A little corner of Victorian London
Or how Tooting became a melting pot of entrepreneurial and cultural energy!
First of all, a huge welcome to my new subscribers! There are twice as many of you today as there were a week ago, and I feel a little apprehensive about putting pen to paper. What are you all hoping for? For those of you who have come here via the Little World of Don Camillo,* here is a gentle introduction to my major interest, the slightly larger world of Alexander Macmillan, Victorian publisher.
Alexander spent the first twenty years of his life in Scotland, and the next twenty running a bookshop and fledgling publishing house in Cambridge, but the twenty years that saw exponential growth in his business, and established him as a key player in Victorian literary culture, were lived in a corner of London called Tooting. However, I began pounding these suburban streets in search of a very different family: the Erichsens, immigrants from Denmark, and their talented artist daughter Nelly, the subject of my first biography. The story of the family connections between the Macmillan and Erichsen offspring and another prolific Tooting family, the Lucases, shines a light on so much that was changing in the second half of the nineteenth century, as developments in transport, communication and social customs opened up a world of possibilities for the next generation of Londoners. I invite you to walk the streets of Victorian Tooting with me, to visit these three remarkable families.
Let’s start with the Lucas family, as they were the first to arrive, as early as 1845. Tooting at that time still had the feel of a rural village, supplying garden produce and services to the City. It was where Vanity Fair’s Rawdon Crawley sent his shirts to be laundered. But now the wealthy merchants, and professional families such as the Lucases, were moving in, building large and elegant houses with gardens, driveways, and easy access by carriage to the Big Smoke.
Joseph and Sarah Lucas lived in Stapleton House, now demolished but surviving in the name of Stapleton Road. Local legend said that they kept two eagles in cages in his garden. The eldest son of a prosperous farmer who lived at Stapleton Hall, Hornsey, Joseph qualified as a solicitor in 1833. Two years later he married his cousin Sarah, and in the year that they married, Sarah’s uncle died, leaving them the house and grounds in Tooting where they were to live for the next sixty-eight years. (if you want to see the house, this is the link: https://boroughphotos.org/wandsworth/stapleton-house-tooting-bec-road-1902-3/)
In the course of this very long and happy marriage, Joseph and Sarah had sixteen children, nearly all of whom survived into adulthood. Their offspring were to scatter around the world, the daughters making very impressive marriages – one daughter Frances married an Austrian, Charles Redl, and went with him as he took up an appointment as Rector of the Royal College in Mauritius; ten years later another daughter, Clara Lucas, married Redl’s successor, Sir Charles Bruce, later Governor of the Windward Isles and Governor of Mauritius. Their younger sister Constance married Sir Joseph Turner Hutchinson, Chief Justice of the Windward Isles and later Chief Justice of Ceylon. Margaret, the youngest daughter, would marry George Macmillan, Alexander’s second son.
Joseph Lucas practised law in Surrey Street, off The Strand. His eldest surviving son Frederick joined him in practice. Another Lucas son, also called Joseph, became a famous geologist and naturalist. He joined the National Geological Survey in 1867 and spent nine years mapping in North Yorkshire – thereafter he earned his living advising on groundwater supplies, crucial at a time of rapidly expanding city dwelling, and was the first to use the term hydrogeology in the modern context. Bernard Lucas, one of the younger sons, was a landscape and marine painter and also an illustrator. He lived and worked for most of his life in London where he exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and New Gallery. Two other Lucas sons, Samuel and Charles, both died before they were 30, and a window to their memory can still be seen today in St Nicholas’ Church, Tooting.
Joseph’s second surviving son, Edgar, born in 1845, was educated at Brighton College, a contemporary and close friend of the controversial thinker and writer Edward Carpenter, and both these young men went on to Trinity College, Cambridge. Edgar returned to London, qualifying as a solicitor in 1872. By this time, two other very interesting families had become close neighbours in Tooting Bec, and friendships would be cemented by marriages, as Edgar married Alice Erichsen.
The second family to arrive on the scene, in 1863, were the Macmillans, renting a house called The Elms, later re-christened Knapdale, after the ancestral home of the Macmillan clan. This building survives today, just a few hundred yards down the road from Tooting Bec station. Here Alexander brought his wife Caroline, his brother’s widow Fanny, and their combined family of eight children. Later in the decade he bought the house outright, and lived in it for more than twenty years.
