Empire: World History - 321. Exploding Rum-filled Coffins, Anglo-Indian Sisterhood, & Julia Margaret Cameron

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

How did Julia Margaret Cameron - Virginia Woolf's great aunt - become one of the most influential photography artists of her time? Who were the Anglo-Indian Pattle Sisters who charmed Victorian society in India and London? How did the family create a warm artistic oasis where celebrities like Tennyson and Watts loved spending time? William is joined by art historian Emily Burns to discuss the life of his relative, the pioneering photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire. I'm afraid it's just me today without Anita because she is resting after her terrible week in A&E, for which she's now recovered, but she had a miserable time, and I'm glad to say she'll be back with us next week for our Indian Mutiny, our 1857 Great Uprising Series,

which starts next week. In her absence, I thought I could get away with smuggling in one more relative into the pod, because she's not here to stop me, and I have a free hand. So today will be the final episode of our photographers who documented Empire, the Eyes on Empire mini-series that we've done. been doing. And I felt we couldn't allow that to pass without taking the opportunity to talk about my great aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron. Now, to traverse her life, we are joined by the wonderful

artist-storian and my friend Emily Burns, who has just edited the fantastic book, Women of Influenced the Battle Sisters, which accompanies the brilliant new exhibition at the Watts Gallery near Guilford, which has just opened and which we recommend that you definitely go and visit. It's a wonderful gallery set in this beautiful and unexpectedly rural valley just down from the hogsback with the wonderful Watts Chapel and as well as the gallery. So it's an extraordinary place to go and visit. If you don't know it, now is the time to discover it. If you do know it, come and see the new exhibition, which will dazzle you. And it's all, when it was kicked off certainly by Emily, who was the initial conceiver of the exhibition, has edited the wonderful catalogue. Welcome, Emily.

And the exhibition is doing well. It's all sort of chugging along now. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Yeah. It's doing very well. It's open until the 4th of May. So plenty of time to come and see. I am coming back specially in the New Year to do a swoop and see it. But introduce us, Emily, for those who I grew up with Judy Mark Cameron in the house and we had her photographs and it was something we were always very proud of. But for those who have never heard of this woman, give us just a kind of, you know, a sketch about why she's worth listening for the next 14. minutes too. Yeah, she's a really interesting person because she's one of the seven sisters who are so interesting. She's the one who's, she's not necessarily a household name, but among artists and photographers she certainly is, and she should be more famous because she's a pioneer of

photography, the very early beginnings of photography. She was gifted camera late in life and really took to it like a duck to water. The age of 48, she started. 48, yes. And, you know, by it given, gifted by her daughter and son-in-law. And, you know, it was a sliding box camera, one of the very early sorts. She, she had, you know, a friend Herschel who, who was a photochemist. And she knew a little bit about, yeah. He was rather a sort of distinguished old Victorian gent in his own right. Yeah. So she knew a bit about, you know, that the science behind it and how to do it. But, you know, she essentially was self-taught. So it's an incredible feat that over such a show. period of time and being entirely self-taught, she could sort of rise up to be one of the most important 19th century artists, full stop really, in any medium. There's a nice quote by Roger Frye, which makes that point. Roger Frye, writing at the beginning of the 20th century,

said, Mrs Cameron's photographs already bid fair to outlive the works of the artists who work at her contemporaries, which is very nice. Oh, that's beautiful, yeah. Yeah, I mean, she was, there was a brief period when she wasn't so well known, but really since her Virginia, well, Virginia Wolf and Frye and from then on really, you know, she's been really appreciated for what, what is worth because she really did such beautiful, creative photographs, which it's sort of prescient of the pictorialist tradition, where sort of photography, rather than being like a mechanical art was sort of brought up to the position of painting and sculpture. creating quite sort of romantic, expressive artwork,

rather than just being a likeness of cold. Yeah, I think many people who maybe don't know her name and are thinking, who is this person, if you just Google Julia Margaret Cameron photographer, you'll recognise many of the images. Because, again, like Karsh's images in the early 20th century or mid-20th century, Julia Margaret's cameras are the defining photographs

of many of the great figures of the 19th century. So, for example, Tennyson, when you come to think of Tennyson, we tend to think of her photograph now. The Dirty Monk photograph, as it was called at the time. Yeah, the Dirty Monk, which he quite liked, but he also refused to sit again. So it's quite an intense process sitting for camera, and as we'll probably discuss later. She was a character, that's for sure. She was a character.

