Anne Gilchrist

Victorian Author, Biographer, and Trans-Atlantic Groupie?

This week I am busy checking final proofs of Literature for the People, so rather than a new piece, I am sharing this revised edition of one of my very first Substacks. I love the story of Anne Gilchrist, I hope you find her as impressive, and as surprising, as I do!

Anne Gilchrist: Library of Congress

On 30 August 1876, an attractive widow in her late forties set sail across the Atlantic for Philadelphia, where she hoped finally to meet and possibly marry her idol, the poet Walt Whitman. She certainly planned to lay her life and her devotion at his feet; for five years they had been exchanging letters, unmistakeably passionate on her part, warm and appreciative on his, but now he had sent her a ring from his own hand, which she took to be the signal she had been waiting for: she packed up her belongings and with three of her adult children, boarded the SS Ohio. The next three years she would later describe as ‘a strange episode’ in what was a life never lived under normal Victorian conventions.

Anne Burrows was born in 1828 at 7 Gower Street in central London, the daughter of a successful London solicitor, but at the age of eleven her life changed when her father was killed in an accident. The family moved to Highgate, where Anne was one of the few middle class Victorian girls to enjoy a school education, and even though it came to an end when she was sixteen, she continued to read widely, lapping up radical international authors such as Comte, Rousseau and Emerson. In 1851 she married a friend of her brother, Alexander Gilchrist, a newly-qualified lawyer, and they moved to Guildford. Alexander longed for a literary life, and he began researching and writing the biography of William Etty, the celebrated York artist who had died in 1849. The couple’s honeymoon was spent in Etty’s home town gathering material, interviewing friends and studying his sketches and paintings. Etty’s delight in the nude, which featured in so many of his works, made him a controversial subject for biography.

The book was published in 1855 and Alexander felt sufficiently proud of his work to send a copy to his idol Thomas Carlyle. Within weeks he had been invited to Chelsea to meet the great man, and in 1856 the Gilchrists moved into the house next door, 6 Cheyne Row. Anne produced four children in eight years, but still found the time to continue her studies and assist Alexander. Her particular enthusiasm, unusual for a women, was for natural history and she began to write for publications, including a series of articles on scientific subjects for Chamber’s Journal. In 1859, the year that Darwin published ‘On the Origin of Species’, Anne’s topical piece ‘Our Nearest Relation’, focusing on the gorilla, was published in All The Year Round, Charles Dickens’ own literary magazine.

Meanwhile, Alexander had embarked on an even more ambitious project: the first biography of William Blake. As Richard Holmes wrote:  

When William Blake died in London in 1827, he was already a forgotten man. His engraved and hand-painted Songs of Innocence and of Experience had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years. His Prophetic Books had disappeared almost without trace. A single mysterious poem, "The Tyger", had reached the anthologies. As a poet - once read in manuscript by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb - he was virtually unknown outside a small circle of disciples, a group of young men who pointedly called themselves "The Ancients”…As an artist, his reputation was little better.

It was his art that first captivated Gilchrist as early as 1855, and by November 1859 he was in correspondence with the publisher Alexander Macmillan about a manuscript which he considered nearly complete: just needing three final chapters, some ‘anecdotes’ and the transcriptions of Blake’s poems to be inserted. Macmillan rejected the first version of the manuscript as needing substantial re-drafting. In December 1860 Gilchrist produced a further but still incomplete version and agreed terms with Macmillan: £150 for an edition of two thousand copies.

1861 passed in whirl of discussion about engravings and typefaces, and in sometimes heated debate about the need to censor Blake’s writings. There was increasing frustration that the artwork was causing the project to be delayed: at one stage Macmillan threatened to go ahead with no illustrations at all. Then in November 1861, disaster struck: scarlet fever infected the Gilchrist children. Despite Anne’s best precautions, locking herself away in isolation as their nurse, her husband caught the fever and, exhausted by the strain of work, he died. He was only thirty-three.

Macmillan was shocked and stricken, as both publisher and friend of the family, particularly as within a week of her husband’s death he received a letter from Anne insisting that she alone should finish the book:

I try to fix my thoughts on the one thing that remains for me to do for him my dear Husband. I do not think that anyone but myself can do what has to be done to the proofs, I was his amanuensis. It was also his own intention that I should make the Index. Many things were to have been inserted – anecdotes etc collected during the last year which he used to say would be the best things in the book. Whether I shall be able rightly use the rough notes of these and insert them in the fitted places I cannot yet tell. He altered chapter by chapter as he sent it to the printers. I fear – I know – it will never be as he would have had it.  But in fact I never write coherently and only wanted to say that I do not need rest – rest is very terrible to me.

Macmillan wrote to their mutual friend, William Rossetti, ‘I had a letter as I told you from [his poor wife] which I have never been able to answer simply because I did not know what to say.’ The project was put on hold, but by the end of February Anne was back in London with all her children recovered and absolutely determined on seeing the book through. She took a cottage at Shottermill, near Haslemere in Surrey, packed up all her husband’s papers and proofs and took her children to live in the country.

