bird, through the garden. I played the physician with some success; and by a seasonable medicine soon restored the sick Muse. The chaise had been ordered in their first alarm, and as it could not arrive till between four and five, I insisted on their taking a poetical dinner, to which they consented after many apologies. The fair invalid was sufficiently restored to survey all our walks, and the chaise arriving, they departed between five and six.53

It seems unlikely the stomach pains were genuine. She made a quick recovery. She could have had herself formally introduced to Eliza Hayley54 through some such literary mutual friend as Charlotte Collins.55 But she may have felt embarrassed to suggest it, given Benjamin’s recent imprisonment. Instead, she rode six miles along the overgrown Roman way to Eartham when four or five months pregnant, with her friend and Charlotte Nary, and briefly suffered or faked an illness in the grounds that forced the housekeeper to ask her in. This housekeeper, or ‘Nurse’ Sarah Betts, was the mother of Hayley’s former mistress, now living in a cottage in the village, who had also been one of the household servants and born him a son; Thomas Alphonso56 was three, acknowledged by his father and accepted as part of the family by Eliza. Hayley referred to all his female literary friends as his Muses.’57

Hayley introduced Charlotte to his publisher, Thomas Cadell and to the Earl of Egremont. She became one of his muses. Another was Anna Seward, ‘The Swan of Lichfield’. After Eliza, his wife, had been sent away in 1789 Hayley fell out with both Anna Seward and Elizabeth Carter. ‘It is sad Charlotte felt flattered by his friendship, though after Benjamin it is not surprising. It is sadder still that she took him so seriously as poet and essayist. But he was popular, impressive in appearance, eager to a fault to patronize his literary friends,and had a beautiful house in the part of Sussex which Charlotte loved the most. He turned down the Laureateship in the following year on political grounds. The tone of her letters to him suggests how interested she was. But to become a mistress would wreck her daughters’ chances of marriage into respectable families and damage her sons prospects’.58 Hayley wrote ‘This admirable lady had a quickness of invention and a rapidity of hand, which astonished every witness of her abilities. Cowper repeatedly declared, that he knew no man, among his early associates in literature,who could have composed so rapidly and so well. Moreover, she read, she wrote, with simplicity and grace.’59

Whilst writing the Life of Milton, Hayley made William Cowper's acquaintance. In August 1792 William Hayley gave a house party centred around Cowper. ‘He was with difficulty persuaded to make the three days’ journey since he had not left his own place Weston, for twenty-six years. Cowper himself referred to his Sussex outing as “a tremendous exploit”. To meet him at Eartham came Hayley’s other friends including Romney, the painter; Mrs Charlotte Smith, the novelist, and Miss Anne Seward, a “poetess” of some contemporary note, who incidentally didn’t much admire Mrs Smith’s works as much as the men did. Romney was greatly taken with Cowper so, while Cowper and Hayley were busy translating Milton’s Latin poems, Romney drew Cowper in coloured crayon. The artist always considered this ”the nearest approach he had ever made to a perfect representation of life and character.” This finished, Romney turned his attention to the women of the party and drew Mrs Smith, who sat for her portrait when not adding a chapters to her “Old Manor House”. Romney wrote to his son John that he thought her a ‘woman of astonishing powers’.60 She describes the occurrence in a later dated 20 November 1804. The Romney pastel was owned by Lucina Smith, Charlotte’s grand-daughter and she willed it to a great-grand-daughter who took it to San Francisco in the 1880s. It was rescued from the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906’ when the owners carried it in a suitcase for three days with their few belongings looking for shelter.61 It passed down through the female line and was finally given to the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal in 2006. According to her letters, Romney was keen to immortalise her in a painting. In her letters she states Romney ‘would do one in oil without any expence to me’ but then she was less keen :‘some remains of female vanity… would have deterred me’. She later called the Romney portrait the ‘only picture that was made of me’, indicating those images of her held at the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere were taken later from this work. 62