My favourite story about her in Tennyson was apparently she was very keen that Tennyson get inoculated. And she arrived at his tower on the Isle of Wight and banged on the door and said, Alfred, Alfred, you're a coward. Come down. And he did indeed meekly come down and agreed to be inoculated for whatever. I got it with smallpox. I didn't know what it was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the kind of woman she was. Yeah, yeah. So let's go back, Emily, to the stuff that I'm really interested in, which is her childhood and her sister's childhood in East India Company, Calcutta. And these girls were partly Bengali, partly French. They stood out even at the time. And really, that was the source of their considerable beauty,

which is the first thing everyone noticed when they arrived in London. So Julia Margaret Cameron is born in Calcutta. She is the second eldest of the sisters, and she is born in June 1815. Yeah, yeah. I think they kind of played up to their Indian roots, their kind of Anglo-Indian upbringing. And they, I think because they had the first,

French link as well. The grandmother, Therese, you know, brought them up and educated them in Versailles. So they had, you know, they had, they were born in Calcutta, had time in France, but had English parent, you know, one French, one English parent.

And, you know, they moved in the circles of the East India Company. They were very sort of cultured, if not educated in book learning academically. They were very kind of confident and, you know, well connected. And the book learning was very much from their mother's French side.

They were educated in Versailles. Because their father was this notorious scallywag who I am longing to tell a story which some of you may be familiar with. But it's a story which is only partially true, but it's still worth telling all the same. It's Virginia Woolf's story. And when she was reintroducing

Julie Mark Cameron, her great aunt in the 1920s, she starts with the story. And it's the story of how, James Pattle, who was Julian Margaret Cameron's father, who was a notorious scallywag and a drinker and known as the biggest liar in India who claimed to have sailed across the Atlantic in the hen coop and was also known as Gem Blazes, the biggest liar in India. Anyway, this character made a fortune importing ice from America to Calcutta and spent it all on a considerable wine cellar and then sort of more or less drank himself to death.

and in the end, appropriately enough, he asked to be shipped back to London in a barrel of rum, which was then the favoured way, Lord Nelson and Byron and several other characters who died away from their preferred graves, were indeed in this period put into barrels of rum. It wasn't that unusual. But the story goes that the barrel of rum plus paddle were put into the widow's bedding, bedroom. And then the boat that was meant to take him back to England didn't arrive. And this was the heat of the Calcutta summer. And it got hotter and hotter. And the boat didn't come and didn't come. And then one night the widow was sleeping when suddenly there was a terrific explosion. And

paddle burst out of his rum barrel. Whereupon, according to Virginia Woolf, the widow then died too. And they were both nailed down and put into the boat together, which had then turned up finally. but the sailors realized that there was rum in this. So they bored a hole allegedly in the barrels. Desperation. And then began drinking the rum. And then the pilot drank so much that he steered the ship onto a sandbank in the Hugli. The paraffin lamp, which was being used to light this nefarious activity, crashed to the ground.

The rum ignited and the whole thing exploded. So Pattle never made it back to England, according to this story. at least, but was cremated in the hoagli. The trouble is there is a very perfectly good grave for him in South London. So certain parts of the story clearly aren't true. Yeah, it seems Virginia Woolf iscribed to the ethos of don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. I've always believed that myself. Anyway, so the girls make it back to England or certainly to Europe and some of them are educated in Versailles with granny.

and they become known both in London and in Calcutta for their beauty. So despite Patel being this ruffian, their grandmother, who called them all to Versailles successively and had them shipped out for a proper French education, made sure that they grew up with the very best that French education could offer. And they became renowned for their enthusiasms, their beauty, their eccentricity, their charm and Virginia Woolf wrote this wonderful Pian to them. She said, no one could restrain the pattles but themselves. Half French, half English. They were all excitable, unconventional, extreme in one form or another, all of a distinguished presence, tall, impressive and gifted,

with a curious mixture of shrewdness and romance. No domestic detail was too small for their attention, no flight too fantastic for their daring. Not a bad start for an artistic career, exactly. Yeah, I mean, it seems that they were, you know, they were sort of strong enough to hold their own amongst groups of big intellectuals and highly influential people. And, you know, Cameron published translation work and poetry. And Mary Watts once said that Sarah Patel, one of the sisters, was sort of complaining to her that she had no education, she kept saying. And then Mary Watts said, but she was riveted all the while by her power of vivid description and her originality of expression. So, you know, whatever education they had, it seems to have served them quite well in the world. And what's always intrigued me is that despite this being, you know, the height of Victorian racism, this is the period when Kipling is a young man, when attitudes are definitely not pro-Indian or even interested in India, the way that they had been in the 18th century, all of the sisters celebrated their Indianness. And they were known for

wearing Indian clothes, chattering to each other in Hindustani. They sat on Indian rugs on the lawns serving Indian food. Their lobster curries were famous. And they wore sort of Kashmiri Jamavarshawls that you see in their portraits. While all the rest of England was in busks and crinolines and whalebone corsets and all this sort of stuff. Should we be surprised at that in this period that they made so much of their Indianness? I think it was, you know, they weren't the only angers. Anglo-Indians coming to London.