The cottage in Shottermill, rented by Anne Gilchrist and lent by her to George Eliot, who is supposed to have written Middlemarch while staying there.

Writing in March she assured Macmillan that she had sorted out all the relevant material and once she had completed the house move ‘you shall not find me dilatory or unreliable; least of all in this sacred trust, and toward yourself, who have shown me a generous kindness, consideration, forbearance which I have recognised with deep though silent gratitude.’

It took another eighteen months to get the final book through the printers and out into the world. It will never be possible to tell how much of the copy was Alexander’s, and how much extra labour Anne dedicated to the task, sacred to her husband’s memory. She never tried to claim it as her own, and certainly both the Rossetti brothers assisted with editing Blake’s poetry, arguing about it with Macmillan, and cataloguing his artworks. But she certainly invested her heart and soul into the finished product. Again, to quote Richard Holmes:

Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, with its combative subtitle Pictor Ignotus (The Unknown Painter), is one of the most influential of all the great mid-Victorian biographies. It rescued its subject from almost total obscurity, challenged the notion of Blake's madness, and first defined his genius as both an artist and visionary poet combined. It set the agenda for modern Blake studies and remains the prime source for all modern Blake biographies. It remains wonderfully readable today, and salvaged from death, it still vibrates with extraordinary life.

Yet like so many works of art, it was produced at great cost, and under mysterious conditions. In the absence of an original manuscript of the 1863 biography, the mystery will always remain just how much of this first, ground-breaking text we really owe to Alexander Gilchrist or to Anne; or to some indefinable Blakean collaboration between the two.

Anne continued to write. In 1865 she contributed an article for Macmillan’s Magazine -  ‘A Neglected Art’ might at first sight seem to be about cooking, but is also a fascinating commentary on the changing social customs of the middle classes: it suggested that women should attempt to be equal partners in marriage, and contribute to the financial stability of the home by managing the domestic economy as efficiently as possible, and if that required the wife to dispense with servants and learn to cook, what would be the problem. She should not be a burden to a young man struggling to make his career, but the very thing that helps him succeed. Surely this article came from her own experience.  

Anne’s life continued peacefully in Shottermill, she made sure that her children were well-educated, she continued to study and to write. But in 1869 her friend William Rossetti handed her a manuscript of poems that he was proposing to publish in England, the works of an American poet, Walt Whitman, and Anne’s life changed overnight. Rossetti later wrote:

…her enthusiasm astonished me: for indeed it revealed to me a greater susceptibility on her part to new and strong impressions – a greater and deeper passion of sentiment as governing and transfusing the conclusions of a strong reasoning and inquiring faculty – than I had hitherto supposed to be within the scope of her character.

Walt Whitman

In 1870, Anne wrote an impassioned article ‘An Englishwoman’s Estimation of Walt Whitman’, published anonymously in a New England periodical. Whitman was not used to praise: ‘Almost everybody was against me — the papers, the preachers, the literary gentlemen — nearly everybody with only here and there a dissenting voice — when it looked on the surface as if my enterprise was bound to fail… then this wonderful woman. Such things stagger a man…’. Introduced by Rossetti, their correspondence began. It was clear from the outset that Anne believed she had found a soulmate and fallen in love: for five years Whitman tried to keep her suggestion of a physical relationship at bay, but then he fell ill, his beloved mother and sister both died, and he wrote to her rather pitifully enclosing a ring. She packed her bags and bought a ticket.

The three years that Anne and her children spent in Philadelphia may not have passed exactly as she had hoped – Whitman was certainly not likely to respond in kind to the relationship she offered him – but they became very close friends, and it was life-changing for her children. Her daughter Beatrice took the opportunity unavailable to women in England at that time and qualified as a doctor; her son Herbert developed his skills as a painter, studying under William Merritt Chase and painting several well-regarded portraits of Whitman, with whom he developed a close and affectionate relationship.  

The Tea Party, painted by Herbert Gilchrist, shows his mother Anne with Whitman. Property of the University of Pennsylvania

Anne returned to live in Hampstead in 1879, working on the second edition of Blake for Macmillan, and then a Life of Mary Lamb for another publisher. She died in November 1885. Whitman wrote ‘I have that sort of feeling about her which cannot easily be spoken of — …: love (strong personal love, too), reverence, respect — you see, it won’t go into words: all the words are weak and formal.’

It is not true to say that Anne Gilchrist has been forgotten – certainly in America the Whitman fan club knows her well and her letters to Macmillan and others are preserved in the Berg Library in New York. It is the complex and original work she completed on Blake, while coping with grief and bringing up a family alone, that suggests she should be better celebrated on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Further Reading:

Walt Whitman’s Mrs G: A Biography of Anne Gilchrist, Marion Walker Alcaro, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991

Anne Gilchrist, Her Life and Writings, Herbert Gilchrist, 1887

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