If Tooting was to become an attractive alternative to living in central London, it needed decent transport links. Not everyone could have their own carriage! In the 1850s an omnibus service connected Upper Tooting and London six times daily – the bus was drawn by four horses and came from Carshalton via Mitcham and Lower Tooting, calling at the Wheatsheaf Inn. In 1861 the population of Tooting was just over a thousand, but over the next ten years it grew by some 40 per cent. The major impetus to settlement had come with the opening of Balham Station in 1856 – on the West End of London and Crystal Palace Railway. This line terminated at Victoria, and its utility was crucial in persuading the overworked and highly stressed Alexander Macmillan, whose publishing business was relocating from Cambridge to Bedford Street in London’s Covent Garden, to move his whole family south as well.
The Elms was a large and comfortable house in its own grounds, described by Alexander’s son George as ‘old-fashioned but commodious.’ It took the form of an H-shaped, substantial three storey gentleman’s residence constructed in brown London brick with an ‘in and out’ carriageway from the main road. The brick of the house covered what in the eighteenth century was a timbered black and white house, with mahogany doors added, and delicately carved Adam-style mantelpieces in the reception rooms and the large bedroom. The attics were large and roomy. On the ground floor, beside Alexander’s library, there was a good sized entrance hall with a broad staircase, and dining and drawing rooms. The nursery and night nursery were on the first floor corner facing the street, and the daughters of the house, as they grew up, were given the next two front bedrooms. Alexander and his wife slept at the back overlooking the garden, and there was a gallery that ran from their room to the top of the staircase, along which the children built toy villages and roads on wet days.
Alexander described it as ‘a nice quaint old house, with a very pleasant garden so retired and countrified and yet so accessible.’ Though it was in a London suburb, yet there were ‘gypsies and tea on the common when we first went there’. The move was a massive relief for the Macmillan family, not just for the simplification of Alexander’s business life, but in terms of the space it gave the children, who ‘tumbled about in the grass’ all day long. He remarked that it was funny that they had moved to London to find themselves living in the countryside. ‘I never knew what the blessing of a country life was before.’ The elm trees were a feature of the place; Macmillan wrote ‘I am getting to find them unendurable since they have given up the murderous habit of shying down big branches at people’s heads.’ There was also a mulberry tree, which Macmillan believed had been planted by the philosopher John Locke, on a visit to Lord King, his biographer, who had lived on the site. Unfortunately the tree blew down in 1886.
The house was highly convenient for Alexander, being only a fifteen-minute walk from Balham station and its trains to Victoria. It allowed Alexander to dispense family hospitality, home-cooked meals supervised and hosted by his wife and his sister-in-law, gardens to enjoy and the offer of a bed for the night. When Alexander had first opened London premises in Henrietta Street, he cultivated a circle of young and ambitious writers, painters, scientists and critics at Thursday evening gatherings of ‘talk and tipple’ known as Tobacco Parliaments. Regular attendees included the Rossetti brothers, Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Huxley, FD Maurice and occasionally Alfred Lord Tennyson. These raucous evenings could now be replaced by open invitations to visit the publisher at his home.
Furthermore, his monthly periodical, Macmillan’s Magazine, was already showcasing female talent; now he had somewhere he could host these contributors for whom London drinking would not have been suitable. Mrs Craik, Mrs Oliphant and Miss Yonge were regularly invited. Christina Rossetti spent a night in June 1864. Jane Carlyle, wife of Thomas, stayed in Tooting on several occasions in June 1865 while her husband was travelling: she wrote that she had been entertained by Alexander singing Scotch songs, accompanied on the piano by the governess, but had been kept awake all night by the family dog under her window. When she returned the following week the dog had been confined to the washhouse, and Alexander gave her a toddy of whisky to ensure she slept better. Alexander’s daughter Margaret recalled how Mrs Carlyle loved ‘the little attentions bestowed upon her by my mother, saying ‘Make of me, my dear, I love to be made of.’
A great friend from Cambridge days, Alfred Ainger, wrote of Knapdale ‘In its large leisurely rooms, or in its spacious old world garden, there gathered together informally the men and women of note and the young promise of the day – authors, poets, painters, English and French, whether they came from Oxford or fresh from the ranks of the Impressionist Artists’. The reputation of the Macmillan home as ‘the place to be invited if you wanted to get published’ continued for many years: from 1878-1881 Thomas Hardy brought his wife Emma to live at No 1 Arundel Terrace, on Trinity Road in nearby Wandsworth in an attempt to get himself more noticed by literary London. Hardy visited Knapdale several times, where he met other writers including Matthew Arnold and Tennyson – he was at a garden party at Knapdale when a thunderstorm hit, and the guests had to take shelter, an incident he used in ‘The Laodicean’.