But I think maybe the mixture of their upbringing, maybe it was a combination of the, you know, the personality of the father, their mother, grandmother, that's upbringing they had. And their confidence, you know, they weren't ashamed of their background. And so they were used to wearing very comfortable flowing robes and Kashmiri shawls and, you know,

and that's what they were used to. And bangles and all the jewelry. Yeah. And so they confident. confidently wore them about town. I mean, it suggested that this might be what influenced the pre-raphalite form of dress, that kind of bohemian, much looser style. And you can actually see in portraits of them by GF Watts. So at the Watts Gallery in the Watts Gallery exhibition, you can see, you know, one of the most amazing portraits is this double portrait called The Sisters,

showing Sophia, your great-great-grandmother, and Sarah standing there in these beautiful flowing rows with their shawls. And you can see there, Raki, the kinship bracelets on their wrist. And there's a second portrait also, just as a Sophia on her own and this beautiful white dress, again, with a raki on her wrist. And you can see what they used to wear. It's quite nice to have that record of them. Let's quickly go through the different sisters, because we've talked about them as a sisterhood. Take us through who they are, because they're all quite interesting in their own way. Yeah. So, Julia, well, they originally were 10 children, but three were lost in infancy. So that left seven sisters. Julia was the second eldest of the seven sisters. Her older sister was Adeline, who was born in 1812 and named after their mother, who very sadly died at sea, age 24. She married Lieutenant General Colin McKenzie, who went on quite successful.

Who appears in my book, Return of a King, and who we dealt with in the pod on the 1842 retreat from Kabul. He's one of the captives and one of the future survives. Yeah, okay, yes. Well, a great link there. So he went on to be quite successful, but poor old Adeline died aged aged. 24, having got married at age 20, had three children in quick succession, and then died at sea and was buried at sea. So she leaves the scene quite early in our story. But then the next one along, after Julia, was Sarah Patel, born in 1816. And she is a mother of the sort of second wave

pre-Raphyphalite Val Princep. She married Henry Toby Princep, which maybe we can talk about because he's a very interesting figure. Princep boys are very important. And I think people don't know about them much in England. They're very famous in India. Henry Toby Princep, who just mentioned, who was Sarah's husband, was a Persian-speaking orientalist.

He fights McCauley, which is very topical in India today, where there's a big debate on this, saying that education should be in Indian languages and that Sanskrit should be venerated. McCauley said, a single shelf of a good English library is worth all the native literature of Indian

India and Arabia. And Princep basically lost that battle. And then his brother is an even more famous figure in India today, James Princep, who decoded the Ashoka pillars, cracked the code to Karosti in the Brahmi scripts, which basically opened up the whole of ancient Indian history. We now know, thanks to him, all about Ashoka and the Bordeur and all these early Indian inscriptions can be read. And he went mad in the process of decoding it, but decoded it first and was then taken back in a sort of hospital ship and died, I think, on arrival in London. Third sister, so Mia, tell us about her. Mia was, she was born in 1818, and she became the grandmother of the author Virginia

Wolf and Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury set. So that's kind of her claim to fame in a way. She was born at sea, so indicates how much the family spent traveling. They were a Victorian jet set. They were always on liners going back and forth. And it took a long time, I should add it. It used to take 90 days before the sewers canal. And then by the end, you know, it could take about a month, you know, in a few weeks.

But still, you know, at the beginning of their lives, certainly, a very sizable chunk of their time was spent in quite dangerous transit. So Mia married Dr. John Jackson and her daughter, Julia Jackson, later, Duckworth got married. Later, Stephen, married Leslie Steven. So that was one of the main beautiful models of Julia Margaret Carrey. The most famous really of her images are this extraordinary haunting, heavy-looded face of Julie Jackson. And Julia Jackson was Julia Margaret Cameron's goddaughter. So they were particularly close. And yeah, they took some beautiful photographs.