So great was William Hayley's fame that on Thomas Warton's death in 1790 he was offered the laureateship, which he refused. Charlotte seldom saw Hayley after 1794. Hayley was instrumental in getting Cowper his pension and their friendship lasted until Cowper’s death in 1800. That same year Hayley lost his natural son, Thomas Alphonso Hayley, to whom he was very attached. He had been a pupil of John Flaxman's, to whom Hayley's Essay on Sculpture (1800) is addressed. Flaxman had introduced William Blake to Hayley, and, after the latter had moved in 1800 to his "marine hermitage" at Felpham63, Sussex, Blake settled near him for three years to engrave the illustrations for the Life of Cowper. This, Hayley's best known work, was published in 1803-1804 in three volumes. Charlotte was very jealous of Blake. In 1805 he published Ballads founded on Anecdotes of Animals (Chichester), with illustrations by Blake, and, in 1809 ,The Life of Romney. For the last twelve years of his life Hayley received an allowance for writing his Memoirs. Hayley married Mary Welford, in 1809 but they separated after three years. He left no children. He died at Felpham on the 12th of November 1820.

NOTES
1 Bignor Park was originally part of the Arundel Estate when the Dukes of Norfolk used the grounds to fatten deer. There was a small house, from which the only surviving relics are two pinnacles at the west end of the walled garden. At the start of the 19th Century the Cornish tin miner, John Hawkins, bought and developed the estate as an extra to his main property at Trewithen in Cornwall.2 George Smith (1713-1776) was a landscape painter and poet based in Chichester.3 The Smiths had brought five slaves with them when they moved from the Caribbean to London and later Richard bequeathed them along with linen and plate to relatives in his will.4 Benjamin Berney died 1777.5 Braithwaite was a weak child and died of typhoid in 1786.6 Charles Dyer lost a leg fighting in France in 1793 and died in Barbados from yellow fever in 1801.7 Anna Augusta married a Frenchman, Alexandre but died in 1793.8 Henrietta Boyle (1756 - 1793) was the only child of Susannah, the daughter of Henry Hoare, who built Stourhead with William Kent, and Charles Boyle, Viscount Dungarvon. Henrietta became a close friend of Charlotte. Henrietta married Viscount John O’Neill (1740-1798) of Shane’s Castle, County Antrim in 1777 and they had two children. She was an amateur actress and had installed a private theatre in the castle. Every Autumn they invited literary people with London connections to the castle. She died in 1793 probably from an opium overdose. Shane Castle was burnt down in the nineteenth century. There are two portraits of her at Stourhead.9 Died of yellow fever in Barbados 1813.10 Woolbeding is 1.4 miles north west of Midhurst, north of the A272 road and the River Rother. There is an Anglican parish church, All Hallows, of Saxon origin where the father of the poet Thomas Otway (1652-1685) had been rector (Anne Katherine Elwood, in Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England (1843). It is near Woolbeding House, which was the home of the late Simon Sainsbury of the supermarket family. The Woolbeding estate is now owned by the National Trust.11 Now called Wyke12 The poems of Charlotte Smith, ed Stuart Curran, 1993, pxxii13 Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: a critical biography, 1998, p 10214 William Hayley (1745-1820), English writer, best known as the friend and biographer of William Cowper.15Lo raine Fletcher, p156 Lionel became a lieutenant-general later in life.16 Girondin: Member of the moderate republican party in the French Revolution, so called because a number of its leaders came from the Gironde region of southwestern France. The Girondins controlled the Legislative Assembly from late 1791 to late 1792, but were ousted by the radical Montagnards under Jean Paul Marat in 1793. Many Girondin leaders were executed during the Reign of Terror. Prominent Girondins included Charles Dumouriez and Jacques Pierre Brissot. The faction drew its support from businessmen, merchants, and government officials. Their fall from popularity began with their refusal to join the more radical revolutionaries in overthrowing the monarchy. 