Margaret Macmillan wrote a memoir of her father’s life at this time:
The family’s day started with prayers at eight o’clock, followed by breakfast and then ‘the departure for the station, bag in hand. A short cut to Balham station led across a field belonging to a neighbour, and my sister and I often stood and watched him at the garden gate. I can see him now, his broad figure of average height, the shoulders a little rounded, and a rather peculiar walk, the toes turned outwards. Always a leisurely walk, for he gave himself plenty of time to catch the train
The final family to join this fascinating network was that of Hermann Erichsen, a Danish immigrant arriving in London via twenty years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Hermann had originally set himself up in business as a general importer and trader, working the shipping routes back to the ports of Denmark. But by 1870 he was closely embroiled in the Victorian telegraph industry (the dotcom boom of the day), and London was the place he needed to be. Initially the family rented a house nearer to Tooting Broadway, but in the mid 1870s they were living close to the Lucases and Macmillans in Grove Cottage, near where the Wheatsheaf public house still stands.
So for fourteen years, the Erichsen, Macmillan and Lucas family lived as neighbours and friends, attending the same church, playing at the same tennis and croquet parties and sharing family dinners. Hermann, Joseph and Alexander commuted to their West End and City offices by train, but in the evenings and at weekends they socialised. Between them they had thirty-three children - the opportunities for friendships and romance were almost limitless. In July 1875, when Alice Erichsen, Nelly’s eldest sister, was twenty, she married Edgar Lucas. The wedding took place at Holy Trinity Church in Tooting, and the witnesses were the two fathers, Hermann Erichsen and Joseph Lucas, supported by Alexander Macmillan, and Edgar’s friend Edward Carpenter. Margaret Lucas married George Macmillan in 1879.
Close proximity to the Macmillan family, now linked by these two marriages, opened up for Nelly Erichsen a network of contacts in the world of publishing and literary life which subsequently she was able to draw upon for inspiration, hospitality and commissions. In 1881 at the time of the Census, Frederick Sandys, a prominent pre-Raphaelite painter, was staying at Knapdale and drawing family portraits. Meeting such visitors must have been inspirational for the 19-year old Nelly, herself just starting as a student at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1886, when she was finishing her course, Macmillan’s second magazine ‘The English Illustrated’, featured an article ‘A North Country Fishing Town’, which she had both written and illustrated. The piece was well-reviewed when it was published, with praise for both the writing and the illustrations. This was a great achievement for one so young: after all, this is a magazine that published original writing by Thomas Hardy and Henry James
For all the suburban development of Tooting in the 1880s and 1890s, the creation of the Public Library, the Camera Club, the Conservative Association, the lawn tennis and the cycling, south of the Thames there was no cultural centre – no university, no theatres, no clubs, no grand public buildings, no picture galleries (except Dulwich) ‘It must surely be a disadvantage’, wrote Walter Besant, ‘ for a young man who would pursue a career in art not to live among people who habitually talk of art and think of art’. If it was a disadvantage for a young man, it must have been crippling for a young woman. The first change came to the circle of friends in 1886 when Alexander Macmillan left London for Bramshott Chase near Haslemere. He donated his beloved house to the Diocese of Southwark, rather than see it be pulled down and covered over by the speculative development which was devouring Tooting. Sometime in the early 1890s Nelly, with all the confidence of an independent young woman, took a studio in the heart of the artists’ community in Chelsea.
The longevity of the Lucases: An epilogue
In March 1931 The Times reported on an event at the Persian Art Exhibition. Lord Frederick Macmillan, as chairman of the Board of Management of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, hosted a reception for 370 people who had actually attended the Great Exhibition eighty years earlier. Among the guests mentioned in the article were the two brothers Frederick and Edgar Lucas, and their sister Mrs Frances Redl – at the extraordinary ages of 88, 85 and 91 respectively. Edgar would die in Bagni di Lucca the next year, and is buried near his sister-in-law Nelly, but Frances, long widowed, was to live to the ripe old age of 99.
In case you missed it!:
For anyone who would like to know more about Nelly Erichsen, pioneering artist, try www.encantapublishing.com!
Such an interesting post, thank you Sarah.