A knot of hair

Warning: death, grief and baby loss referenced.

It is one thing to understand that hair was kept and even made into jewellery in the nineteenth century or to know that post-mortem sketches of loved ones were made or photographs taken. It is another to open a clasp purse and, unexpectedly, find a sketch of a woman who is clearly dead or dying, with a little paper twist of hair, tucked in with letters about being at a death bed. This is what happened to me almost two years ago when exploring the Severn family archive for the first time. Fortunately, I was not alone but with my friend Thomas, from the British Museum, and we both looked at this little packet with some alarm and emotion. We soon realised it was Eleanor Severn’s collection of mourning items related to her mother Elizabeth (also known as Eliza, nee Montgomery).

In 1861 Elizabeth Severn, Mary’s mother, did not accompany Joseph Severn to Rome where he was to take up the position of Consul, as Mary was getting married to Charles Thomas Newton. She was also ill with recurring attacks of nausea and vomiting. By the date of Mary and Charles’ marriage in May, Elizabeth was too ill to attend and was recuperating in Folkestone. Arthur was already in Rome with Joseph and Elizabeth decided she was well enough to travel with her youngest daughter Eleanor to Rome in September 1861. They spent some time resting in Calais and Dunkirk, before moving to Paris from where Eleanor wrote a lively letter, full of drawings of sights and comic things, to Mary, but finishes by saying ‘mama cannot sleep’. On 13 December, Eleanor and Elizabeth finally arrive in Marseilles to get a boat to Italy, but Elizabeth becomes more ill. Walter went to visit Arthur and Joseph at Rome via Marseilles so he can see his mother at the end of the month.

Months later, Elizabeth is still very ill and Joseph was impatient for his wife to come to Rome (Severn, 25 February 1862, Letters and Memoirs, Scott No.149). A few weeks later Mary wrote to Eleanor, partly telling her off for not writing and enquiring after her mother’s medical care and symptoms:

I did mean to pay you a flying visit and kind Charles said he would get leave taken whenever I wished. Then we heard she was better but, O dear Eleanor, if she was so ill, why did you let her go on to Marseilles. (Mary to Eleanor, 19 March 1862).

A few days later, Charles and Mary did pay a ‘flying visit’ to Marseilles and visited Elizabeth and Eleanor. By this point Elizabeth’s treatment was costing a guinea a day with the accommodation at Hotel des Bains des Catalans mounting up and Joseph. A few weeks after Mary left, Eleanor sent a telegram to her father in Rome to summon him as her mother is dying.

Eleanor's pencil written account of her last days with her mother.

19-year-old Eleanor nursed and stayed with her mother on her death bed and keeps an account. Faintly written in pencil on almost translucent paper, it is a moving account of her tending her mother and her loneliness as she waits for her father and possibly Mary and Charles to come and say goodbye. On 14 April 1862 Eleanor writes ‘Oh, if I could get her to say one word to me, one little word’ and the next day ‘she still lives’ but her hands are purple and she is ‘very weak’. On 16 April, Eleanor wrote:

We hear the workmen singing, what a strange contrast. 11'o clock & now I am sitting by her bed writing this. Her face looks changed. God grant Papa may be in time -

At which Eleanor breaks off. She drew her dying mother and cut off a lock of her hair. . . . On 17 April Elizabeth died. Frederick Gale, her son in law, arrived in time to support Eleanor, then Joseph two days after, by which point his wife had already been buried. Elizabeth left Mary a drawing of Keats’ head to go with her broach.

In the clasp purse there is Eleanor’s drawing of her dying mother, a lock of hair, her death bed notes, and a letter from Mary on the need for a gravestone for her mother. It is probably from the time that Mary and Charles visited the cemetery at Marseilles on their way back from Greece and Turkey in December 1863:

I did not like to put it in my letter which was so full of brightness that at Marseilles we went to see dear mama's grave. There I heard of you, the man at the cemetery told me you had come. Charles & I think a stone should be put on the grave. & also that the inscription should be written in the stone for that on the cross may fall off. & we think it should be stated who Mama was, it ought to be 'the wife of Severn & . . . it is not night, Elizabeth Severn. - This must be done. It is a bright cheerful spot & the sun shone on the little cross. I felt it!

In the event a headstone was not placed onto Elizabeth’s grave until 1870, after Mary’s own death in 1866 and Eleanor’s marriage to Henry Furneaux the same year, as an accompanying receipt showed. May be Eleanor could not organise this until after her marriage, when she and Henry visited the cemetery? The final thing in the clasp purse is a list of objects owned by Elizabeth for her children - mainly jewellery - and it is a short one.

There are plenty of death bed scenes in Victorian novels, because death was not usually out of domestic view in a hospital or hospice, but at home with the dying person nursed by loved ones. I understand Eleanor’s need to write and record what she is going through, on her own at the age of 19. I both can and can’t imagine what that would have been like. Death bed waiting still happens, but we rarely acknowledge it or the trauma and comfort that can come from caring for and moving a loved person on. Eleven years ago this night, I gave birth to Emily early - at 32 weeks - and a day later she went into convulsions in her incubator. A week later she died. Every minute of the night Emily breathed more and more shallowly, while I held her, is etched on my memory. Each year at around this time, I write something to remember her, to share my love – and that of our family and friends – for her. It is my way of archiving my love and sorrow for my daughter; drawing, hair and diary was Eleanor’s for her mother.