17 Loraine Fletcher, p25818 William Godwin (1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist.19 Loraine Fletcher, p32220 Loraine Fletcher, p32321 Poems, pxxvi22 Dickens is supposed to have used the Smith case in his own case of Jardyne v Jardyne in Bleak House 23 During Charlotte’s lifetime published in ten additions with some additional poems including subscription editions with illustrations in 1789 and 1797, the latter expanded to two volumes. The Fifth and subsequent editons published by Thomas Cadell, Thomas Cadell Junior and William Davies.24 Robinson, Daniel, ‘Elegiac Sonnets: Charlotte Smith's formal paradoxy’, Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 200325 Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) were earlier.26 Loraine Fletcher, p10627 Loraine Fletcher, p12028 Loraine Fletcher, p18929 Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: a life, 1997, p68 30 Bishop C. Hunt, Jr. ‘Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith: 1970’, Wordsworth Circle, Spring, 2004 31 Loraine Fletcher, p157. ‘An Evening Walk’, was originally published in 1793, revised in 1794, reprinted in another version in 1820, and reprinted again in 1836. It was the first long poem that Wordsworth completed. Initially composed during his college years (1787-1789), it is permeated with the sights and sounds of the English Lake District.32 Loraine Fletcher, p22033 Loraine Fletcher p33034 Catalogue for Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British art, Pallant Gallery,Chichester, 2007 p3135 Loraine Fletcher, p12336 Loraine Fletcher, p537 Loraine Fletcher, p7838 Loraine Fletcher, p12239 Loraine Fletcher, p12340 Sue Berry, Georgian Brighton, 2005, 90-9141 Loraine Fletcher, p12542 Loraine Fletcher, p12843 Wordsworth Circle, Spring, 2004 by Bishop C. Hunt, Jr.44 Loraine Fletcher, p15745 Loraine Fletcher, p159. On 10 August 1792, 600 of Louis’s personal Swiss bodyguard were massacred at the Tuileries where Louis and Marie-Antoinette were being held. It was the last day of the French monarchy. The news reached Brighton on 11 August and Charlotte was supposed to have said in a heated argument that the Swiss Guard deserved to die.46 Eartham is 6 miles north east of Chichester There is an Anglican parish church dedicated to St Margaret and a public house, The George, formerly The George and Dragon. The adjoining Manor Farm is the centre of a large farming enterprise. Nearby is Eartham House designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1905) for Sir William Bird which has been used since the 1920s as a private preparatory (junior) school. It replaced a house built by Thomas Hayley, William Hayley’s father. This had wooded grounds, ornamental walks, grottoes and a hermitage in honour of William’s self-styled posture as ‘The hermit of Eartham’. (Pallant catalogue) William sold the estate in 1800 to William Huskisson MP for Chichester . 47 Edward Gibbon attributed its success to the advocacy of the Duchess of Devonshire. Emma Hart attributed her capture of Sir William Hamilton to the beneficial influence of the poem. Pallant Catalogue, p2748 Pallant catalogue, p18 49 Pallant catalogue, p2050 William Cowper 1731-1800. His best known work was ‘The Task’, 1785.51 Pallant catalogue, p2252 Loraine Fletcher, p6553 Loraine Fletcher, p69 54 Eliza and William Hayley separated in 1789. He took her to Derby and left her in the care of a widow whom he paid to look after her. They never met again though they corresponded. He attributed her madness to her mother. Eliza may have been frigid and a virgin throughout their nineteen years of marriage. She died in 1797.55 Charlotte Collins lived near Midhurst and was the daughter of a clergyman who had educated two sons of the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke and Lady Diana Spencer. Later she married the elder son, George St John, in 1783 and became Lady Bolingbroke. They had two children but were divorced. She died in 1803.56 Thomas Alphonso was tutored by Thomas Sockett (1777-1859). In 1792 William Cowper recommended Sockett, a near neighbour, to William Hayley to become his secretary andcompanion to Thomas Alphonso. In 1794 Sockett went to Sheffield Place on Hayley’s recommendation to put together Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs. He then went to work at Petworth House as tutor to the three sons of the Earl of Egremont and Elizabeth Ilive. Egremont later funded an Oxford University education for Sockett and gave him three livings including Duncton and Petworth in Sussex. He was rector for over sixty years and worked first as an aide to the Earl and later to his son, his former pupil, George Wyndham. He married Sarah Gray in 1810 but she died four years later in childbirth leaving Thomas with three small children. He married his second wife, Sarah Herrington in 1816. Sheila Haines & Leigh Lawson, Poor Cottages & Proud Palaces, 200757 Loraine Fletcher, pp 68,6958 Loraine Fletcher, pp127,859 Pallant catalogue, p3160 Pallant Catalogue, p31 61 New York Times Archives. 12 July 1914 article entitled ‘Will sell a Romney with noted history’62 Abbot Hall Press Release Oct 2006 63 William Hayley’s house is The Turret, east of St Mary’s church built by him c 1800 in pasteboard stucco Tudor. Blake’s house, a little further south in Blake’s Lane is a nice unrestored thatched flint cottage (Pevsner, Sussex, p219)

