Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (18 page)

By the time she was sixteen, Charlotte had a reputation for learning and culture. She followed contemporary affairs closely from the newspapers and her journal was full of her thoughts on politics. In contrast, she found the demands of fashionable society – the dress fittings and the long afternoons, the predictable parties and the ‘gazing at each other in listless indolence' – tedious and unsatisfying, preferring the company of scholars to the chatter of female acquaintances.
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This may have done little to impress the pleasure-loving young men of the Regency, but her title, and a not insignificant personal fortune, more than made up for her unfortunately thorough education. She was something of a catch, and society was not slow in conjuring up all kinds of potential matches for her. Terrified of being trapped in a miserable alliance to satisfy her family's ambition, however, she refused a marriage arranged by her mother in 1832 to the sixty-seven-year-old Robert Plumer Ward, a politician and novelist who was already twice widowed, and instead enjoyed a brief, but chaste, flirtation with the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Disraeli was handsome and dashing, described by Charlotte's cousin as ‘wearing waistcoats of the most gorgeous colours and the most fantastic patterns. . . velvet pantaloons and shoes adorned with red rosettes. . . his black hair pomatumed and elaborately curled and his person redolent with perfume'.
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Not yet elected to even the most minor of political offices, he was instead writing novels which Charlotte admired, and he took her to a series of fashionable concerts and bought her flowers. He even wrote enthusiastically to his sister about her fortune. But the relationship came to nothing (Disraeli later married one of Charlotte's closest friends), and in April 1833 Charlotte left Uffington for London.

Almost immediately upon her arrival in the capital, at the age of twenty-one, she met the forty-eight-year-old Welsh ironmaster and MP Josiah John Guest, known simply as John. Already a
widow, John Guest was a handsome, curly-haired, practical man who, like Charlotte, was a rather diffident outsider amidst the glamour of London society. After a whirlwind romance, Guest walked with Charlotte in Kensington Gardens on 12 July 1833 and proposed to her. Charlotte accepted.

Most of Charlotte's family seem to have been pleased to be rid of her to a wealthy man. Although he was in trade, they could console themselves with the knowledge that it was no ordinary trade – the rail tracks made at Guest's factory in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil were to criss-cross the globe, opening up lands from Russia to India. They celebrated at Uffington with a ball and an ox roast. Her stepfather Pegus, however, was horrified. He objected vociferously to the marriage and continued to detest his new son-in-law, even calling him out for a duel on one occasion, which, Charlotte duly noted, ‘is too absurd an idea'.
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He was habitually rude and dismissive of Charlotte's new husband, and he was not alone. London society in general was offended at the thought of a daughter of the aristocracy marrying a man whose hands were dirtied by the dust of the factory; a man descended from farmers and coal miners and who worshipped in the dissenting chapels that challenged the established hierarchy of the English Church. The new couple were ostracized: they were not invited to the events that mattered, and Charlotte's drawing room was distinctly quiet during the usual visiting hours.