And you can tell by this story so far that the family was very close. You know, all the children and grandchildren, they all sort of corresponded with each other. And, you know, I guess that happens when you are sort of international network. Sometimes you're not with your children or not with your husband or not with your sisters. And so, I mean, especially Sarah Princep, took on the role of supporting the younger siblings and their families and kind of sort of adopted the role as mother figure because both their parents died, you know. And setting up this salon, Little Holland House, which was both the base for the family and all the cousins as they successfully arrived off liners or ships or whatever from India. But also, which is where the Watts Gallery comes in, she invited famously the painter Watts to come to lunch and he stayed 35 years. years. Yeah, she said it came for three days, stayed for 30 years. In a fact, I think it was about

25, but you know, whatever. It's still quite a good line. Yeah, yeah. I mean, to show us how generous she was. Great grandmother lived when she came from India. She moved in with her elder sister Sarah, where she succeeded to be sort of hit upon by various pre-raphalites such as Byrne Jones and Rosetti, who all painted her endlessly, as well as Watts, who painted her These people were lurking around Little Holland House. You could meet a poet, you could meet a painter, you could meet Joachim, the musician. And, you know, it was really quite an impressive place. Tim the Halle Orchestra is named.

That's it, that's it. We play in the garden in the evening suiaries. So all this went on. And somewhere in the middle of this, later in the story, Judy Margaret turns up and makes everybody sort of dress up as King Arthur and takes their photograph leaning against a tree being the knights. for the Rhinetable or one of these sort of Walter Scott stories? Yeah, I mean, they called it sort of lion hunting in that, you know, there was a sort of, they were trying to collect these great people and try and photograph them and, you know, Sarah wanted them to come to her suiets, Julia Margaret Cameron wanted to photograph them,

Watts wanted to paint them, and so they did most of them. I mean, I think Julian Margaret wanted to photograph Rosetti and she never quite managed it. But, you know, she got most other people. She did quite well. She turned up. Apparently, she turned up at the door with Henry Taylor. She turned up at the door of Carlisle. She was desperate to photograph him. And his wife was horrified and had to sort of prevent her from walking into his room before his trousers were on. His wife was famous too tough. She met her match in Mrs. Carlisle. But she did get him. She did photograph. And he's looking as if he's just been sort of caught with his trousers half up. And he described the photograph as an inferno because he looked

so pissed off. That picture. Anyway, we've looked. We've jumped ahead. Let's go back just before we go to the break to just give Julie Margaret's life from when she comes back from Versailles, having been educated. Age 21, she gets sent off to the Cape of Good Hope. Tell us this story. Yes, so she got ill and so she was resting at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. And while she was there, she met two important people. one was Sir John Herschel who we briefly already mentioned the astronomer and photochemist

and they stayed in touch for the rest of their life she photographed him she fluffed up his hair for the portrait brilliant she kind of ruffled it just to make it so it looks like Boris Johnson

or something in the picture but it's a bad comparison because one just groans at the sort of Boris Johnson but yeah yeah so she so she they corresponded all their lives

and you know so really I found it quite interesting that she was thinking and talking about photography well before, you know, well before she got her camera and started the art of photography herself. And so you can maybe say Sir John Herschel sort of planted the seed for that, which is quite nice. And then the other person she met was Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist, a reformer, 20 years her senior, and they married. They went back to Calcutta and married there in 1838. And, you know, she adored Charles. And he's also quite a character.

and there are some wonderful stories about her, you know, dressing him up. And there's, you know, three layers of coats and a cone hat. He was pacing outside in the garden at Little Holland House. And how he, you know, he looks like Merlin, but he was cast as Merlin, absolutely perfect casting in one of her photographs. And he had to sit next to this oak tree, which they dragged onto the set and decorated. And he kept getting fits of giggles and ruined all the photographs through sort of vibrating the tree. I love it.

But, you know, he's a lovely relationship, both of them, I think. And he invests very early on in coffee plantations in Sri Lanka, which is going to be important for the end of the story, because they always have these loss-making plantations in Sri Lanka that are draining all their money, and to which they eventually retire because they can't afford to live in England. Yeah, yeah. I think Cameron, he, Mr Cameron actually sort of,

he really liked Sri Lanka salon, and he wanted to go back there, which is why they kind of returned at the end of their lives, but he wrote the sort of the legal code there. He was actually in the 1830s. He'd already been there and worked there. And so there was always a sort of link to it in the background. And, you know, their sons went out and worked on the plantations.

You know, he always joked that Julia with her great spending on people and gift giving was slicing up salon is in their estates there. Another bit of salon gone, you know, another shawl. So listen, we must take a break now. But after this, we want to come back and focus on Little Holland House, which we've mentioned already, but we want to dive deep into that world and Julia Margaret Cameron's amazing photography of the inhabitants of this Victorian salon. I think of it as a summer afternoon world. To my thinking, Little Holland House is an old white country house standing in a large garden.