THE TRIST FAMILY: Pre-Raphaelite art collectors from Brighton

John Trist
The Trist family can be traced back to the early 1820s when John Trist was living at 57-58 St James’s Street and was called Collector of Assessed Taxes and a wine merchant. By 1833 he had an address at 111 Edward Street whilst a Mrs Trist ran Fox Cottage School for Young Ladies at 112 Edward Street. John Trist and his wife gave birth to John Hamilton Trist on 3 December 1811. He appears to have had another son called William.

By 1846 John had expanded his premises and his sons were working for him; a wine merchants called John Trist & Sons was established at 59/60 St James’s Street whilst John was living next door, at 1 Upper Rock Gardens. By 1850, 58 St James’s Street was recorded as the home of Mrs Trist so perhaps John had died by then.

In 1854 William Trist was living at 1 Upper Rock Gardens although he appears to have moved to 58 St James’s Street by 1856 and he stayed there until at least 1873. Meanwhile his brother, John Hamilton, seems to have taken over the house at 1 Upper Rock Gardens and stayed there until at least 1870.

John Hamilton Trist
John Hamilton Trist (J H Trist) married Harriet Susanna and they gave birth to Herbert Hardwick Trist who was christened on 1 September 1852 at the Chapel Royal Brighton. John Hamilton seems to have started collecting in the 1860s. He was a patron of the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Arthur Hughes, and funded Hughes ‘grand tour’ in 1863. He amassed a large collection including Albert Moore’s Pomegranates (1866), Burne-Jones’s The Lament (1866)1, Arthur Hughes’s Home from Sea (1856-62), Ford Madox Brown’s Elijah and the Widow’s Son (1864) and also works by Rossetti, Leighton and Alma Tadema. His pictures were sold at Christie’s in April 1892, presumably on his death, and The Lament subsequently belonged to the artist Frank Brangwyn.

Herbert Hardwick Trist
Herbert Hardwick Trist (H H Trist) was a collector in his own right and later probably inherited or bought some of his father’s paintings in 1892. He acquired some works by Rossetti: Miss Herbert (1863), King René’s Honeymoon (1864, The Dancing Girl (1866) and Regina Cordium (1866) (a painting once owned by Fanny Cornforth). H Trist was recorded as living at 63 Buckingham Place in 1873 until at least 1879 and later recorded as living at 7 Beaconsfield Villas in 1887 but he may not have been from the same family. Herbert Hardwick Trist had at least one son, John R Trist (1881 census).

