Be friendly, but not too friendly. . .
- Debbie Challis
- 11 hours ago
- 7 min read
In August 1852, Mary Severn went to Ireland with her brother Walter for the start of what would be a seven-month tour of portrait making and commissions, which was also the start of her professional career. She was 20 years old and, after Walter returned to London, was in the care of their Anglo-Irish neighbours the Palliser family. Mary regularly wrote to her mother from Ireland and much of the content is about how she gets from a to b, usually with the help of Colonel Palliser or a chaperone. There were times, however, when Mary had to navigate the difficulties of being a young single woman who needed to get from one house to another in order to do her job.
On 29 December 1852, Mary wrote to her mother Elizabeth Severn that they were ‘all invited to Mr Massey Dawson’s to stay a few days. Colonel Palliser considers himself my guardian and has accepted the invitation for me.’ She was staying at Tullamaine Castle in Tipperary with Mr and Mrs Maher, as well as Colonel Palliser, a younger Palliser, Mrs Phipps, Mrs Cowry and a Mr Massy Dawson. She had already had difficulty getting to Tullamaine Castle as Colonel Palliser had gone away for a time and Mrs Baywell and Mrs Phipps did not approve of Mary being alone in a carriage with the young Palliser, though Mary knew him so well in London. She wrote that he is very far from ‘being thought steady’ and Mary has heard alarming stories of him. How, in the end Mary left Tullamaine is unclear.
On 4 January 1853, some of the party went to Ballynacourte to see the Galtree Mountains with George Staunton King Massy Dawson. Mary, again, had difficulty there as Colonel Palliser needed to attend his ill sister in Wales and so to get to the Rectory at Cahir, ‘the colonel had left orders for Mrs Palliser to meet me there and take me.’ However, George Dawson offered to take Mary in his carriage and ‘the only way to get out [of the house she is staying in] is to walk with Mr Dawson & Mrs Cowry asks him to'. The issue is of that Dawson is single and Mary has been reprimanded by her mother for walking out with him alone. Reading the letter, I can feel the frustration in her reply:
I try to be so quiet and steady and think so much before I say or do anything. I am quite vexed to think I have not done what you would have liked.
She was also making a portrait of George Dawson, which was ‘one of best yet’, and accepts an offer of a lift to Cahir in his carriage rather than get a train as:
I think this a good arrangement for I do not think it would be nice to leave this house alone, if I had met anyone on the train, they would have been surprised at my coming from Ballinacourte alone. I think I should look like an “unprotected female”.
Mary to ES, 1852/3?, Galbally Tipperary
It is clear that her mother did not agree as in a letter dated 15 January, Mary denies any affection or dealings with Mr Dawson and writes that she can't think what she said to make you imagine all this. She defends herself from accusations of being ‘improper’ as she asked ‘Mrs C about walking with Mr Dawson’, who said it was proper in ‘his own grounds but not in a town.’ Mary exclaims that she ‘would leave this place today and not do his picture’ as:
I am hurt that you could have imagined I could have accepted this invitation if I thought that Mr D had ever paid me an 'extravagant compliment' which I can safely say he has never done. I have told you all that he ever said, which was nothing (at least nothing that was meant) but I daresay on paper it looks more than I mean. Poor man, how alarmed he would be, if he thought I imagined such an idea. I do not thnk Mrs Cowry would let me stay if that was the case. . . . Leave it all to me Mama, trust me.
Mary to ES, 15 January 1853, Massey Lawton, Tipperary Ireland
The underlining’s are Mary’s own. In the same letter Mary says she will send £25 to Henry, her younger brother, who is working at the Mint and training as an engineer. This is the bind – Mary needed to work for her family but also to protect her reputation. George Massey married in 1854, by which time Mary was legally in charge of the family affairs and fortunes.
In 1856, her father the artist Joseph Severn was concerned by Mary’s conduct in her friendliness to ‘young men’ and wrote to Elizabeth that:
Hers is a manner the most easily to be misconstrued & as she is now so much before the Public, it is absolutely expedient that you should be always at her elbow, not only as a protection but also as a caution to her for the ardent nature of her mind & heart is such that I doubt she will be able to change either in manner or matter
Joseph Severn to Elizabeth Severn, 11 February 1856, in Scott (2005), no. 128.
Mary was, according to all accounts that I've read, passionate and interested to talk to anyone. She also had to work and was becoming more well known. For a middleclass woman, selling your work had overtones of selling yourself sexually. A contemporary of Mary’s, Emily Mary Osborn (1828-1925) depicts a female artist trying to sell her work in a printer’s while being leered at by two men behind her in Nameless and Friendless (1857). Deborah Cherry points out that the painting is ‘about the conditions in which a bourgeois woman’s respectability and career are endangered’ (Cherry 1993, 80). As Cherry points out it is about an artist, who observes, being observed by those with more power than her.
Dressed in full mourning, the young woman is an orphan and needs the money. A friend of artist and activist Barbara Bodichon, Osborn is supporting the right of women to work and she sold the painting for £250 (Barber 2024). The economic point is as important as the threat of sexual violence and clear double standards; if Mary lost her reputation, she could lose her living and be unable to support her family. However, Mary was not friendless or nameless, and her network of siblings and friends constantly chaperoned her.
At some point in 1859 (probably), there was a more serious incident when Eton Fellow and School Master Edward Coleridge kissed Mary. From Mary’s own letter, it does not seem quite as Sue Brown describes it, that he ’got carried away during a sitting and jumped up and kissed her, much to her parents’ consternation’ (Brown 2009, 277). Edward Coleridge had been at Eton, then went to Exeter College, Oxford and returned to teach. He married Mary Keate in 1826 and they had their first child a year later. Mary went on to have another four children. In a previous blog I had written that it was more likely to be Edward’s son Charles or nephew William who kissed Mary, but I am corrected by Mary’s own words:
Mr Coleridge, I see has quite won your heart. I shall but be half shy with him now that you know him & like him, but before I did not quite feel at my ease, as you did not know him, & only used to tell to tell me it was my fault if he kissed me! & that it was taking a liberty as he had known me so short a time - so as I could not prevent it, I avoided the house.
Mary to ES, No Date 1859?, Eton
From the description, it does appear that it was Edward who kissed Mary. His wife Mary died later that year and after not getting the appointment of Provost, Edward took an Eton sponsored living as a vicar at Mapledurham in 1862. The same year he married, at the age of 70, Mary Caroline Bevan, who was 48.
Mary was used to talking to men of her age and class, she frequently went to her brother’s ‘bachelor’ parties, where she enjoyed discussing books, music and art. Her brothers Walter and Henry treated her as their equal, if not superior, in talent, and it is clear from her cartoons that they chatted over many things. The difference with both encounters here is that in Mary was in a supplicant position; being paid for her work, not quite of the same class or, in the case of Coleridge, much younger. Mary defended herself to her mother, though was concerned what people thought of her. She was the one who would be damaged, financially and morally, and had to walk a fine line that those men did not and even women who had money did not have to with quite the same strictness.
Has it changed . . . I remember being told, when first working at events in the 1990s, ‘be friendly, but not too friendly’. I still do a rictus grin when hosting work events or doing chitchat when I’d rather flee, though now I remember to tell myself that it is them not me.
References:
Tabitha Barber (2024), ‘Victorian Spectacle’ in Now You See Us. Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920, London: Tate Publishing
Brown, S. (2009), Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship. Oxford University Press
Deborah Cherry (1990), Painting Women. Victorian Women Artists, Routledge