Long windows open to the lawn. Through them come a string of ladies and crinolines and little straw hats. They are attended by gentlemen in peg-top trousers and whiskers. Tea tables and great bowls of strawberries and cream are scattered about the lawn. They are presided over by the lovely sisters who do not wear crinolines, but are robed in splendid Venetian draperies. They sit enthroned and talk with foreign emphatic gestures to the eminent men, rulers of India, statesmen, poets and painters.

My mother comes out to the window wearing that striped silk dress buttoned at the throat that appears in her photographs by Julie Margaret, and there she stands silent with her plate of strawberries, or perhaps is told to take a party across the lawn to Signor's studio. The sound of music also comes from those long low rooms where the great Watts pictures hang, and Yoakim playing the violin, and also the sound of a voice reading poetry, Uncle Toby reading his translations from the Persian poets. So that is Virginia Woolf describing Little Holland House at its peak. Emily, tell us about Little Holland House because it's absolutely central to this story.

Yeah, so Little Holland House was the Dower House of Holland House, which is now, sadly, under Melbury Road. So all the survives of this is of this whole world is sort of late in the house, isn't it? You can go and get an image of what this seems to feel like, I think. Yeah, so Little Holland House was demolished sadly as well. But it was this sort of rambling, sort of almost like a farmhouse type building. Big lawn, big gardens, big trees. And it's where Sarah Princep and Toby Prinsop settled in London. And they took in, you know, two of her younger sisters and their families and other families.

You know, Julia would visit. She lived in East Sheen. and that's where they welcomed great artists, great poets. So George Frederick Watts, we've mentioned him already, he became a sort of artist and residence of sorts. And so that's why there's lots of wonderful sketches. And all the sisters worshipped him and used to bring him tea and incense, says George Moria, he says that,

and worship them until his very manliness have been undone. Yes, have departed. It's such a wonderful phrase. Yeah. Yeah, so Watts was sort of held court there. And but they, you know, there were, you know, Rosetti went, Bern Jones went and lots of politicians and scientists, you know, Darwin, you know, they had all these connections.

And it was on a sort of Sunday afternoon, so a very kind of behemian collection on an otherwise quite serious day. And they... Which in Victorian London was a big deal. So the Sabbath was celebrated very much as sort of, something which should not be broken. And the sisters did break it. They've had all their parties on that day.

Yeah. And, you know, they served curries. They wore their fabulous outfits. You know, Julia would come in and try and persuade some unsuspecting person to sit for her portrait. There's a lovely story, one of my favorite stories, that she sees in the street outside Holland House, a handsome young priest probably heading towards the Brompton Oratory. And without a moment's hesitation goes up to him and says, you must be my Galahan. and the priest understandably taken aback murmurs excuses

but she doesn't take no for an answer ever and assuming that his refusal of this honour to be in her photograph could only be for religious motives she reassures him with the promise I'll write and ask your Pope and the priest in question afterwards of course comes Cardinal Vaughan of course, but of course yeah another one of her close friends

Henry Taylor and his wife Alice she attacks them with her wild beaming benevolence is the phrase. And she said to Taylor's new wife Alice that before the year is out, you will love me like a sister. And she did. She broke them down and they adored her. But there's lots of accounts of her sort of, you know, chasing after people to sit for her portraits, but also sort of showering people with gifts. And one friend commented that she would rain down precious things upon us,

not drop by drop, but in whole Golconda mines at once. I love it. There's a kind of oddly classless atmosphere also in this place. They'd grown up outside the English class system, which was such a dominant feature of Victorian society. And they unusually seemed to have broken through all that. So Watts came from a very humble background. Byrne Jones came from sort of, you know, the back end of Birmingham.

And none of these artists were from the top drawer of society. society and they took them in and the photographs would often mix people like Tennyson who was rather grand with The cleaning lady from little Holland house of the stray Italian waiter who became Iago in this one of her most famous photographs and she put them all together you know quite irrespective obeying none of the English laws of the class system They'd all be jumbled together and made to sort of be you know the Knights of the Rhin table or Sir Galahad and his and his ladies in some sort of Arthurian sort of scramble.

Yeah, it was classless and intergenerational, which I think is the kind of wonderful environment to be in. You can learn a lot. Virginia Woolf said, we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next, nor did anyone else. So let's talk about how she begins her photography, because she moves at one point to freshwater in the Isle of White,

which is now a museum, which also can be visited to her and all she did, and has contained some of her cameras and many of her most famous pictures. And she knocks these two houses together. She's on the, she's not far, she's sort of walking distance from Tennyson, who's also taken refuge there.

