23 May marks the death in 1935 of Emma Pignatel, Alexander Macmillan’s second wife. She had been a widow for nearly forty years, surviving well into her nineties, and the proud mother of two children: Mary, who had married well-known Glasgow publisher, James Maclehose, and John, who had just been made Bishop of Guildford. Her life with Alexander had been charmed, full of famous friends and literary parties, but her earlier life had been precarious, with many years of financial difficulty, punctuated by a noteworthy encounter with that Victorian sage and art critic, John Ruskin.
Emma was one of four daughters of a French father and English mother. Her father, Eugene was born in Lyon around 1818, into a well-to-do family that owned one of the silk-trading businesses prominent in the area. Eugene began travelling for the firm, arriving in England for the first time in January 1838 and settling in Mosley Street, Manchester. On Christmas Day 1839 he married eighteen year old Priscilla Bundy Browne, the daughter of a tobacconist in Manchester, and together they moved to Livorno in Italy, where they lived for the next ten years and started a family. Their first daughter, Lucy, was born in 1840, followed by Emma in 1843, Mary in 1845, Victor in 1846 and Charles in 1848.
Emma’s early life was one of relative prosperity, combined with constant upheaval and uncertainty. In 1848 revolution broke out in Tuscany, and Eugene became a member of the liberal provincial government that took control of Livorno. When more conservative forces came to power in 1851, Eugene took his family to his wife’s hometown of Manchester, a journey that Emma remembered as ‘long and tiresome’.
After a comfortable life in Tuscany, damp and dirty Manchester must have been a terrible shock. The couple’s last child, Alice, was born there in 1851, and the three elder girls, all under the age of eleven, were packed off to boarding school at Cheadle Hall, then to another establishment in Paris. They were attractive girls, speaking three languages, artistic and musical, especially the oldest, Lucy, who trained on the piano with Charles Halle. But financial disaster struck in the mid-1850s with the outbreak of silkworm disease in Europe, and Eugene’s firm failed. With six children to support, drastic decisions had to be taken. The family moved back to France, but in the autumn of 1857 all four girls were sent to a boarding school in Lymm, Cheshire, where their father visited them to say goodbye – he was moving to Japan to try to restart his silk business. They never saw him again. Emma wrote ‘I suppose the terms must have been made possible. We were kindly done by there. Lucy and I both took to drawing and water colour painting and a kind governess lent us books and read poetry. There were old fashioned servants who taught us laundry.’ Their mother Priscilla had stayed behind in France, in a quiet country cottage, looking after the two boys until they were old enough to join their father in Nagasaki. Emma implies that her mother had a breakdown, and the marriage effectively ended, with Eugene later starting a new family with a Japanese woman.
In March 1859, Emma, aged 16, and her older sister Lucy, 18, began working as teaching assistants at Winnington Hall School in Cheshire, where their pay enabled their younger sisters Mary and Alice to board as pupils. There, they met and became friends with a regular visitor, John Ruskin. The school was originally founded in Manchester by Margaret Bell, the daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, and from him she inherited a strong and forceful personality. However in the 1840s she abandoned his faith to follow the Broad Church teachings of FD Maurice and Julius Hare. In 1851 she took the tenancy of Winnington Hall, just outside Northwich in Cheshire, from the Stanley family – a beautiful stately home with grounds and a lake.
Bell took girls from as young as six until eighteen, and in the 1861 census there were seven teachers, ten servants, but only twenty three pupils – which may explain the financial difficulties under which she laboured. Attracting the attention of the wealthy and famous John Ruskin seemed to be the answer to her prayers. At the time, Ruskin was pining for Rose la Touche, the girl he had been obsessed with since he had met her the previous year, when she was just nine years old. Unable to progress this relationship, he transferred his attentions to the bevy of beauties at Winnington.
Over seven years beginning in March 1859, Ruskin often stayed at the school and wrote regularly to Miss Bell and her pupils, also inviting her to bring parties to stay at his parents’ house in Denmark Hill. He called the girls his ‘birds’, helped them with their drawing lessons, taught Bible studies alongside geology, played hide and seek, croquet and cricket with them, watched their country dancing and choral evenings, stayed in the best room and had the use of a private study. He wrote to Miss Bell that he had ‘fallen in love with all thirty-five young ladies at once’, and the cheques began to follow, a couple of hundred pounds at a time, much to the disapproval of his father, who clearly thought Miss Bell was a woman on the make. By 1867 Ruskin had lent Miss Bell over a thousand pounds.
Among the names mentioned in the letters from Ruskin to Miss Bell, are Emma and Lucy Pignatel. Emma’s unpublished memoirs also tell the story.
It was on 13 March 1859, just after we had settled in, that Ruskin paid the school his first visit, having been interested in what he had heard of Miss Bell’s endeavour to carry out the teachings of his ‘Elements of Drawing’…that evening he arrived in a travelling coach which was laden, I am sure, with the precious treasures he always carried about. That first evening we, in white dresses, assembled in the octagonal drawing room (a room for which the silk wallpaper had been made in China) and he shewed us Turners and made friends with us.