Charlotte was naturally emotional and prone to sentimental tears, but she wasted few of them on the newlyweds' situation. Relishing the thought of a different life, she was untroubled by the opinions of the social elite. She believed in her husband, and in herself, and she believed that marriage to an active, industrious and political man would, in the end, open more interesting and challenging doors than the ones that were being closed to her. In August 1833, after a honeymoon tour of Sussex, Charlotte accompanied her husband for the first time to his ironworks in
Dowlais, in South Wales, where it was evident that London sensibilities were not shared by John Guest's friends and workers. Charlotte described with great delight the couple's arrival in Cardiff, which was celebrated by ‘a volley canon, fired in grand style'. Furthermore, ‘a triumphal procession and an illumination were planned' to greet them, intended on such a grand scale that ‘no less than from 15 to 20 thousand people would probably have collected on the occasion'.
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The thought of such a reception horrified Guest, however, who, despite his public role, was a shy man; he had experienced a similar event before, during which a boy had been killed in the press of the crowd. But he did not want to seem ungrateful or heavy-handed in putting an end to the celebrations. In a pattern that was to be often repeated during their twenty years of marriage, John Guest turned to his wife for advice, and they decided to order a prompt dinner at a local inn, allowing them to press on to Dowlais and arrive a day earlier than expected, so that, diplomatically, ‘the complimentary machinations for the following day might be eluded without being rejected'. In compensation, John and Charlotte gave out celebratory beer to over 4,000 people at the ironworks a couple of days later and ‘they gave us some discharges of canon in return'.
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Charlotte's married life was extraordinarily active and successful. She embraced the Victorian ideal of the wife and mother, following her husband's political and industrial interests with pride and giving birth to ten children in the space of thirteen years. She also took her responsibilities for the Dowlais workers' welfare to heart, developing housing and recreational projects and working hard to introduce a fresh water system. She was particularly keen that all the children should have the benefit of a good and useful education, and she founded six schools, raising large amounts of money for their upkeep by private subscription. So important did she become to the success of the ironworks, and
the lives of the people who worked there, that a friend noted that in many respects she was more influential than her husband: ‘for in all that he was deficient she excelled, and while we credit him with founding the greatest ironworks in the world, and giving sustenance and substantial comfort to twenty thousand souls, it is chiefly to her influence we must look for all that was done in the way of moral and mental elevation'.
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In order to better accommodate their rapidly expanding family, Charlotte also set her mind to improving their home. In August 1835, she gave birth to Ivor Bertie Guest, a son and heir, and with the dynasty secure, she encouraged Guest in 1846 to buy Canford Manor in Dorset, a convenient distance from business both in London and Wales. The manor of Canford Magna had history. It dated back to Saxon times and had been an important base for the Earls of Salisbury. It had also been the home of William Ponsonby, the brother of Byron's lover Lady Caroline Lamb. It boasted extensive rolling parkland, dropping down to the River Stour, shaded woodland paths and neatly kept formal gardens, but the house itself was unremarkable, a muddled conglomeration of earlier buildings and practical extensions to the original medieval manor. Charlotte thought it dull and was immediately determined to make some alterations; to stamp her character on the place.

The Guests commissioned the architect Sir Charles Barry (who was, at the same time, rebuilding the Palace of West-minster with Augustus Pugin) to improve and expand Canford. Together, they created a fairytale, battlemented neo-Gothic house, complete with towers and turrets and a spectacular garden pavilion that housed twenty-six ancient Assyrian sculptures, including two colossi, one with two human heads and a lion's body, the other in the form of a bull. Charlotte worked closely with Barry, enjoying the challenge of learning about architecture and undertaking extensive discussions with
the skilled stonemasons, carpenters and designers on site. John Guest, too, took a close interest in the house but he had less time to spend in Dorset and his role was primarily to pay the bills: the improvements became so costly that he became known locally as ‘paying Guest'.
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So much was being achieved in the valleys of South Wales; so spectacular was the Canford house becoming and so influential was John Guest proving in public life that news could not fail to reach fashionable London society of Charlotte's increasing wealth and influence. What had amounted to social ostracism came to be conveniently forgotten, and during the 1840s and 1850s showers of invitations duly arrived from those eager to make the family's acquaintance. Along with her commitments in Wales and Dorset, Charlotte became famed as one of London's most entertaining and gracious hostesses. Before long, there were splendid dinners at the Guests' London house in Spring Gardens, Westminster, with the children playing on the back stairs, the table laden with veal cutlets, woodcock pie and boars' head, and leading statesmen such as Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington discussing politics in the parlour.

