Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (19 page)

There were a few signs in her early life that suggested Charlotte might be destined to become a collector. When she was nineteen years old, her mother gave her a feathered fan which she treasured, not only as a gift, but as a work of art and a cultural artefact, reading more into the fan's construction and design than might most young women of the period. She was also a close friend of her cousin, Austen Henry Layard, the man who would later dismiss J. C. Robinson as ‘nothing but a dealer' and who was related to Charlotte on her mother's side. She was a keen supporter of Layard's pioneering archaeology while he, only six years her junior, came to rely on her as a patron. There has been some suggestion that the two were lovers, but any romantic relationship between them was certainly conducted with the utmost discretion and no evidence has been found to support the rumours of the time. There is, however, little doubt that at least some of Layard's enthusiasm for the idea of adventurous collecting had rubbed off on his cousin: he gave Charlotte numerous pieces from his excavations, and in time, as we have seen, she made over a building at Canford, known as ‘the Nineveh Porch', to show off his finds.
This included a relief taken from the throne room of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC) and brought back from the ancient city of Nimrud in northern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), which Layard began excavating in 1845. The relief, among the first Assyrian pieces to be seen in Britain, was rediscovered at Canford in 1992 and sold two years later at Christie's for £7.7 million, by far the highest price ever paid for an antiquity and a pleasant windfall for the boarding school that now occupies the Canford buildings.

Without a change in circumstances, however, the early feathered fan might have remained nothing more than a treasured gift and Charlotte might well have remained a passive bystander to Layard's own collecting. Her future as a collector depended on a combination of events in the early 1850s which altered her personal and professional circumstances, and introduced her to the temptation of rare and beautiful objects. The first of these was the Great Exhibition in Joseph Paxton's magnificent Crystal Palace in 1851. As members of the social elite, the Guests were invited to the official opening of the exhibition on 1 May; they spent the previous day researching the best places to sit so that when the pageant began they would have an unobstructed view of the Queen and her entourage.

But Charlotte was not just there to see and be seen. When the pomp was over, she made return visits and, along with more than six million other visitors, she was fascinated and delighted by the display of objects from around the world. The examples of manufactures absorbed her; the details of international trade and commerce intrigued her; and the models of technological innovation excited her. Taking her place in the crowds, she enjoyed the sheer exuberant spectacle: the circus, tightrope walkers, dog shows, pigeon shows and flower shows, the life-size reproductions of dinosaurs, the replica lead mine, and the fountains in the park with over 12,000 individual jets of water. But what was to change
her life were the packed and dazzling displays of furniture, textiles and china, jewellery and silver, glass and sculpture, paintings, carvings and antiquities from ancient civilizations. It was a treasure trove. Charlotte had never before seen so many beautiful and fascinating things gathered together, the past and the present – as well as glimpses of what was to come – so jumbled and interweaved. For a woman devoted to learning, there was much to study. For a woman with a sharp eye for detail and value, there was much to admire. And for a woman with wealth, there were many opportunities to buy. Charlotte did not become a collector overnight as a result of visiting the Great Exhibition, but it gave her a sense of what might be possible.

One of the reasons Charlotte could not, or would not, indulge any enthusiasm that had been sparked by her visits to the Crystal Palace was that by 1851 John Guest was seriously ill. Her visits to the Great Exhibition were overshadowed by her concern for his deteriorating health, and by November, with her husband often feverish and incoherent, Charlotte was doing everything for the business. He could not travel, nor attend meetings, nor even sign letters or cheques. Doctors tried a variety of treatments but were, on the whole, baffled and pessimistic. There were periods when Guest had the energy to make short journeys and entertain, but these became shorter and fewer. Charlotte could do nothing but take on the burden of the business and hope.

Guest's illness dragged on another year, coming and going, but in November 1852, after a sharp turn for the worse, he finally died. It was the end of a marriage, an unusually intense and equal business partnership, and of Charlotte's direct influence in political circles. It was also an enormous personal loss. Charlotte was, for many weeks, inconsolable. Two months after the funeral, when she visited Canford for the first time since her husband's death, she tried to describe her intense sorrow: ‘When we stopped at the door, I got out silently, and leaving them all went straight to the
Library, where luckily there was a light. A slight veil had been thrown over his bust, which at once I removed and then I flung my arms around it, and remained clasping it for some minutes, kissing the cold lips – not colder than his own when I kissed them last – and shedding torrents of passionate tears. And this cold marble is now all that is left me!'
¹⁹

However, it was not John Guest's death which affected Charlotte's future as a collector so much as her remarriage. John's death inevitably involved much change, but as executor to his will, and a trustee of the estate, Charlotte continued to be heavily involved with the day-to-day running of the Dowlais works, much as she had been in the past. She continued to take charge of the business, struggling to make the works profitable in a changing economic and industrial climate, and negotiating a resolution to a strike among the workers in South Wales in 1853 – a fraught affair that turned her hair white. But she was hardly out of her heavy widow's weeds when she caused another scandal with her blatant disregard for Victorian proprieties. In 1855, at the age of forty-three, Charlotte married again. This time she chose ‘Charley' – Colonel Charles Schreiber – a handsome soldier from a military German family, not yet thirty years old, a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. Respectable enough, perhaps, but he was also the tutor who had first come to Canford to school Charlotte's oldest son Ivor just twenty-four days after John's death. Her friends and acquaintances, and even her daughters, were shocked and horrified. It was not only that Charlotte had been so recently widowed, and that Schreiber was so much her junior, but Charles's role as a family servant put the relationship beyond the pale.

