“All My Darlings”: A Victorian Family in Their Own Words

By Patricia Neate

My aim … to rescue from oblivion the lives of ordinary people – Athol Fugard
In 2005, Patricia Neate inherited a dusty Regency desk that had once belonged to her husband's great grandfather, George Augustus Macirone. Sagging under the weight of papers, it sat in the spare room, shedding rosewood veneer. Something had to be done. 
Patricia took a deep breath and opened it up. She pulled out a packet of yellowed letters, brown at the edges – scores of tiny envelopes addressed to George Macirone, George Augustus’s father, at a place called Heigham Hall. On an impulse she looked it up straight away. It had been a private Lunatic Asylum. She sat down to read there and then. 
Patricia began to pick her way through a treasure trove of family letters spanning the reign of Queen Victoria. It contained vivid stories – from a first hand account of the young Queen’s wedding to a plan to spring Napoleon from St Helena via brushes with cultural icons like Dickens, Keats and Mendelssohn. But, the most gripping were the personal ones – of mental illness and manic invention, grand houses and debtors’ prison, flawed hopes of colonial emigration, and the religious schisms that almost tore the Macirones apart. And through them all ran the lives of George Augustus’s sisters, Clara and Emily, who sacrificed any hope of romantic love or children to support their family – two enterprising, resilient, talented women, two notable omissions from “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls”!
More than a decade later, Patricia completed “All My Darlings”. It is a remarkable achievement: a quotidian tale of Victorian life, a vital social history, and a simple family portrait - open-ended, unguarded and brimming with humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Dec 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789012521

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 Patricia Neate

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador

9 Priory Business Park,

Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

Tel: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 978 1789012 521

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For the present and future descendants of George Augustus Macirone

George Augustus’s Desk - or more properly ‘bureau’ in its restored state. It must be imagined with every surface vertical and horizontal covered with papers of every description, photos and objects of devotion. It is an heirloom in more ways than one.

Inspiration and Justification

All those things for which we have no words are lost

Annie Dillard

Historical truth… represents the flotsam from a host of individual stories of human beings like ourselves… there is a special excitement in gathering up the fragments of past lives where we can

Diarmaid MacCulloch

My aim… to rescue from oblivion the lives of ordinary people

Athol Fugard

Contents

Family Trees

Foreword

1.A New Queen

2.Grandpapa – Pietro Augusto and His Sons

3.The Story of George and Mary Ann

4.Clara’s Account of Childhood

5.Francis Maceroni

6.Uncle Colonel’s Secret

7.The Storm Comes On

8.Clara at the Royal Academy of Music

9.George Augustus Goes Away to School

10.Being the Poor Relations

11.Making Ends Meet

12.Independence for Clara and Emily

13.The Search for Lodgings in London

14.George Augustus at Christ’s Hospital Senior School

15.Clara and Emily at Home and Away

16.The Death of Colonel Francis

17.George Commits Himself to Northampton Asylum

18.Keeping in Touch

19.Life at Northampton Asylum

20.Bills, Bills, Bills

21.Uncle George Perriman and the Wool Money

22.George’s Health at the Asylum

23.Clara’s Second Concert – Mendelssohn Comes to Call

24.News of Emily and Georgey Boy

25.What Next for George?

26.Castles in Spain

27.‘The Infernal Bastilles’

28.Liberating Mr Pulvertoft

29.Heigham Hall

30.Thompson and George Perriman Junior – the Black Sheep

31.Work, School, Cholera, Smallpox

32.1848 – The Year of Revolutions

33.Emigration and Unemployment

34.No Freedom Yet for George

Paintings by Emily Macirone

35.Life at Heigham Hall, Norwich 1849

36.George Augustus Goes to King’s College

37.George’s Relapse

38.George Translates Dr Adolf Marx’s General Musical Instruction

39.Clara – Professional Progress, Private Pain 1849-50

40.Emily’s Successes

41.Pastimes and Excursions

42.Securing George Augustus’s Future

43.George Returns to London 1850-52

44.Servants, 1852

45.A Digression – the DuBois Scandal

46.George Augustus’s Apprenticeship

47.George Augustus and the Dean of Perth

48.The Legacy of Perth

49.Clara and Hubert – ‘Hope Long Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick’

