She spent nearly thirty years living in a series of London flats, but Mary Cholmondeley, as appreciative journalists never tired of pointing out, came from an old and illustrious county family complete with ancestral acres. She was in her own person a powerful symbol of the ongoing shift in class power relations in late Victorian Britain, born into an aristocratic clan at a time of middle-class expansion, an encroachment of which she was always more than half aware. For the Cholmondeleys had been established in their own castle in Cheshire since the Conquest. In the early seventeenth century a younger son of the family was settled by one Mary Cholmondeley, ‘the bold lady of Cheshire’, at Vale Royal in the same county, and it was a descendant of his who became the first Lord Dela-mere in 1821. Rather less glamorously, another descendant, Charles Cowper Cholmondeley, went into the Church, establishing himself in Hodnet, Shropshire, in the early nineteenth century. It was a lovely but small village north of the capital town Shrewsbury (to this day many residents of the town profess not to have heard of it, and only manage to give directions if asked for the slightly larger adjoining village of Market Drayton). There were few cottages in Hodnet and only a handful of suitable houses to provide a social life for the local gentry. The church, a surprisingly large one for such a small parish, still retains the family pews of its patrons, the Heber-Percy family.

The rector of Hodnet from 1807 was the famous hymnist Reginald Heber (best remembered for his still popular ‘Holy holy holy’, composed in 1820), and it was he who was responsible for building a new rectory in 1812. Within a few years it had become the scene of its first frustrated romance, when Maria Hare (aunt of Dean Stanley, who became Dean of Westminster in 1864) was not allowed to marry Martin Stow, the curate, on his departure for Calcutta with the newly appointed Bishop Heber in 1823.