In 1899 H C Marillier wrote Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of his Art and Life and two illustrations were printed by permission of Mr H H Trist (The Dancing Girl, Michael Scott’s wooing). Marillier discusses the painting of Bocca Baciata (The model for this was Fanny Cornforth) which was sold to George Price Boyce; ‘Rossetti painted several heads later after much the same pattern as Bocca Baciata, of which two, a Regina Cordium done for the late Mr Trist of Brighton and a water-colour of 1868 called Bionda del Balcone, may be regarded as inferior replicas.’ Marillier later writes that Rossetti produced ‘a bright little water-colour drawing for a window representing Christ Crowned, with a regal globe in his hand and above and below two pairs of winged angels. This was formerly in the possession of Mr Trist ...’ and ‘two small paintings and a crayon were produced for Mr J Hamilton Trist, or bought by him in 1866, these are the head of Miss Wilding called Regina Cordium and a nearly circular head of a Dancing Girl sometimes called the Daughter of Herodias’ .... the crayon design is still in the possession of Mr H H Trist.’

At the end of the book there is a list of paintings with their provenance and there are seven paintings connected to the Trist family.

Christ in Glory: ’formerly in possession of J H Trist’
King Rene’s Honeymoon(1864): ‘painted for J H Trist and purchased by him in 1864. Sold at his sale April 1892.
The Dancing Girl(1866): ‘In the possession of H H Trist. Bought from the artist by J H Trist.’
Regina Cordium(1866): ‘in the possession of H H Trist’
Michael Scott’s Wooing: ‘Owner H H Trist’
Lilith: ‘in possession of H H Trist’
Miss Herbert(1863): ‘In the possession of H H Trist. Bought from the artist in 1866’


John Trist & Sons, wine merchants, were still in St James’s Street in 1914 but they had disappeared after the Second World War. The building, 59-60 St James’s Street Brighton, stands today and has a memorial plaque (HT 1815-1914).

Georgina Fernandez and the Pre-Raphaelites

This is a précis of an article published in 2005 in the British Art Journal (vol vi no 1, pp 3-20) by Julian Moore and Christopher Whittick entitled ‘Depictions of Georgina: Aspects of social identity in two portraits by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’. Some additional information concerning Fanny Cornforth has been added.


Georgina’s story begins at the start of the 19th century. In 1816 her mother, Helen Parsons, was baptised at Broadwater, near Worthing, where her grandfather had a carpentry shop. In the 1830s Helen, or Ellen as she was usually called, followed her brother, George, to live in Brighton. They were among the flood of rural work people who left the long-settled villages and swelled Brighton’s population by 40% in the early years of Victoria’s reign. Ellen went to share a house in one of four tiny, low-ceiling cottages in Gloucester Passage, a courtyard in the older part of Brighton which was dominated by an iron foundry and the Gloucester Brewery. This area was very poor and she was, in effect, just one step from destitution.

In August 1839 Ellen married Archibald Robertson and they went to live at 39 Blackman Street. He was a porter but already very ill with TB and he died a year later. Ellen began a relationship with a Henry Bignell, a violent, disruptive man and she was soon pregnant. A year later she found herself pregnant again and decided to go to the law to claim financial support from Henry but he promptly fled Brighton for London. Georgina was born on 15 October 1841. Her sibling died and, in 1844, Ellen herself died of TB aged 28. It is possible, but unlikely, that Georgina’s mother was a prostitute. The first generation of urban working class brought with them their own life assumptions forged in the Sussex countryside and simply tried to sustain this lifestyle within the urban environment.

From the wreckage of her mother’s life, Georgina was left an illegitimate baby without parents or siblings but she was saved by her uncle, George Parsons, who looked after her during her childhood with help from her grandfather who had followed the trend and left Broadwater for Brighton. George Parsons was a journeyman who lived in Whitecross Street. Their household was one of the lower artisan class; Georgina was one of the so-called ‘Common People’, a member of the fluid society of the Blackman and Whitecross Streets of Brighton.

