Quick intro and backstory
Eliza Ogilvy's commonplace book: last seen in 1973
Any reader of A.S. Byatt’s Possession will know how one thing leads to another, especially when that ‘one thing’ is the discovery of a letter from a poet — two letters, in this case, sent from Rome to Edinburgh in the revolutionary Spring of 1848.
Each was written a week apart by Eliza Ogilvy to her friend Marcelly Graham. Eliza was four months pregnant, revelling in the Saturnalia of Carnevale, joining frenzied crowds watching Berber horses race riderless along the length of the Via del Corso ‘like mad dogs with tin pots at their tails’; then squeezing her way by candlelight into the Moccoletti masquerade, to snuff out others’ candles and protect one’s own; it was ‘Death to anyone who is not carrying a candle’, but this year no candles were to be blown out, by order of Pope Pius IX, to prevent violence while there was a threat of revolution. This was Eliza’s second grand tour of Italy and after a wild month in Rome she was soon to depart for Florence, where she would meet Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the first time and so begin a close friendship and correspondence that lasted for 14 years, until Elizabeth’s death in 1861.
The sale of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 37 letters to Eliza Ogilvy by my wife’s grandfather and great aunt is an established part of our family history1. These became a small but important part of a major scholarly archive, The Browning’s Correspondence, which today contains almost 12,000 documents relating to ‘the poets’, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, each precisely — obsessively — catalogued and annotated because, of course, one things leads to another and unlike Byatt’s novel such projects have no end. This was a one-sided correspondence containing Elizabeth’s thoughts but not Eliza’s; her letters to Elizabeth were missing, lost after Elizabeth’s death in one of Robert Browning’s many changes of address; and so Eliza’s voice was absent and her opinions could only be inferred from Elizabeth’s replies. Little was known about her life other than her five published volumes of poetry; there were, too, many competing tales of other family members: coachmakers in Smithfield building carriages for the Prince Regent, indigo planters in Tirhoot conspiring to kidnap the Viceroy, Secondaries in the City of London packing juries for bribes, skirmishes at Quatre Bras two days before Waterloo, appeal court judges in Calcutta trading in opium, colonial scientists in Shanghai studying the causes of nutritional disease.
Eliza’s absence receded in 2016 when we found a steel strong-box of the kind used by officials in India; it contained a trove of her unpublished poems, the transcript of a memoir of her friend and mentor Marcelly Graham, the eight pages of closely written letters to Marcelly sent from Rome in 1848, and letters from East India Company officials to her father in Calcutta — one from Tipu Sultan’s son, Prince Ghulam Mohammed, concerning his visit to London. And then too there was a lock of Eliza’s hair, and the manuscript of a sonnet on the subject of love, written for the 16 year-old Eliza by a young poet 9 years her senior — so there was a romance too. These treasures brought Eliza back to life and started a trail of research and discovery that included a long and — until very recently — fruitless search for Eliza’s commonplace books in which she kept her poetry and recollections: one of these was last seen and copied in part in 1973, its list of contents suggesting a rich seam of interdisciplinary history in memoirs she wrote of members of the Sydenham set, including the artist David Roberts, the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan and the physicist Sir David Brewster..
What emerged was the realisation that Eliza, her family and her connections in Edinburgh, London, Florence, Calcutta and Madras opened up an intimate and vivid picture of 19th Century life — both colonial and metropolitan — and one that illustrated the immense cultural and social changes that were taking place across just three or four generations, powered by the growth of empire and industry.
Using Eliza and her network as the common factor connecting everything together is a helpful way of finding how one thing leads to another: imperial careers and family networks as a force for social mobility and the creation of a ‘British’ middle class; the connections between capital, industry and empire that become strikingly apparent in the careers of Wellington’s colonels after 1815; how the death on the banks of the river Sutlej of Eliza’s guardian and uncle, Major General Sir Robert Dick, was used by Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, to plant the first ugly shoots of Christian militarism in British society; contrasting coalitions of opposition in Britain — emancipationists, nationalists, chartists and dissenters; Scottish outsider poetry, and it’s role in developing a democratic counter culture that included women as authors and contributors to social debate; the evolution of portraiture under the pressure of family separation, social mobility and technical innovation; the Bengal renaissance as an alternative future for India (and legacy for empire) snuffed out by racism and utilitarianism; with the Brownings in Florence, Bagni di Lucca and Venice, exchanging contrasting views on poetry and Louis Napoleon; building the imperial culture factory that was the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, a strange amalgam of artists, engineers, orientalists and East India money.
The result is a work (in progress) in which Eliza is not always the primary subject but instead the common factor — the common placer — in a series of essays and observations that trace the networks of the people she knew, the events that engulfed them and the ideas they held onto. So, not a literary Life or conventional biography; instead, stories that surround Eliza, not just stories about Eliza; more a scrapbook that follows the example of her missing commonplace books, as a collection of in the main of first-hand stories and micro histories drawn carefully together, with the hopeful outcome being a fresh and often surprising impression of the cultural impact of empire and industry through the long 19th Century.
This is an investigation that crosses many disciplinary boundaries and so, as a serial publication, gives the opportunity to its author to learn and synthesise more efficiently and quickly. Conventional publishing is a slow process requiring patience that feels out of place in a disappearing world; I’m used to digital publication and the openness and continuous changes and improvements that come with it. I just happen to love paper too, and hope the final output will be some form of print edition. In the meantime, the essays (or chapters) and previously unpublished poems and other material are appearing here in draft form on Substack — just click the button below. And please subscribe (it’s free) if you enjoy the read and would like to receive regular updates.
William Owen, January 2024