Introduction

ON 4 January Joanna gave birth to her second child, Alice. As with Sidney, the birth seems to have taken her by surprise as she had been to hear the scientist, Michael Faraday, give his Christmas lecture on ‘The Various Forces of Matter and Their Relations to Each Other’. The series of Christmas and other lectures, aimed at the general public and at children, were begun by the Royal Institution in 1825, and Faraday himself, who left school at the age of 13, had attended as many as possible and regarded them as fundamental to his education.

The correspondence for the first few months of the year is sparse – largely because Joanna and Henry were rarely apart (though this did not stop them sending each other notes) and Joanna was recovering her strength after her confinement. By April she must have begun to go out again socially, as the correspondence boasts an enigmatic note from John Ruskin, dated 2 May, thanking her for an unstated kindness, and hoping that she and Henry would visit him again ‘when I’m more free’. Alice Joanna was christened on 11 May.

George, who had returned to the Isle of Wight in early January to finish his painting of the Undercliff, came back to visit his sister and the new baby on 15 January (‘the little girl has pretty hands and feet’). He would disappear again to Mapledurham (another Thames haunt) at the end of April, but while in London his social and artistic life centred on the Hogarth Club. Through the club he met new artists, including Frederic Leighton, William Stillman and James McNeill Whistler. Leighton, with G. F. Watts, was a leading light in what became known as the Holland Park Circle, centred on Little Holland House, the home of Thoby and Sarah Prinsep. With regard to Watts, Sarah once said: ‘He came to stay three days; he stayed thirty years.’ According to Caroline Dakers,4 the artists of Kensington, unlike Rossetti's Chelsea set, courted the establishment: they opened their houses and studios to newly rich patrons in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, and encouraged their description in the ‘House and Garden’ magazines of the day.