Nevertheless, Charlotte's life was not confined to entertaining, society events, philanthropic projects and running a family. Even with the interest of rebuilding Canford, and the challenge of keeping ten children healthy and occupied, she wanted more. She saw her marriage as a professional, as well as a personal, partnership and was eager to take an active role in the development of the ironworks. Just as she had been willing to challenge Victorian convention in marrying Guest, so she was determined not to be confined by the usual nineteenth-century restrictions on a woman's role. The day after she first arrived at Dowlais with her new husband, she insisted on seeing the furnaces and the forges, and after dinner she walked back to the works to watch the iron being cast. She
was soon able to take an informed view of the processes and before long she was translating technical documents into French, to better disseminate developments in the industry, and was writing pamphlets on ironworking techniques and improvements. The prospect of entrepreneurial business excited her, not so much for the wealth and prestige which accompanied it, but because it offered a means of reaching and understanding people and cultures across the world. During her husband's frequent absences, she was in sole charge of the expanding Dowlais empire and she entertained streams of influential visitors: iron masters from France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Poland, the Nawab of Oudh from India and Russia's Grand Duke Constantine. Charlotte believed fervently in the value of what was being achieved at Dowlais and, when John's work as a politician and industrialist was recognized in 1838 with a baronetcy, she thought he deserved more: ‘I consider it a paltry distinction and was much averse to his taking it. . . I shall not rest till I see something of more value bestowed upon him.'
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Alongside her husband's industrial interests, Charlotte also became increasingly involved in the political issues closest to him: free trade, the abolition of slavery and the reform of the Church. The curiosity she had shown for political discussion as a teenager flourished into an active engagement that even took her on to the streets. She canvassed openly on Guest's behalf, and was frequently to be found sneaking into large and unruly public meetings in Merthyr market to hear him speak. She was a practical, informed and unflappable spouse for a politician attempting to push through liberal reforms in what could be stormy times: when the works and house were threatened by Chartist riots during the autumn of 1839, Charlotte made composed plans for ‘the case of a siege' and arranged for the children to be sent away to safety, noting in her journal only that since there were ‘from fifty to a hundred special constables
all in the house. . . the succession of suppers and tea-drinkings that went on amongst all that entered was really a curious thing'.
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Remarkably Charlotte also found time – in the midst of political riots, the children's scarlet fever scares and entertaining high society – to continue with her studies. She began to teach herself Welsh within weeks of her marriage, and took on what proved to be the eight-year task of translating eleven medieval tales collectively called
The Mabinogion
, providing extensive scholarly notes to explain the stories and their contexts. The Mabinogion myths were at the heart of Welsh folklore and are some of the greatest tales of Celtic literature, set in a bizarre and magical landscape, part Wales and part mysterious underworld, populated by giants, enchanted horses and magnificent heroes. They introduced figures like King Arthur and Merlin into European storytelling, and they brought together some of the most influential myths of the oral tradition. Welsh scholars knew of the stories and William Owen Pughe, a Welsh teacher, antiquarian and writer of grammars, had left an unfinished translation at his death in 1835; but no English speaker had thought them worth much trouble.

Charlotte took a different view. She valued
The Mabinogion
as more than an obscure element of Welsh tradition or a personal academic challenge. It was a way of understanding and popularizing the culture which she had embraced so enthusiastically. It was a means of sharing the stories with her own children, and of exploring the magical cultural landscape which was too often obscured by the noise and dirt and fire-blowing furnaces of the Dowlais ironworks. It was a labour of love. But unexpectedly, when it was published in several beautifully produced volumes between 1838 and 1849, it also became something of a publishing sensation. Charlotte's translation, which remained the standard for almost a century, made the tales famous: they became popular
and fashionable almost immediately, not just in England and Wales, but also across Europe and America.

With both industrial wealth and a family background in the English gentry and aristocracy, Charlotte was perfectly placed to become a collector. Her interest in ceramics and smaller decorative objects such as fans and playing cards placed her at the forefront of the changing fashions in collecting, moving on from paintings and sculpture to more portable and domestic pieces. She was clever and studious, and in many ways she inherited her interests from the long line of gentlemanly amateurs who had gone before her. But her collecting was in no way inevitable. She might have continued as an industrialist and a reformer, and been remembered as a mother, a scholar and a pioneering translator.