In 1857, when Georgina was sixteen, her uncle and aunt both died so she was on her own again. However, somehow, within two years, she had left Brighton and found her way to Tenison Street in Lambeth where she lodged with a fellow Brightonian, Sarah Cox. Sarah, who was six years older than Georgina, had come from Steyning to Brighton with her father after her mother died, to live in Spring Gardens, close to Gardiner Street. It is possible that Georgina was a friend of Sarah’s younger sister. Around 1857 Sarah changed her name to Fanny Cornforth, possibly using the name of a great aunt, and moved to London. In 1858 Fanny married Timothy Hughes who turned out to be a drunkard. It was in 1858 that she first met the thirty year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This may have been when he was walking at Cremorne Gardens and he noticed her cracking peanuts with her teeth which she threw at him. Another version of their first meeting puts Fanny in the Royal Surrey Pleasure Gardens in Lambeth when Rossetti was attracted by her head of red hair whilst out walking with Edward Burne-Jones, Cornell Price and Ford Madox Brown. Fanny then became acquainted with various members of the Pre-Raphaelite group and it was Rossetti and George Price Boyce who helped her to escape from her husband and they set her up in a boarding house in Tenison Street. This triangular relationship has become famous through the painting Bocca Baciata by Rossetti. It was commissioned by Boyce who wanted a portrait of Fanny Cornforth. Lambeth at this time had a large and varied population and this street was quite a desirable site in an upper working class area. Fanny’s house had four-storeys which were over a basement. Fanny was a rather vulgar, extrovert character and it is possible, although there is no proof, that she was a prostitute at this time and the boarding house also served as a brothel.

In spite of the questionable status of her abode, association with Fanny Cornforth brought Georgina up in the world and she, too, became acquainted with the circle of friends centred around the Pre-Raphaelites. By 1861 Georgina is described as the wife of Charles Robinson, a draper’s warehouseman from Lincolnshire, but there is no record of any marriage. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1862, Fanny left Tenison Street and moved in with the newly-widowed Rossetti as his housekeeper, first living at lodgings in Lincoln’s Inn and then at 16 Cheyne Walk. She probably left his employment around 1865 when he started to use Alexa Wilding as his main model. However, they remained friends. Rossetti made a number of sketches in the early 1860s of Fanny and he also drew Georgina; a sketch entitled Portrait of Miss Robertson.

It is not known if Georgina stayed on in the Lambeth boarding house after Fanny left to live with Rossetti. She may have returned to Brighton for a time. However, by the mid- 1860s, she had become acquainted with James Fernandez. He was born in 1835 and was an aspiring actor playing at the Theatre Royal Brighton in 1868. He was professionally ambitious but big West End roles had so far eluded him. In the 1871 census he and Georgina were enumerated in Buckingham Palace Road, London, living as husband and wife.

It seems their relationship had reached a crisis point. Any exposure of their improper life style would have threatened James’s career but marriage was also fraught with difficulties: a mid-century Victorian marriage should not have begun with a premarital liaison; Georgina’s poverty-ridden background might become known; there was a Victorian horror of hereditary weakness and Georgina was, of course, a bastard daughter of a dissolute mother and a violent semi-criminal father; and there was also the difficulty of Georgina’s unrefined speech. This was a problem she shared with Fanny Cornforth who was noted for her Cockney accent. These difficulties must have been resolved as James and Georgina were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster in May 1871 when Georgina was thirty and her husband was thirty six.

In 1874 Rossetti drew Georgina again in coloured chalks on pale green paper. He drew Fanny at the same time and they are both wearing the same ear rings in their respective drawings. The two women now drifted apart and Rossetti wrote ‘Fanny lost sight of Georgey’. Georgina, as Mrs Fernandez, moved upwards into a new social world as her husband’s success increased. Fanny, meanwhile, moved downwards. She was rejected by Rossetti and later married John Bernard Schott and became the hostess of the Rose Tavern. She died in 1906.