And she's always disturbing Tennyson when he's trying to compose his poems. And telling him to be inoculated or delivers a grand piano, or something of the sort. And just when he's, as the moment of inspiration has come, she's the eternal woman from Porlock,

breaking into his reveries. But something very important happens, Emily, in December 1863. Tell us the whole story of the arrival of Charles Norman and the sliding box camera. Yes, well, her daughter thought that she might be a bit lonely because Mr. Cameron was away in salon,

checking on his plantations, and seeing his son. and she was. She was sort of not really short to do with herself. And so she took this present. That didn't mean idleness in her sense. It meant saving the poor of Ireland. She raised more money than anyone else for the potato famine. Irish famine, yeah. Translating German poetry. I mean, every kind of strange enthusiasm was entertained. But anyway, this camera is delivered in 1863, and that becomes the entire focus for all her energy. Yes. And so sort of like she, applied herself like she applies herself to everything else with great gusto and enthusiasm.

And within a month, she gets, makes her first success, a photograph of a local girl Annie Philpott. And she's so excited. She runs around giving her presence as if it was like the girl who had created the photo. And her first success sort of means the first image that she was happy with that she hadn't accidentally ruined by putting her finger on the back of the slide and got the exposure right because of course, you know, nowadays we think photography is very easy. But then at that stage, it was a highly laboursome process, very laborious. You would have to have used these big, initially she had, I think it was nine times 11 size glass plates and then it was 12 times 15 inch. So, I mean, really large, heavy plates, which you had to coat with solution. You had to, you know,

take the photograph while still wet. You had to, you know, then set it and wash it and clean. And all these sorts of layers to the making of a photograph. And she, you know, you had to do it in her Victorian dress. She was always covered in chemicals, apparently. Her hands were stained. And smelt of them. She smelt of them. And apparently, if you walked past Dimbler at certain stages, you could get wafts of

chemicals through the bushes. But she, you know, she perfected the art and she got there. And she, but what was interesting is that through all this experimentation, sure, she created sometimes sort of out of focus, maybe slightly more blurry or smudged images. And she worked out that actually she preferred that effect. It was more evocative and expressive and romantic. So she decided not to get higher focus. That was what she wanted.

I've got a quote here by her son talking about this. He says, it is a mistake to suppose that my mother deliberately aimed at producing work slightly out of focus. What was looked for by her was to produce an artistic result. matter what means. She always acted according to her instinct. If the image of the sitter looked stronger and more charismatic out of focus, she so reproduced it. But if she found the perfect clearness was desirable, she equally attained it. Yeah. She had a good eye. She knew what she was looking for when she saw it. And she'd go through, you know, she talks about going through a hundred glass plates to get one that she was happy with that she'd then get, you know,

get printed. We say, you know, she was an amateur or it was her hobby. But she, she, she, she, approached it like a professional, even though she didn't actually have a professional setup. So her dark room had been the... It's her glass house with a chicken coop and her dark room was a coal shed and the dark room needed to have fresh running water, but it didn't. She just brought in cans of freezing water from outside to sort of slop onto the glass plates. You know, then that had to be sort of somehow collected and taken away. She didn't make it easy for herself. But she was happy making her photographs in the way that she did. And even though she could have made money as a commercial

photographer, she got people writing petitions to her asking to be photographed by her. And there's this one lady who said, you know, I'm a carriage person, so I'll turn up on my skirts won't be crumpled. And she sent quite a terse reply saying, you know, I'm not that kind of photographer. I don't take commissions. And in any case, I'd prefer your skirt crumpled. She did it her way. She wrote her annals of my glass house, which I should just read a couple of little quotes from, which talk at the end about her how she began. She says, I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter,

and my first picture I effaced to my constellation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass. It is with effort that I restrain the overflow of my heart, and simply state that my first lens was given to me by my, cherished departed husband and daughter with the words it may amuse you, mother, to try photography when you are in your solitude at Freshwater. I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length that longing has been satisfied. So wonderful. And that's what she was after. Beauty was something that actually mattered to her, didn't it? Yeah. And she actually, you know, she photographed great men and great women as sort of portraits, and she also did what she called her

fancy pictures, which were more literary, mythological, religious scene, narrative scenes. And, you know, she took great pleasure in dressing up her subjects and getting them to pose and covering them with tinsles, crowns. And, yeah, I mean, Tennyson called, called them her victims. And he, of which he was one. Of which he was won. But the reason, I should probably say, the reason that they joked about them being victims, It wasn't that meeting Julie Margaret Cameron, you know, she was a wonderful, charming lady.

