Biography

A paradoxical disadvantage of the Kindle’s long battery life is that I often forget to charge it before train journeys and find myself facing a blank screen. The last such episode proved felicitous, as it prompted me to buy Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks from the wonderful £2 bookshop opposite the British Library. Although I visited Madame Tussaud’s several times as a tiny geek, I hadn’t given it much thought since, but Pamela Pilbeam’s superb study has awakened my interest. The book is part biography of Tussaud herself, and part cultural history of waxworks. ...

Last year I reviewed Lady Colin Campbell: Victorian Sex Goddess. My only criticism was that the book focused very much on the court case, and there was little to satisfy the curious mind as to Gertrude Campbell’s subsequent career. Fortunately, Anne Jordan has just published Love Well the Hour: The Life of Lady Colin Campbell, thereby giving this redoubtable woman more sustained consideration. ...

Fellow Victorian geeks will recognise Madame Rachel as Maria Oldershaw, foster mother and business partner of the delicious Lydia Gwilt in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. She and her beauty products were also referred to in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. In this excellent biography, Helen Rappaport tells the true story of the woman behind the infamous creation of “Madame Rachel”, purveyor of dubious unguents which promised to make women “beautiful for ever”. ...

Ouida (1839-1908) was born Maria Louisa Ramé in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds to an English mother and a largely absent French father. An eccentric child, she rapidly outgrew East Anglia, let alone her birthplace. She was delighted when in 1857 her mother agreed to move with her to the heaving metropolis of London. The good people of Ravenscourt Park (a suburb to the west) were rather perplexed by this strange creature: “she had not, so to speak, grown into her nose, her straight, mouse-coloured hair hung in rats’ tails down her back, and she walked with one small, delicate hand resting on [her dog’s] collar.” Oblivious to her neighbours’ discomfort, Ouida (a childhood nickname) quickly built a career as a successful writer. There was no starving in a garret for her – she immediately struck literary gold with her work for Bentley’s Miscellany and soon became a firm favourite with the reading public. ...

As with many Victorian writers, George Gissing’s life (1857-1903) reads rather like one of his novels. In some spooky cases, his life actually imitated his art, the fates suffered by some of his characters later befalling the author. Born in Wakefield in 1857, George Gissing’s existence was one of eternal struggle. Although a gifted scholar, the early death of his pharmacist father left Gissing perennially short of money. His extraordinary talent won him a prestigious scholarship to Owen College (now the University of Manchester) and it looked as though his troubles were over, with a distinguished academic career virtually guaranteed. However, his weakness for a prostitute called Nell was to be his undoing. Initially her client, they soon became lovers, but she still demanded increasing sums of money from him to fund her alcohol addiction. With very limited means, he was forced to steal on her behalf and was eventually caught when the suspicious college authorities laid a trap for him. He was expelled in disgrace and his family wanted nothing more to do with their black sheep. ...

Samuel Plimsoll MP (1824-1898) is a peripheral character in Victorian history, but his contribution to politics was immense. His Big Idea was to mark a line on the side of a ship to indicate the lowest level at which it might safely sit in the water. Although that might sound like plain common sense, opposition to Plimsoll’s proposal was colossal. Some ruthless shipowners would deliberately over-insure their vessels and send them to sea in a terrible state of repair. If the ship sank, they would receive several times its value, but the crew would meet with a salty death. Although such extreme cases were mercifully rare, it was relatively common practice for businessmen to seriously overload their vessels in a bid to maximise profits. Understandably, sailors were reluctant to crew these “coffin-ships”, but refusal meant three months’ imprisonment - the law protected the criminal, rather than the victim. ...

Although “Victorian Sex Goddess” is a rather sensational title for a book, this account of the redoubtable Lady Colin Campbell by G H Fleming is refreshingly understated. I’m sure few writers could resist the temptation to ham up one of the most dramatic court cases in British legal history. He mainly allows the case to speak for itself, but includes a plethora of seemingly insignificant details which both delight and enlighten the reader. ...

I was prompted to seek out The Mysterious Marie Corelli: Queen of Bestsellers after reading The Sorrows of Satan. Quite apart from the astonishingly narcissistic writing style, I was tantalised by the short accompanying biography, which suggested a fascinating and contradictory life. Although an independent and successful woman, she vehemently opposed women’s suffrage, referring to the Suffragettes as “Ladies who scream”. Her novels portray marriage as the desideratum of all girls, yet she chose to share her life with another woman, Bertha Vyer. ...

George Grossmith (1847-1912) is, of course, cherished by the nation for having penned the inimitable The Diary of a Nobody with his younger brother Weedon. It is less well known that he was a talented entertainer, appearing in a number of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and also touring with his own show. Tony Joseph, in George Grossmith: Biography of a Savoyard, illuminates all areas of his life and career, giving a sense of his inestimable contribution to nineteenth-century culture. ...

When Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, he was aged just 25. Although his career was tragically short, his work epitomises the Fin de Siècle, with its decadent, and sometimes shocking, figures. Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872, in the home of his maternal grandparents. Although his immediate family moved to London soon afterwards, he retained his affinity with Brighton, attending the Grammar School while staying with his aunt. His school days are described as being unusually happy, and he benefited from the tutelage of the dynamic and progressive headmaster Ebenezer Marshall. Marshall pushed both pupils and teachers to achieve their full potential, and he had the reputation of a slave driver: “He refused to countenance the establishment of a ‘staff room’, considering that his teachers should be out among their pupils, not skulking in a den consuming tea and digestive biscuits.” ...