Georgina and James had 44 years of marriage and for much of that time they lived in a flat at 1A Carlisle Place near to the site intended for Westminster Cathedral. James was a freemason and was amongst the first to join the Drury Lane Lodge when it was formed in 1886 and was the Master in 1891. He continued to climb the ladder of success and was a well-known supporting actor throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian years. The pinnacle of his success was in 1911 when he took part in a gala performance given by the king to honour his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. James died in 1915 and Georgina lived on as a widow at Carlisle Place for another fifteen years.

When James died Georgina put his collection of theatrical memorabilia up for sale at Sothebys and offered the two drawings to the National Gallery. Only the 1860s drawing was accepted and it is now at Tate Britain. On her death she bequeathed the chalk drawing to the Victoria and Albert Museum but it was declined and so it was sold through Christies. It has passed through various owners and was last sold to a private buyer in 2004 for £40,000.

Captain Henry Hill: Victorian Brighton Art Collector

Henry Hill was born in 1813 in Cullompton, Devon. He married Charlotte, who was born about 1814 in Sidmouth, Devon, which suggests that Henry Hill’s early life was spent in East Devon. They do not appear to have had any children. Henry Hill probably spent his working-life as either a taylor or as an outfitter. It is not known if this was his father’s trade or if Henry initially began trading from a base in Devon. However, in 1847, he was working as a taylor at 43,York Street, near Victoria Station, London and, by 1851, he had moved to 3 Old Bond Street and was described as a military taylor. Here he seems to have been in partnership with his brother, John, and, in 1857, their establishment was recorded as Hill Bros, military outfitters by Royal Appointment to the Queen. The firm remained based in 3-4 Old Bond Street for the rest of the century.

In 1865 Henry Hill and his wife moved to Brighton to live at 53 Marine Parade, Brighton, a four-storey Regency property, on the sea front built between 1810 and 1820. The entrance to the Chain Pier would have been nearby and, in the mid-nineteenth century, it would have been a select property well-placed in the expanding Kemp Town district. By 1869, Henry Hill had been elected as a councillor for Park Ward. He became chair of the Fine Arts sub-committee and was a councillor until at least 1877. A new purpose-built museum and art gallery was opened in Brighton in 1873 and the first exhibition there was centred on the collections of Henry Willett and Captain Henry Hill.

It is not known when Henry Hill started to collect paintings but, once established in his shop in London in Bond Street, he would have found himself surrounded by a number of prominent art galleries including the Doré Gallery, the Goupil Gallery and, most importantly of all, a gallery at 168 New Bond Street established by Paul Durand-Ruel in 1870 under the management of Charles Deschamps. The Hill brothers appear to have been very prosperous by this time and it would seem that Henry really loved his paintings and did not buy them simply as an investment. He owned some earlier British pictures by artists such as George Morland and David Cox but the bulk of his holdings was of contemporary Victorian works by English artists ranging from Val Prinsep and Fred Walker to the Scottish artists, John Pettie and William Quiller Orchardson. He had at least four paintings by Frank Holl (1845-1888) who, in addition to painting portraits, had emerged as a major painter of scenes of modern urban impoverishment and distress. Hill may have purchased these out of sympathy for Holl’s subjects, although family loyalty probably came into play as Holl’s sister was married to Hill’s brother. Hill’s Collection also included works by foreign artists: a painting by the Dutchman Josef Israël, a Fantin-Latour still-life, works by J-B-C Corot and Jean-François Millet and a major group of eighty oils and water-colours by Marie Cazin.