50.George Augustus Gets a Job

51.The Death of George Macirone

52.Uncle George Perriman’s Will

53.A Victorian Celebrity Event

54.The Middle Years

55.Travel and News from Abroad

56.Of Friendship, Family and Charity

57.Farewell to Mary Ann

58.George Augustus Marries Mary Fortescue

59.The 1870s – Marriage and Six Children

60.Death of Mary Macirone (Fortescue)

61.Late Victorian Childhood – 1880s

62.Theatricals

63.Clara and Emily’s Later Years

64.Goodbye to ‘Auntie Minnie’

65.The Last Years of Clara Macirone

66.Farewell to the Macirones – George Augustus’s Heirs

67.George Augustus’s Desk

Acknowledgements

Family Trees

These are family trees in autumn if not quite the skeleton branches of winter. I have allowed many, many leaves to drop to the ground unremarked – some of them just as colourful and varied as those I have left on the branches. Main characters are in bold.

A: The Macirones

B: Colonel Francis Maceroni

C: The Perrimans

D: The Fortescues and Spooners

Foreword

Around the turn of the millennium, the last three surviving grandchildren of George Augustus Macirone (an Italian surname pronounced Machironi) died. They were: Mary Gordon, daughter of George Augustus’s eldest daughter Catharine, Rev Felix Watkins, son of his second daughter Lucy, and Fiona Neate, the daughter of George Augustus’s fourth daughter (of five) Maria Lutugarda.

Each of these three grandchildren left family letters and papers, including paintings, drawings, music, photographs, diaries and memoirs, encompassing the 1790s to 1920s, but most falling within the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901. Some of these lay in George Augustus’s once-handsome bureau for upwards of 100 years, others were stored in boxes in cellars or attics. On Mary Gordon’s death, the bureau passed to my husband Francis, Fiona Neate’s elder son, and the other papers soon followed to be stored in our house in London

The wooden boxes, bags and old cardboard suitcases soon filled the dusty cupboard under the stairs, while the dilapidated ancient bureau, which had spent the last eighty or so years in a damp and smoky country kitchen, sagged under the weight of papers, dropping bits of rosewood veneer on the spare room carpet. Something had to be done.

In the autumn of 2005, I took a deep breath and dragged out the nearest box. When I opened the lid, clouds of sooty dust escaped smelling of mould and decay. Sitting on the floor in the hall, I pulled out a packet of yellowed letters, the brown edges of which were badly frayed or nibbled. A scrap of paper tucked under the string announced ‘1848’. The scores of tiny envelopes were addressed to George Macirone, who was George Augustus’s father, at a place I had never heard of – Heigham Hall, Norwich. What was this grand-sounding house and what was George Macirone doing there? On an impulse, I looked it up straight away. In his day it had been a private lunatic asylum. I started to read the letters there and then.

Eight years later, I had read, or rather deciphered, and transcribed over a thousand letters, as well as all the diaries, memoirs and other papers. I never ceased to be moved each time I unfolded and perused a letter that had not seen the light of day for perhaps 150 years. They contained whole lifetimes, from the careful first efforts of childhood to the tremulous scripts of old age. As the years passed, language and handwriting styles evolved, and when paper was scarce and costly the pages were covered first horizontally and then overwritten vertically, making even their unravelling an act of love. My growing engagement with the family who had unknowingly admitted me into the intimacy of their lives came close to love too, and I decided that their story must be told.