They had a good fun time. The difficult bit was the exposure, because in those days, you had to stay stock still for three to seven minutes, which if you've ever tried to stay still with your eyes open for, you know, more than a minute, you'd realize how difficult that is. And that's why it was so sort of difficult and painful for them. And there's a really interesting account by someone who said, you know, by one minute, I was screaming. By the second minute, my eyes were about to pop out of my head. And by the end, I broke down entirely. And the photograph that resulted was full of wobbles. And she said, you know, if she wanted to capture this great queen in a state of great distress, then she was successful. But, you know, it was a difficult process. And that's also why I think there probably were quite a lot of photographs

of, you know, her staff members and people who are close to her who are willing to do it a lot of times and the more important... Yeah, the celebrities, they'd say, okay, yeah, once, and then once they've done it once, they might not want to do it a second time. And then you get that sort of furious picture, the inferno picture of Carlisle, but it's just one, and it's out of focus largely, and it's just this dark, brooding presence. But she's also, she's interesting because she's, on one hand, she's looking at Raphael, the Renaissance, and the old masters, and she's very, she's very good at her lighting.

Her lighting is extraordinary, I mean, by any standards of any portrait. painting her comparing her work to Karsh or to Ali Leibovitz or something.

You can see that she's very much pulling the same sort of tricks that will be the key to

successful portrait photography for centuries to come. But there's also quite a lot of sort of

self-conscious artistic work at hand in the radical cropping and these intense

hazy close-ups. She's really I mean she's really thinking about her photographs. It's not just a snap that, you know, may or may not work. There's a lot of thought going into everything, even leaving aside the narrative or the mythological or the religious

symbolisms. Yes. And she was really keen to create kind of, she focused on rounded plastic forms. I think that's where the softer focus helped her. She felt it gave her subjects more weight using this sort of contrasting light and shade, the Kiyaroscuro. And she was also highly principled and she disapproved of retouching, unlike most other artists who would dot out spots in the print. And there's an interesting quote where she said, lastly as to spots, they must, I think, remain. I could have them touched out, but I am the only photographer who always issues untouched photographs and artists for this reason, amongst others, value my photographs. So Mr. Watts, Mr. Rosetti, and Mr. Dumoria, write me above all others. And she was proud of that kind of principled take on

photography that clearly the studio commercial photographers would, you know, essentially airbrush their photographs and she didn't. And she'd send her prints some of them to her, GF Watts used to be her sort of mentor as well as her friends. So she'd sent her photographs to him for comment and advice. And he's often painting the same character. Yes. We have, you know, you can put alongside her extraordinary pre-refolite-looking photographs,

his extraordinary portraits, many of which are still at the Watts Gallery. Yeah, I always think the one of Tennyson, actually, her photograph of one of the front-facing ones of Tennyson and the painting by Watts of Tennyson are very arrestingly similar. And I do wonder, you know, sometimes did Watts receive her photographs

before he painted the sitter and be influenced by that, who knows? But he did, he was caring for her about, She didn't make much money from it. It was quite expensive process. And she'd like to make money, but she didn't mind that she didn't, as long as she made great art. And he wrote to her, please do not send me valuable mounted copies,

send me any defective unmounted impressions. I shall be able to judge just as well and shall be just as much charmed with success and shall not feel that I'm taking money from you. So she was posting him all these defective works. And a lot of those are now in the VNA collection, actually, which is quite nice. There's lots of one-off.

And she was a letter writer, wasn't she? She used to love the post. And in those days, there were often four or five collections and four or five deliveries in the Victorian Post. And Tennyson would record that he received, you know, 10 letters a day from her because he was obsessed with something, whether it was trying to get him inoculated or something else. Yeah, she once boasted that she wrote 99 letters in two weeks in a fortnight. And then she said, huh, you'll see why I have no leisure time. And also why she has so much energy, I suppose, to sort of put it into photography. You know, she was, but sadly, lots of her letters have been burnt because that was her instruction upon her death.

So, you know, she wrote to Henry. My grandfather burnt a whole archive of Sophia's letters, which is a huge shredding. My aunt saw him coming back, grinning from the bonfire. Oh, gosh. I burnt the lot. There was a whole family scandal of the generation that followed. I had a gay great-grandfather who, in the eyes of my grandfather was a disgrace to the family. So he just put the whole lot on a bonfire and it's all gone.