1876 was a very important year for Henry Hill’s Collection. He purchased Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay which the artist had painted in 1866. He also purchased a cluster of works by Degas, the first being Two Dancers originally exhibited in Paris by Degas in 1874. It is not known when Hill first noticed Degas’s work or when Degas identified him as a particular client. Certainly by 22 August 1875 Degas was writing from Paris to the dealer Deschamps in Bond Street, keeping him informed of his progress in completing pictures for the market and urging the need for sales: he wrote “this is the moment for me to take flight in England”. Degas had first visited Britain in 1868 and probably visited London in 1871 and 1875. The extent of the personal contact between the two is a matter of speculation but there is circumstantial evidence that he visited Brighton. It has been argued that Hill and his wife did not buy the pictures for profit as they were all still in the Collection when he died and were only sold on the death of Hill’s wife in 1892, even though Degas’s stock had risen throughout the 1880s. Hill did not seem to find the ballet subjects disreputable as many contemporary critics had done and it is possible that they struck a chord in his sympathy for the strenuous lives of the urban worker. The critic, Alice Meynell, visited the Collection and admired the “great power and certainty of draughtsmanship in Degas’s dancers” but she also wrote of the “women working chillily at their profession in the dreary grey daylight - women of all ages, thin, undersized, bony, long-elbowed, with the abnormal development of the leg muscles adding dismally to the imperfections of the unidealised form”.

Henry Hill bought one further painting by Degas. In 1876 the second Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris and Degas showed Dans un Café. It did not sell and so was shipped to London and was sold to Hill. Hill lent it to Brighton’s Third Annual Winter Exhibition of Modern Pictures which opened on 7 September 1876. This painting, now known as L’Absinthe, shows two figures seated in a café: one a streetwalker and the other a distracted man drinking a hangover cure. Perhaps Hill had been attracted to the subject matter of the painting as it again shows the urban disadvantaged. The critic of the Brighton Gazette wrote: ”The perfection of ugliness: undoubtedly a clever painting, though treated in a slapdash manner, amounting to affectation. The colour is as repulsive as the figures; a brutal sensual-looking French workman and a sickly-looking grisette; a most unlovely couple. The very disgusting novelty of the subject arrests attention. What there is to admire in it is the skill of the artist, not the subject itself’. The next chance the British public had to see L’Absinthe was at Christies on 20 February 1892. The following year, 1893, it was first shown in London at the Grafton Gallery and it provoked a furious newspaper exchange which ran for many months. It was seen as a “dirty drunken French picture”.

Frank Holl painted Henry Hill in 1880 and it was presented to Brighton Art Gallery by a ‘Mr Hill, nephew of the sitter’, in 1939. This was probably James S Hill, described as a ‘Landscape Painter Oil & Water Colours’ who lived with Henry and Charlotte Hill in Brighton. Henry Hill died on 1 April 1882 and “would almost certainly have left his Collection to Brighton but there was an argument between him and the Corporation which led to the pictures being auctioned at Christie’s instead”. There were eventually two sales. The first was held in Brighton by Christies on 25 May 1882. The second sale was held at Christies in London on 5 June 1882 and the paintings were sold for £1,362. Walter Sickert acquired The Rehearsal of the Ballet on Stage for himself although his collection was not a private museum like the Hill Collection where an attendant showed visitors into the two galleries in Hill’s Marine Parade residence. Whistler described one such visit: “I was shown into the galleries, and of course took a chair and sat looking at my beautiful Nocturne then as there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep”.

In his funeral notice Henry Hill was described as "a gentleman formerly connected with the 1st Sussex Rifle Volunteers in the capacity of Quartermaster". Presumably his experience as a military outfitter was invaluable. The threat of invasion by the French under Napoleon III was such that, by 1860, Volunteer Battalions had been formed throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The 1st Sussex Rifle Volunteer Corps was raised at Brighton in 1859. Henry Hill appears to have been made a Captain around 1877.

Richard Thomas in his catalogue to the 2005 Tate Exhibition on Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec comments that the fact that Henry Hill’s taste could encompass Prinsep and Fred Walker and also Degas makes his Collection exceptional. Hill acquired one of Degas’s ultimately key, and most poignant, images in L’Absinthe. Degas’s work was amongst the most advanced picture-making to be found anywhere in the mid-1870s. It is all the more remarkable that such innovative work was so admired in Brighton.

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