This, then, is an account of the Macirones in their own words. Although it necessarily touches upon numerous friends, relatives, ancestors and descendants, at its heart is the nuclear unit of George, his wife Mary Ann and their children, Clara, Emily and George Augustus. Amidst a large ensemble cast, therefore, a brief introduction to these main characters will help the reader navigate their story.

This is the only surviving picture of George Macirone (1788-1858) taken around 1855. Adored by his wife and children, he was both traditional patriarch and radical eccentric. Indeed, if he didn’t mould the others in his image, their life choices were inevitably fashioned in response to his struggles. A brilliant, restless, troubled polymath, his character may be triangulated from the poles of his profound love for his family and the illness with which he struggled his entire adult life.

This is Mary Ann (1789-1869) painted in later life by the talented Emily. Like many Victorian women, Mary Ann was defined by her marriage. However, this should take away nothing from her sharp intellect, nor the considerable business acumen she necessarily displayed at the height of her husband’s problems. She was both deeply religious and possessed of a profound social conscience; – qualities she passed on to all her children.

Another of Emily’s portraits, this shows elder daughter Clara (1821-1914) as a student at the Royal Academy of Music. At a time when professional opportunities for women were severely limited, Clara nonetheless became the Macirones’ main breadwinner, a truly gifted musician whose work and reputation survives to this day. Perhaps her greatest legacy, however, was the family itself. Without the diligence and ingenuity she displayed at considerable and heart-breaking personal cost, they would surely have faced bankruptcy.

This portrait of Emily (1827-1888), at the age of twenty-one by a fellow artist by the name of Maddox, is the only picture that remains. Six years younger than Clara, Emily was a capable painter and, if she never received quite the recognition or reward of her sister, she was at times in demand as a portraitist. Bright, warm and attractive, Emily was the family’s most enthusiastic correspondent and her letters are unfailingly funny and engaging.

Seven years younger than Emily, thirteen than Clara, George Augustus (1834-1910) was very much the baby of the family and, in a male-dominated society, it was his welfare and prospects that most preoccupied his sisters. Emily’s picture shows him in his uniform for Christ’s Hospital, the Bluecoat School. A likeable boy, ever eager to please, he grew into a pious, somewhat earnest man, touched by tragedy, whose specific religious convictions would come to challenge the family equilibrium.

This is the Macirones’ story, not mine. What they have chosen to write and to retain offers a unique insight into their lives and personalities, and into the times in which they lived. Letters are the main source, but I am conscious of holes in the narrative when no family member is away from home and it’s impossible to eavesdrop on their communication through the amazingly efficient Victorian postal system. Some letters must also have been lost or destroyed. As far as possible, I have filled these gaps from other family sources, memoirs, notes and diaries, occasionally from public records, and, only where irresistible, my own speculation. No facts are invented – at least, not by me.

The hardest, indeed most painful, part of this task has been deciding which letters to omit. To include them all would have involved running into several volumes. I have tried to retain only those which illuminate the characters or the times, or which move events forward, but I confess I was often captivated by the seemingly mundane and peripheral. Occasionally I have compromised by pruning the luxuriance of Victorian prose to cut to the heart of a subject.

This book aspires to be neither history nor biography. It is the testament of a family. The Macirones were not rich, though they tasted wealth. They were not poor, though they faced penury. They were not famous, though they moved in the orbits of celebrated artists, musicians and writers. The Macirones were ordinary as all families are ordinary, and remarkable as all families are remarkable. What impresses me above all is their constant care to be true to themselves and to each other, and to transcend their circumstances, and that, I believe, makes knowing them always interesting, often instructive, and on occasion inspiring.

Chapter One

A New Queen

The wedding of Queen Victoria and her adored Albert takes place on a typical February day in 1840. London is chilly and wet: streets streaming and muddy, loyal crowds peering around umbrellas, waving damp flags and pocket-handkerchiefs. Then, in a development widely attributed to divine approval, the rain is finally interrupted by a gleam of sunshine at the very moment the bridal procession emerges from Buckingham Palace for the short ride down The Mall, only recently paved, to the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace.

