Married Life for Mary: Speculation and Sketches

I have spent the last 6 weeks with my head down co-editing (and writing and re-writing parts of) a book on the work and life of the archaeologist and curator Charles Thomas Newton, Mary’s husband. It is now off for review so I can return to Mary Severn Newton, for a while at least. Over the next month or two I will explore Mary's and Charles’ marriage as best I can with the information I have through: 1. The Work of Housekeeping; 2. Art and her Profession; 3. Intimacy; and 4. Family and Friends. But first I want to ground that with some thoughts around writing a life and invisibility.

Mary Severn Newton, C.T.N. makes M.N. study the fine modelling of Mausolus' face. Brit Mus.

Writing and editing work on Newton’s life has made me think a lot about him as a man and husband, though most of the chapters by fellow curators and researchers are on his work at the British Museum 1840-1852 and 1861-1886, or in his excavations beforehand. I particularly thought about him as a husband when reading and adding to ‘An Arcadian Epilogue’ by one of my co-editors Thomas Kiely. This short chapter at the end of the book is about Mary and Charles’ shared grave in Kensal Green Cemetery. Both Thomas and I read Newton’s letter to Mary’s sister Eleanor, written the day Mary died on 2 January 1866, and both of us were tearful. It was a side of Newton unseen in the official correspondence of the British Museum or in the sardonic letters to friends Austen Henry Layard, John Ruskin or Henry Acland.

But what of Mary? There are far fewer letters from her in the archive from during her marriage. In fact, very few, partly as her mother died less than a year after their wedding day and she had been Mary’s main correspondent and source of advice. Some letters between Mary and Charles were burnt by Mary’s nieces, the daughters of her older sister Claudia Gale. In Wifedom (2023), Anna Funder writes of the ‘invisible life’ of Eileen O’Shaunshessy, otherwise known as Eileen Blair (Mrs George Orwell) and re-pieces her life from newly discovered letters to her best friend. Funder points to how Eileen has been submerged, not by Orwell himself so much as (male) biographers of him. There are some parallels here as there is a sense that Mary’s new life and relationship was not always approved of by her older brother Walter and her father Joseph. Charles replaced them as her confidant and professional advisor. Mary also had a new life and with Joseph Severn taking Charles’ position as Consul in Rome, her family home was split up. The twins Arthur and Eleanor lived with Charles and Mary at 37 Gower Street, and after Mary’s death Charles, off and on until their own marriages.

As an artist who has been overshadowed by both father and husband, Mary has had some attention from feminist art historians. In Painting Women. Victorian Women Artists (1993), Deborah Cherry implied that Mary did not want to marry Charles, though her sketches and letters within the family archive (unseen by Cherry) show they were both equally desperate to marry. Mary was certainly ambivalent about taking on the responsibilities of being a wife, having been used to her own timetable and eating toast when she worked and dining late (as this sketch shows). She had her mother to do the housekeeping and constantly advised her on expenditure.

Mary Severn Newton, Sketch. Poor CTN finds out his mistake. He can get no dinner for his wife has been suddenly inspired and won't dine till a colossal head looks at her thou' the ladder. Bills all thrown aside. Does not this frighten you very much?

Cherry states that Mary’s work post-marriage was almost entirely to enliven Charles’ publications and lectures. There is only one ‘publications enlivened by his wife's drawings’ and she points out that the profound changes for a woman on marriage did not affect men:

They took place within that web of psychic and social relationships which instituted sexual difference and constituted pleasure for a married woman in relation to her husband. By contrast, in Victorian Britain husbands were not expected to rearrange their activities or reconstitute their sense of self on marriage a the contrary, they expected their wives to adapt to them and cater to their desires. (Cherry 1993, Painting Women: 36).

For various reasons (to be explained in the next few blogs), I agree with Cherry’s overall analysis but disagree on the detail around Mary’s and Charles’ relationship and implied lack of agency. There is no doubt that the power dynamic was unequal, but Mary’s struggles were also linked to her previously expressed self-doubt and there is evidence that Mary was doing her own work, not just for her husband. It also wasn’t so unusual for women to work supporting her husband and part of the unseen labour that women do – and still do:

Some women worked in the family business. Others might assist their husbands by giving dinner parties for business associates, copying documents, or fending off insistent creditors. Sometimes wives stepped in to run things when their husbands were ill, or even ran their businesses as widows. (Steinbach 2004, Women in England 1760-1914: A Social History: 74-75)

Certainly, Mary’s mother and Mary herself fended off creditors from Joseph Severn and controlled the family finances (as much as they could do).

The opinion of their marriage is overshadowed by (some of) her family’s opinions of it and the need to mould her into a flawed, almost tragic, domestic goddess, as novelised in Sheila Birkenhead’s two books in which there are chapters on Mary. Birkenhead suggests that it’s not just Mary’s involuntarily childlessness that caused her distress, but the exacting work and drive of Charles himself:

But in London Charles made her work as hard as he did him. She had to make all the drawings to illustrate his lectures. He was fond of company, and when they got home from the Museum, where they had been working all day, he liked to dine with frlends. Mary charmed everyone with her easy, clever conversation and her sweetness and grace. But she often wished that they could have stayed quietly at home, though she never said so to Charles. He was a spare, strong, nerveless man. He drove her as he drove himself, but she was more delicately made. (Birkenhead, 1943, Against Oblivion, 221)

Yet, this sketch shows Mary watching Charles sleep after a long day at work and wondering where the sparkling man who had entertained her and her family before their marriage had gone.

Mary Severn Newton, Sketch: CTN's evenings at home 186-. MM her soliloquy: I used to think that Mr Newton so agreeable when he came to Ecclestone Square but now he is so different. He goes to sleep every evening.

In a letter to her older sister Claudia from Constantinople, Mary wrote that:

Gertrude Jekyll is a splendid traveller, never tired, never ill and always happy. and drawing every spare minute. I have been very well, but I am not strong like her & I am glad I am not, for I tell her if I were, I would give Charles nothing to talk of. Whereas I tell her it is better that he should be always so anxious that I have proper food and rest, not over tired.

Mary to Claudia Gale, 24 November 1863, Constantinople.

This does not suggest that Charles ‘drove Mary as he drove himself’.

Writing about the visibility (or not) of Newton in the introduction to the new book – he has been overlooked compared to other traveller-archaeologists such as Layard – has made me think again about the invisibility of Mary Severn Newton. Part of it is down to being overshadowed by both father and husband and partly that she only had a short period in which she didn’t have to make an income to support her family and worked to private commission, rather than sales in galleries. This latter point is why there is very little of her work in public galleries and why it is so important to source work by her to better understand not just Mary, but the work of professional women artists of the time and how they could work.