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Charles Dodgson's Portrait of the Arnold Sisters

2022; Canadian Population Society; University of Alberta, Population Research Laboratory; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vcr.2022.0004

1923-3280

Karen Bourrier,

Australian History and Society

Charles Dodgson's Portrait of the Arnold Sisters Karen Bourrier (bio) Charles dodgson's best-known photographs are individual portraits of young girls. Many people will be able to call to mind Alice Liddell, his muse for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as the beggar maid, or Xie Kitchin as Penelope Boothby. These portraits reinforce a popular idea of Dodgson as cultivating one-on-one (and possibly untoward) friendships with individual girls. Yet a significant subset of his portraits, featuring family groupings of sisters, and sometimes brothers and parents as well as girl subjects, tells a different story. These portraits emphasize not the individual relationship between photographer and muse but the rich and complex social networks in which Dodgson and his sitters were embedded. For this forum, I consider Dodgson's 1872 portrait of the Arnold sisters. The photograph was taken a few weeks after Mary Arnold's April marriage to Humphry Ward (fig. 1). The four sisters are seated in Dodgson's Tom Quad rooftop studio, in Christ Church, Oxford. From left to right, Lucy, Mary, and Ethel are seated in the background, while Julia, the second youngest, is seated in the foreground on the floor between Lucy and Mary, with her white-stockinged legs stretched out and her right ankle crossed over her left. The three younger sisters wear matching ribbon- and flower-festooned hats and light-coloured frocks (Lucy's is longer than Julia's and Ethel's, as befits her older age). Mary wears her wedding gown, a velvet choker, white gloves, and a veil topped with orange blossoms that trail down to her chest. Although she is the bride and became the most famous Arnold sibling in her lifetime, in this portrait, Mary leans back toward Lucy, her face in shadow. Ethel, who became the black sheep of the family, is seated far to the right, away from her sisters. The matching dresses and hats worn by the three younger girls code them visually as sisters. The Arnold sisters often shared clothing. Tom Arnold worked as a tutor in Oxford and eventually separated from his wife after his conversion to Catholicism; his daughters were usually short of money. As Julia's son, the biologist Julian Huxley, remembered, "My mother used to tell us how she and her sister Mary had to go to parties in turn, as there was only one pair of best shoes and one evening dress for the two [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. "Portrait of Mary Augusta Arnold (Mrs. Humphry Ward), Lucy Ada Arnold, Julia Frances Arnold, and Ethel Margaret Arnold, 1872." Box 36, folder 1. Mrs. Humphry Ward Papers, 1863–1919, Claremont Colleges Library. Courtesy of the Special Collections of the Claremont Colleges Library. of them" (17). (As is evident from the relative size of the sisters in this portrait, it is more likely to have been Ethel with whom Julia shared a party wardrobe.) The concept of bridesmaids dressing identically is familiar to us today, but Victorian sisters often dressed alike in daily life, whether the frock was flattering to all the sisters or not. As Priscilla Lammeter explains in George Eliot's novel Silas Marner (1861): "I'm obliged to have the same as Nancy, you know, for all I'm five years older, and it makes me look yallow; for she never will have anything without I have mine just like it, because she wants us to look like sisters" (148). Dodgson's catalogue is replete with pictures of sisters in matching dresses. Julia's and Ethel's frocks, with their wide bell sleeves ending at the elbow and three-tiered skirts falling shortly above the knee are reminiscent of a parade of matching dresses worn by the Liddell sisters, the Brodie sisters, and the Hatch sisters, among others, for Dodgson's sororal portraits. It was unusual for the Arnold sisters to have such fine dresses and for them to be wearing matching dresses at the same time rather than sharing the same fine dress sequentially. Like other child-friends of Dodgson born in the 1860s, Julia and Ethel were part of a cohort that Sally Mitchell calls "the...