Among the throng on a specially erected platform on the route, two sisters stand on tiptoe: Clara, aged nineteen, just two years younger than the Queen herself, and her thirteen-year-old sister Emily, known affectionately as Mimi, Minnie or Minniekin. Together with their six-year-old brother, George Augustus, these are the surviving children of George and Mary Ann Macirone: the wide age gaps between them a constant, painful reminder of four siblings who have died in infancy or early childhood. In an era of shockingly high infant mortality, the girls are fortified by a robust Christian belief in the angelic destiny of these little souls. Nonetheless, more than fifty years from now, Clara will recall in loving detail and lasting grief each of these dead brothers and sisters in her memoirs. For example, of little Emily (whose name was passed on to Minnie, born the year her namesake died):

I, aged six, being invited to go back in the bright summer evening and play on the common, left her imploring me to stay with her – a remembrance which even now gives me such pain I can hardly bear to write it… I didn’t know how ill she was – that was the excuse, but I felt it since and was broken hearted.

Perhaps because of this early experience of death, Clara is watchful and protective of her surviving siblings even as a young woman. Certainly she’s keeping a close eye on her lively little sister today as they are without a chaperone.

Clara is of average height and pale, with her mother’s light reddish-brown hair and hazel eyes, Emily, smaller with darker eyes and hair and the olive complexion that betrays her father’s Italian heritage. They are dressed for the weather in sturdy brown-laced boots and several warm petticoats under thick skirts, hitched up against the mud. Swaddled in woollen wraps against the cold, bonnets firmly tied with wide ribbons beneath the chin, they are full of excitement as they patiently wait for the procession to pass.

Clara is a student at the Royal Academy of Music. She is serious and hard working, but also intensely romantic and given to purple prose. In her diary entry for the previous day, she has mused on the forthcoming royal marriage in a tone both reverent and exalted. As one of the young Queen’s ‘maiden subjects’, she enjoys an orgy of sentimental identification with the bride, of which the following lines give a flavour; full of the attitudes to the feminine, domestic and divine that will become known as ‘Victorian’:

Let her shelter in her husband’s love from the forms of state etiquette which must chill her warm young heart like a panoply of ice. Let her, like a poor little bird, fly from the storms of cabals of state, fluttering to her nest, and there live, for love is life, and laying aside the Queen, be the wife and forget the coldness of the world in her husband’s smiles, and be happy, as with all our hearts we hope she will be. She ought to have the prayers of all, but especially of the maiden subjects whose state she leaves, with the sympathy her virtues and her situation command, to take her station at the head of the dignified band of English matrons. Heaven bless her and grant that she may be another Marie Thérèse without her fate however, for her husband did not do her justice.

Clara’s exalted mood in no way dimmed by the weather, the diary entry for the wedding day itself continues in a similar vein:

All seemed to feel for her. I saw many handkerchiefs held suspiciously close to the eyes when they should have been waving their welcome, and the low murmur God bless her was thrilling from its subdued intensity… I thought she had never looked so beautiful. Her coronet of orange flowers was relieved by her simple dark hair, and her face was very pale with such a sweet expression (I felt – and I think many felt as I did –- as if I loved her like my own sister).

However, her reflections end on a more mundane note after she and Emily have walked home, dripping wet, to Islington:

It poured with little intermission till the procession began… We did not see her return for our stand broke down just after a general thrill ran through the immense multitude when the first gun was fired announcing that the ring was put on her finger, and the second when the priest pronounced them man and wife. We came home in a state better imagined than described, of fatigue, dirt and enthusiasm.

Was it the ‘general thrill’ that rocked the stand to such an extent that it had to be abandoned?

Chapter Two

Grandpapa – Pietro Augusto and His Sons

A step back.