but for which I would love to write all this at book length, but no, there's just these fragments. I think it was more common then to destroy. It was deemed as a respectful thing to do to sort of destroy the letters if the person had asked. But she wrote to Henry Taylor every day and he wrote back. So how many letters are we missing with, you know, updates about her day and her thoughts and feelings? Now, Emily, in 1875, not only is Charles Hay, Cameron's health failing, but the family fortune is failing. These blessed estates in Sri Lanka have drained so much money that they can't continue to afford to live in England. So famously,

they pack up, sell fresh water, and they bring with them a cow, Cameron's photographic equipment, and two coffins. Tell us about this. Well, the coffins were stuffed with glass and China, which I think is rather cunning. I don't sure if it's whether they thought they couldn't have coffins made where they're going. I think it was more that, given their great age, they probably need a coffin quite fast, so it's useful to have one already. But yeah, it's a practical thing to do. And by that stage, you know, they both travelled so much. They were, they were frequent flyers. So, you know, they, but she was, she, they didn't tell anyone for ages that they were moving to salon because she knew that all her friends and family back home

would object. So they kept their plan secret for quite a while. And I don't know whether Julia originally actually wanted to move, but Mr Cameron was really set on it. And she was, she loved it and she was willing to go. And in a way, I mean, she did continue with her photography while she was out there. But I'm not sure if it's about the supplies or the conditions. You know, it was harder. So we have fewer, only 30 images. I know this story for sure is that there was an enormous selection of her Sri Lankan photographs in the National Museum in Colombo. And I know various people in Sri Lanka who are still looking for them.

They may yet turn up. But until fairly recently, like 20 years ago or 30 years ago, there was an enormous selection of her Serenka photographs that had simply gone missing. Anyway, I'm off. I'm off to Sri Lanka on Friday to go to Dimbola and see where she's very, which I've never. Did you ever make it there? You had a plan at one point. No, I was too far across the country.

We were both there at the same time. We crossed over, but we still didn't make it. So I'm glad that you're returning to finally pay your respect. Exactly. Yeah. And just tell us briefly, after retiring to this newly opened tea and coffee plantations up above Noorreli, at the state, still called Dimbola, with beautiful hillside views out over the amazing mountains of Surinca. she settles very happily there for what the last five years? Yeah, it's a very short time they're really there for. But we have sort of comments. So the traveller and artist Marian North went to visit. She was invited over. And of course, very rapidly was asked to sit for Cameron.

She was delighted to have a new subject appear. And Marianne North comments that when she arrives, she found Mr Cameron really sublimely happy and the walls were covered with Julia Margaret Cameron's magnificent pictures, which tumbled all over the tables and chairs and mixed with the books and draperies. And she agreed to be photographed. And then she reported that Julia had made me stand with spiky coconut branches running into my head and told me to look perfectly natural.

So up to her old tricks, I think. But, you know, and she said she liked one of her shawls, and Julia Margaret Cameron immediately got some scissors and cut the shawl in half. and gave her the other half. So, you know, they did return to London once more. 1878, they returned to London to see their family, and then they came back and then Julia died first. There's a lovely description of her last days.

The Camerons were in Kalatura by the end of the year, and they moved into Henry's bungalow, Glencairn, in the mountains. It was there that Cameron herself fell ill, probably from her old bronchial complaint, no doubt exacerbated by all these chemicals. Yeah, and I'm sure. Yeah. For many years.

After a 10-day illness, she died on January the 26th. It has been told and retold that on her deathbed, Cameron looked out of her window at the evening sky and uttered one last word, beautiful. I love that story. That's so lovely. I feel like they were happy to the end, and she was creating her art, you know, almost at the end.

So it's a lovely story. photographs of the photographs of Srinanka are of these Tamil plantation workers but they're treated like models they are

which itself is it was unusual for the Victorian period they arranged exactly as she would have arranged Darwin or Herschel or Rosetti

or Bern Jones or any of these characters who sat for her in England except that they're incredibly beautiful Tamil plantation workers carrying pots

and she loved it Yeah, the monumentalising of her lens. She made them look, you know, grand and noble and elegant. And they're really beautiful portraits. Well, that's all we have time for today. Please go and see the wonderful exhibition, the Pattle Sisters, which Emily has worked on for so long, along with many other of her wonderful colleagues,

Gossimran Oberoi and... Karina Henderson. There's a wonderful catalogue which you edited, and I contributed an essay too, which got cut in half and then put in two hundred bits. Yes, he did such a good essay. I made it into two. And you have all the sisterhood there with their Indian background. And anyone who's interested in the Indian background of Virginia Wolf or Vanessa Bell

will find all the material there on that subject, which I know has stirred up a lot of interest in India. Anyway, thank you very much, Emily, for coming to us today. the exhibition, the Patel Sisters, is on until May. So you've got some time to do it. I'll be giving some lectures there in early February. So look at the Watts Gallery website. So goodbye from me, William Duremple.

And goodbye from me, Emily Burns.