Brotherhood
Richard Shone
A Pre-Raphaelite Circle Raleigh Irevelyan (Chatto and Windus 0.50) Some extraordinary marriages are recounted or touched on in this agreeable book. Already well told are those of Ruskin and Effie Gray who was later Lady Millais, Rosetti and Lizzie Siddal, Thomas and Jane Carlyle. Several others involve attractive young women affected it seems with mild gerontophilia — Pauline Trevelyan, the subject of the book, was nineteen years younger than her husband Calverley Trevelyan, and her great confidante Louisa Mackenzie at the age of thirty-two married a man twenty-seven years her senior. Another such marriage was that of Francis Strong who at twenty-one married Mark Pattison, then forty-eight — they were possible models for the Casaubons in Middlemarch. Entanglements, divorces, unlikely alliances eddy about the constant couple of the narrative, Pauline and her bizarre husband Sir Walter Trevelyan.
Until now Pauline Trevelyan has been seen as an erudite, delightful woman, winning the devotion of Ruskin and the adoration of Swinburne, a patroness in the parrot-house of Pre-Raphaelitism, the chatelaine of Wallington, Northumberland.
Certainly this book confirms her footnote reputation, but it also draws the picture of an engaging human being who was often in advance of contemporary thought and manners (she usually sat on the floor — always an endearing characteristic in peo ple) and who with great forebearance suffered a series of illnesses which carried her off at the age of fifty. Raleigh Trevelyan
doesn't spare us some gruesome clinical details — her husband did not spare himself inspection of 'albumen and pus in discharge
from P.'s bladder', a diary entry which might stand motto for that spirit of (scientific) enquiry which colours that age.
She was born Pauline Jermyn in 1816, her father a Suffolk curate and naturalist. From her youth she was a passionate botanist, wrote poetry and stories and saved her pocket-money for an annual visit to the Royal Academy where Turner was her hero. After a brief courtship she married Trevelyan, heir to Wallington and Nettlecombe Court, Somerset, in 1834. Tall, thin, dark, rather humourless, deeping a diary as dry as the fossils he collected, a naturalist of some distinction and a fanatic teetotaller, Calverley managed to pursue interests sometimes contrary to his wife's while remaining an essential ingredient in the gatherings at Wallington of scientists, painters and writers. They seem to have been perfectly happy together, his chronic sobriety matched by her bright, teasing talk, each applying the reins to the other's wilder enthusiasms. They travelled abroad, attended endless learned lectures and meetings, visited exhibitions, were continually involved in schemes to improve Wallington and avoided conventional Society. Pauline established her home in the North where Newcastle and Edinburgh offered intellectual stimulation as well as plentiful medical advice. She also began publishing reviews in the Scotsman of inordinate length about painting; her meeting with Ruskin in 1848 was a resounding event in her life. Thereafter the Pre-Raphs and their friends come thick and fast — Effie longing for balls, so to speak; Millais then at his creative best; glimpses of Hunt and Rossetti; the untrustworthy William Bell Scott; the Carlyles.
Raleigh Trevelyan tells an interesting story and though many of the letters he has used have appeared previously, they are newly interpreted; his sympathetic commentary clears up chronological points and adds fresh details, particularly in the role played by Lady Trevelyan in the prelude to the Ruskin divorce. She was one of the few of Ruskin's friends who didn't break with him; against her humane and temperate attitude, the ensuing scandal, enflamed by the pernicious Lady Eastlake, takes on aspects of unreal horror. With skill the author tailors familiar events to avoid repetition; his footnotes offer some astonishing titbits Maher Calverley, the last man in England to be pressed to death'). He has made a distinct contribution to the personal history of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and gives us some enlightening information on the restless intellectual life of the time.
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