Notes
Note for: Adeline Virginia Stephen, 25 JAN 1882 - 1941 Index
Adeline Virginia Stephens (Woolf was her married name) was born into the l
ate Victorian intellectual aristocracy in 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Ste
phens, was a distinguished man of letters, acquainted with most of the fam
ous (male) writers of the day, and the founder of the Dictionary of Nation
al Biography. Her mother, Julia Duckworth (née Jackson) was a famous beau
ty and minor author, who occupied herself greatly with good works and publ
ished in 1883 a book on the management of sick rooms. Both parents had be
en married before: her father to the daughter of Victorian novelist Willi
am Thackeray (by whom he had a daughter Laura who was mentally disorder
ed and spent most of her 75-year life in an asylum); and her mother to a b
arrister, Herbert Duckworth, by whom she had three children, George, Stell
a, and Gerald. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children together: Vaness
a, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian. All eight children lived with the paren
ts and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Virgini
a, a nervous and delicate child, was educated at home with her sister, mai
nly by their parents.
Notes
Note for: James Peter Pattle, 24 DEC 1775 - 4 SEP 1845 Index
HAILEYBURY COLLEGE RECORD 1791 ROLL 13/290-295 (S
EE LETTER JOHN WILLIAM PATTLE
10/1/1992). WRITER 1791. HE LIVED 18 LOWER BERKLEY ST. IN 18
32 & 25 BAKER ST.
IN 1833 WHEN ACTING AS EMERGENCY CONTACT TO BEADLE & IMPEY STU
DENTS AT
ADDISCOMBE SEMINARY (JOAN HOSEASON 2/2/1992)
From "The footnote on page 218 by Raleigh Trevelyan in The Golden Oriole p
ub OUP 1988" .... was 'a gentleman of marked, but doubtful, reputation, w
ho after living a riotous life and earning the title of "The biggest li
ar in India", finally drank himself to death'.
"VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE CASK OF RUM"
(A talk by Prof. Joan Stevens, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealan
d.) (Copyright restricted)
"In my last talk, I traced the connections between Edward Jerningham Wake
field, son of Gibbon Wakefield, and various families who had served with t
he old East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. One of the
se was the family to which his mother belonged, Pattle. Jerningham Wakefie
ld's grandfather was Thomas Charles Pattle. Now Thomas had a brother, Jame
s, who had seven beautiful daughters. James Pattle had married a French gi
rl, daughter of the Chevalier de
Novelist William Makepace Thackeray.
l'Etang, one of Queen Marie Antoinette's pages. After the Queen's executi
on, he and his young wife were banished. They went to British India, whe
re their one daughter married James Pattle. All the family became frien
ds of the Thackerays, with whom there remained ties for the rest of the
ir lives. As a young man in London in the 1830s and 1840s, the novelist W
illiam Thackeray was constantly in Pattle company, while he and his paren
ts when in France kept up with old Madame de l'Etang in her widowhoo
d, as well as with her daughter Mrs. James Pattle. As for the Pattle daug
hters, "they possessed", as a descendant, wrote "great beauty and vivid pe
rsonality".
However, before I tell you tales of the seven beautiful daughters, I mu
st say more about their father. James Pattle, nicknamed Jim Blazes.
Let me quote, first, the words of his great grandchild Virginia Woolf. "
He was a gentleman of marked, but doubtful reputation who, after livi
ng a riotous life and earning the title of "the biggest liar in India", fi
nally drank himself to death and was consigned to a cask of rum to await s
hipment to England." Here I interpolate, that the reason for the ca
sk of rum was a bet. The cask story is best told in the breathless pro
se of young Kate Stanley, later to be the mother of Bertrand Russel
l, in a letter of 1860, where she repeats what she was just heard at Mr
s. Carlyle's. As both accounts are needed to give you the picture, I sha
ll thread them together. Here is young Kate, then. "Mr. Pattle once ma
de a bet with a man that he would be buried in England - he lived in Ind
ia - it was for £100, and this man said he would never live to go ba
ck to England. Mr. Pattle did die in India but, in his will, he sa
id he only left his fortune to his wife on condition he was buried in Engl
and in the Churchyard he named -- so though it was very inconvenient -- Mr
s. Pattle was obliged to go to the trouble and expense of doing it or el
se she could not have the fortune, so Mr. Pattle was put in a cask with sp
irits to preserve him and embalmed.
Here I must pause, to return to Virginia Woolf's narrative. She, at leas
t, uses commas... "The cask was stood outside the widow's bedroom door", s
he writes, "In the middle of the night, Mrs. Pattle heard a violent explos
ion, rushed out; and found her husband, having burst the lid of his coffi
n, bolt upright, menacing her in death as he had menaced her in life." Th
ey put the cask on a ship for England but, when the sailors found out wh
at was in it, says Kate Stanley, they "positively refused to go on wi
th it and said they would throw it overboard or come back to Calcutta; s
o, as the Captain thought Mrs. Pattle would rather not have it thrown over
board, he had brought it back to her."