The next day he encouraged them to practise drawing from nature:
By some, for me wonderful chance, he sat down in my place and painted the bit of bark I still possess. In the course of time he encouraged me about my feeling for colour and in such odds and ends of time as came to me I learnt to copy William [Holman] Hunt and various bits of Ruskin’s own work. He liked the dancing Miss Bell had instituted – a classical sort unknown to many people at that time, and then it was he wrote the verses Awake Awake which he gave to Aunt Lucy on her birthday and suggested that she and Mary Leadbeater should find a tune to make it into a dance…As he came a good many times he became a kind personal friend to some of us. He was particularly kind to Marie, who in her shyness had very sweet ways and when she grew ill in 1865 (she took cold after measles and in six months died of consumption) he wrote her many little notes to cheer the dreary times she went through.
Yale University archives holds the proof sheets of Ruskin’s Praeterita, and in among the notes Ruskin had prepared for a theatrical performance he lists Emma as ‘a great cricketer, perfect dancer, and entirely unselfish and clear-sighted counsellor’. When Miss Bell fell ill in 1866, Ruskin wrote to another girl ‘I’ve always had great faith in Emma Pignatel’, which suggests that she had assumed some seniority during Miss Bell’s occasional lapses of concentration. Emma wrote ‘Miss Bell’s teaching was sometimes very good indeed, and at other times things were irregular and uncomfortable, but we owed her so much in many ways that I don’t want to refer to shortcomings.’ The school fell increasingly into financial difficulties and within a few years Miss Bell had moved on to Weston-Super-Mare. By 1873, Ruskin was regretting ever having met her or lent her any money: ‘Damn Miss Bell’.
In 1865, Emma’s younger sister Mary died. Emma left the school in 1868 and Lucy the following year, by which time they had taken lodgings in Balham and were able to bring their mother over from France to live with them. In 1870 they took a lease on a smart little house, 20 Kensington Park Road, and that was where news reached them that their father had died of apoplexy in Nagasaki. At some point around this time, the girls re-established contact with Louisa Cassell, who had taught at Winnington and was now living in Tooting as governess to the Macmillan family. They started to attend services at the Vere Street Chapel to hear FD Maurice preach, and were invited to visit the Macmillan home. Emma wrote ‘I was shy about making any new acquaintances and feared to intrude when Mrs Macmillan very kindly pressed me to go and see them. Knapdale appealed to me; the kindness of the family, the old house and the book shelves a bit like Winnington.’ Caroline Macmillan had been ill for some years, and she died in the summer of 1871.
The friendships between the Pignatel and Macmillan households were entwined more closely when Alice, the youngest of Emma’s sisters, met and fell in love with one of Alexander’s favourite authors, the Scottish geologist Archibald Geikie. Geikie, whom Alexander referred to as ‘the man of stones’ was thirty-five, Alice was not quite nineteen when they married at St George’s, Campden Hill, Kensington, in August 1871. Just over a year later, Emma and Alexander were married by licence, with Canon Charles Kingsley officiating, at the same church. There is a certain reticence visible in the arrangements made – a marriage by licence avoided the need for banns to be read at the parish church in Tooting – was Alexander hoping to avoid local gossip? The ages of bride and groom are not specified, the form just says ‘Both of full age’. None of his family signed the register, but that may because none of them were over the age of twenty-one. A brief notice was placed in The Times and the Morning Advertiser a few days afterwards, and the news was picked up in the gossip columns of the Daily Mail. The honeymoon was brief, just a few days in Torquay, as Alexander was still struggling with the sciatica that had laid him low all summer.
For Emma, approaching thirty, who had just lost her father and may have had a difficult relationship with the mother who sent her away for much of her childhood, the offer of marriage from wealthy Alexander would have been tempting whatever she felt about the older man. He was in fact attractive: ‘a tall broad-shouldered man whose face inspired confidence, not only in his clear-sighted way of looking at things and firmness in dealing with them, but with always a kindly and patient outlook…I wonder if by saying “he was a rock to stand by” I can explain what a centre of his family he had become.’
For Alexander, grieving the loss of his first wife, yet overwhelmed by the responsibility of managing eight teenagers, three of them girls, the marriage must have been an enormous relief. When in 1878 his old friend Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) similarly remarried after being widowed, Macmillan wrote to him ‘I may venture to congratulate you on following my example in restoring a shattered home with a new sweet centre of woman life. Whatever their wrongs and rights, they are very essential to our home life – these same women.’
Sources: Emma Pignatel Macmillan’s Recollections, Maclehose Family Papers, and The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin's correspondence with Margaret Alexis Bell and the children at Winnington Hall, ed.Van Akin Burd,