Once again, Charlotte was challenging Victorian convention, but she did not seem to care if her choice of husband was regarded as unfortunate. She did not worry that many considered that she had demeaned and disgraced herself, nor that her daughters were
horrified by the thought of having Charles Schreiber as a stepfather. And she was quite relieved when Pegus disowned her. Her love affair reinvigorated her. She was ready for a new challenge. Under the terms of John Guest's will, a second marriage meant she had to relinquish the running of the ironworks to the other trustees. It also left her substantially less buoyant financially, and she immediately had to forgo luxuries like ponies and a carriage of her own. But she was content to sacrifice material comfort. Charles Schreiber's modest nature, good humour and energetic mind delighted her, and it was with growing excitement that they made plans together.

The marriage, in April 1855, was a quiet affair. This time, there was no cannon salute or triumphal procession. And the first few years of Charlotte's new life were unsettled and sometimes sorrowful. By 1856, the newlyweds were overspent by £6,000, and money was a worry. Schreiber's personal wealth was negligible – or he would never have been forced to take on the role of tutor. The youngest of Charlotte's children by Guest was still only eleven years old, and the financial demands of raising her family were not inconsiderable. It was ten years before the Schreibers' affairs settled down and money pressures eased, with three daughters safely and successfully married. In addition, Charlotte was having to labour, for a second time, to edge back into polite society, being seen riding out in Rotten Row and attending Court. But her progress was slow and frustrating, and it was hard not to look back at the glittering social events she had been hosting just a few years earlier. Worst of all, however, were the disappointment and agony of three miscarriages, the last of which marked the end of the Schreibers' hopes to have children together, followed by the death, in 1862, of Charlotte's son Augustus at the age of just twenty-one.

It was not until all this upheaval and grief passed, almost ten years after Charlotte's second marriage, that she could begin to
look around and think what she might like to do with her new life. And it was now that she found herself increasingly attracted to the idea of collecting. Things from her past, like the feathered fan, provided a catalyst for new areas of study. The people around her, particularly her husband and her cousin, tempted her with the idea of travel and adventure. The allure of beautiful and curious objects held out a romantic promise that seemed suddenly irresistible. Charlotte did not fall into collecting; she made a conscious decision that it was how she wanted to spend the rest of her life. By the mid-1860s, she had devoted herself to the idea, one which took her far from Dowlais and its furnaces, and which would beguile and consume her for the next forty years. She confided every high and low of her collecting, every expectant journey and successful transaction, to her numerous volumes of journals, kept in her elegant handwriting. Sometimes these are pithy notes relating little more than travel schedules, objects and prices, but more often the entries run away with colourful descriptions of journeys, people and places, glowing with delight in what she is doing and giving a real taste of what it was like to be a traveller at this time. Her journals take us to the heart of the day-to-day life of the Victorian collector. They reveal Charlotte's dedication, scholarship and courage; they give a lively sense of an all-consuming desire to collect, and they show just what it took to manoeuvre successfully in the cut-throat world of nineteenth-century collecting.

I
t was spring 1873 and the collecting season had begun in earnest. Fine weather and easier travelling conditions had coaxed collectors out of their drawing rooms and into the streets. Dealers, too, were restocking their shelves and refilling their displays. The Schreibers were far from alone as they made their way through the now familiar towns of Holland and Belgium. Speed and stamina were everything: on 8 April, after a half-past-five start on a misty morning, they squeezed in visits to Gouda, Utrecht and Rotterdam, before reaching The Hague in the evening in violent rain and with Charles, perhaps unsurprisingly, feeling ‘ill and tired'. Nevertheless, their efforts proved to be in vain. There was nothing in any of the shops worth the trouble of the journey, and the Schreibers' big red bag remained empty. It was not that dealers were struggling to find new objects, nor that the usual supply routes from impoverished gentry and declining European aristocrats were drying up. It was that they were being outmanoeuvred by the competition. Exasperated, disappointed and defeated, Charlotte confided to her journal: ‘we find everywhere
that Duveen of Hull has been there before us making wonderful purchases.'
¹

Rivalry between collectors throughout Europe was fierce. When J. C. Robinson was sitting in Rome in 1859, waiting for the South Kensington Museum's reply to his request to buy works from the Campana collection, it was the manoeuvrings of other collectors that most concerned him. During the 1860s and 1870s, an increasingly sophisticated European travel network was making it possible to cover ground reasonably quickly, cheaply and easily. By 1860, there were nearly 800 miles of railway in Britain for every million people, amounting to almost 10,000 miles of track. In France and Germany, railway development emerged more slowly during the early part of the century, but a boom in construction meant that by 1880 France had caught up with Britain and boasted some 15,000 miles of track, while Germany's political unification in 1871 was facilitated by almost 20,000 miles of railway that joined the major states in a public system of
Länderbahnen.
²
In addition, the increasing number of museums emerging across Europe, and the growing state investment in collections, meant that men such as Robinson, Franks and Eastlake were travelling and collecting with the wealth and power of national institutions behind them. If and when they could disentangle themselves from government bureaucracy, they could often beat private collectors – who had fewer resources – to the spoils.