Mrs. Pattle then chartered a ship herself, but this too returned, baffl
ed by a "great storm of thunder and lightning". Next, she put the cask in
side a large wooden case and tried a third time. Ill with nervous strai
n, quite understandably, she then went to the seaside for a holiday. I qu
ote young Kate Stanley again. "When she had been there two days, a fright
ful storm arose. Wind and rain and thunder, and the sea was in a great sta
te; and a ship near the shore was in great distress. It struck and was qu
ite wrecked, and every soul on board perished. What next morning, among t
he debris, should Mrs. Pattle find washed on shore to the foot of her hou
se but a large case at once recognized as Mr. Pattle's tomb. So the ca
sk was again taken out and put in a spare room in their house. Soon afte
r, in the middle of the night, a great noise was heard as if the roof w
as coming down. Mrs. Pattle, running upstairs with the key of the room w
here Mr. Pattle was kept, opened it; and what should she see but the ca
sk lid off and Mr. Pattle sitting up in the cask half out like a jack-in-t
he-box. She was so frightened, she fell ill and they gave up sending M
r. Pattle to England. The gas had generated and burst the cask."
Well, it's a wonderful story, you'll agree. Virginia Woolf summed it a
ll up by reporting "That Pattle had been such a scamp, the devil wouldn
't let him go out of India." If James Pattle brought a liar's imaginati
on and unconquerable vitality to the marriage, his French wife brought gre
at beauty, which all the daughters but one inherited. Let me now tell y
ou more about them. Remember, they are the cousins of Eliza Pattle, the wi
fe of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The eldest was Mia, who married Dr. John J
ackson. Her daughter, Julia Jackson, married Herbert Duckworth, publishe
r. He died, however, and she married again, taking as her second husba
nd the author, Leslie Stephen. For Stephen, too, it was a second marriag
e; his first being to Harriet, younger daughter of William Thackeray; the
ir child, little Laura Stephen, died young -- or what would she have do
ne with her inheritance?
Stephen's second marriage, however, to Mrs. Julia Duckworth, grandchi
ld of James Pattle, produced its own brand of genius. For there were fo
ur children, all noted in their day. The most brilliant, Virginia, marri
ed Leonard Woolf, and is known to you all as Virginia Woolf. If you've be
en able to keep my family tree in your head, you'll have worked it out th
at Virginia Woolf's mother, Julia Jackson-Duckworth-Stephen, and Edward Je
rningham Wakefield, son of Gibbon Wakefield by Eliza Pattle, were second c
ousins. The next of James Pattle's lovely daughters, Sarah, married Hen
ry Prinsep, a wealthy Indian merchant who returned to London in 1843. H
er house was always open to Thackeray, who was a constant visitor. His le
tters and diaries record many delightful meetings there with the Pattle gi
rls, as he called them.
Then there was Julia Pattle, who married Charles Cameron, an important Ind
ian official; she was the only plain sister, but she made up for it by h
er picturesque behaviour, especially in middle life, when she became o
ne of the pioneers of portrait photography. Together with Mrs. Prinsep wh
o, by the 1860s, had the painters, Watts and Burne Jones, and who knows ot
hers besides, living in her menage at Little Holland House in London. Jul
ia netted for her camera most of the celebrities of the day. Julia Camero
n's story, which is delightful, I cannot cover here; but you will fi
nd it in all its vitality in her volume, called Victorian Photographs, whi
ch has the introduction by her niece, Virginia Woolf, from which I have be
en quoting. If you still believe that the Victorians were conventional, h
ave a look at this book.
Then there was the youngest Pattle girl, Virginia, Thackeray's favourit
e, who was so strikingly beautiful that she used to be mobbed in the Lond
on streets. All through the 1840s, Thackeray commented on her lovelines
s, whenever he met her at the Prinseps or elsewhere. His admiration culmi
nated in an article in Punch, "On a good looking young lady", in 1850. H
er wedding to Charles, Viscount Eastnor, later 3rd Earl Somers, in Octob
er 1850, was one of the brilliant occasions of the time. "She looked beau
tiful" wrote Thackeray "and has taken possession of Eastnor Castle and h
er rank as Princess, and reigns to the delight of everybody."
* * *
The above tales, with their mentions of various people who remained in ass
ociation for family reasons if no other, could well be cross-reference
d, as follows. It was presumably the case from 1787, that Thomas, Judge Ja
mes Pattle's father, as an East India Company director had views on the op
ening up of the Pacific Ocean to British shipping by virtue of the establi
shment of a convict colony at Sydney. From 1787, an increasingly influenti
al Company investor was the banker Francis Baring, who as chairman of t
he Company in the early 1790s took a dim view of London-based whalers oper
ating in the Pacific, perhaps engaging in trade illicit from the Company p
oint of view. Too little is known of Baring's view here, or the views of h
is associates. ([13]) In 1789 the Directors of the East India Company were