The grandfather of the three Macirone children, Pietro Bonaventura Augusto Gaspare Macirone (1750-1826), usually referred to as Count Macirone, came from a distinguished Roman family; son of the Marchese Francesco Filippo Ludovico Melchiore Maceroni, himself reputedly descended from Calpurnius Macer, a Roman Senator in 103 CE. At one time, the Maceronis owned extensive estates at Castelgandolfo.

Later, they managed profitable alum works on land belonging to the Vatican, and Francesco Filippo constructed the fifteen miles of road from the alum mines at La Tolfa to Civita Vecchia, named the Via Maceroni. (A sharp-eyed reader may have already noticed the two spellings of the family name with the ‘i’ and the ‘e’ reversed. An explanation follows. The fact that Pietro’s two sons, our George and his brother Francis, each went on to choose a different version from the other may be a clue to their characters).

Grandfather Pietro left Italy in his twenties. Fired with republican fervour, he joined one of his numerous brothers, Felix (Felice), and a cousin, Leandro, to fight for American independence in the war of 1775-83. Enlisting in the international regiment assembled under the command of the French generals Rochambeau and Lafayette, they became three genuine Maceronis among the Yankee Doodle Dandies in the melting pot of the revolutionary army. But the young men’s adventurous spirit came at no little cost: Leandro died in the war and Felix was wounded, returning to Rome to take Holy Orders (he eventually became a bishop). And Pietro? He was wounded too. But only three years after the end of the American conflict, he turns up in Sheffield, now spelling his name ‘Macirone’ (to distinguish himself, so the story goes, from a Maceroni relative who was a mere charcoal merchant). Supported by friendly connections with the wealthy banker Nathan Meyer Rothschild (N.M.R. or ‘no money returned’), the family had latterly built a profitable business in banking and the export of fine silks from Italy. And this brought Pietro to Yorkshire.

In Sheffield, Pietro met and married Mary Ann Wildsmith, daughter of a prosperous family of horsehair weavers and carpet manufacturers. Soon the couple moved to London with their two sons: Francis, born in 1787, and George (father of Clara, Emily and George Augustus), born in 1788.

The boys were educated at Old Hall Green, later St Edmund’s College, Ware; the first Catholic college founded after the relaxation of the anti-Catholic penal laws. Pietro and Mary were Catholics, and the family back in Rome provided a number of priests and nuns to the Church. However, Pietro’s Catholicism was nominal only and he was vehemently opposed to the Jesuits, suppressed throughout the eighteenth Century, but restored in 1814 by Pope Pius VII. Clara would later recall that her grandfather used O Gesuito! as an expletive when riled, and when the Catholic Emancipation Bill was under discussion she quoted him as saying, They don’t know what they are doing or they would never pass that Act. But Parliament did pass it, albeit three years after his death – over his dead body indeed.

With his republican, anti-clerical, and rationalist ideas, Pietro was a true son of the Enlightenment. In time, this would worry the pious, protestant relatives of his daughter-in-law, George’s wife, Mary Ann. One cousin feared she might have married a follower of those vile felosofors Ruso and Voltair who have done more harm to Christianity than all the writers that have ever wrote.

Whatever their religious formation or lack of it, Francis and George’s accomplishments suggest they enjoyed a good classical education. Indeed, Francis so impressed his masters that he alone of all the pupils at Ware was allowed free and unsupervised access to the college library. Good-looking boys with lively intelligence and courtly manners in the Italian style, the brothers were close in age, achievement and character. Then their mother, Mary Wildsmith, died at the age of just thirty-four. Francis was twelve, George eleven, and Pietro a widower at forty-nine.

No doubt his wife’s death contributed to Pietro’s decision to send Francis to Italy three years later in 1803. Though still a boy, Francis, as elder son, was expected to learn his father’s business and study banking at the Banco Torlonia. It was an experience that turned Francis’s worldview upside down and launched him on the extraordinary career whose effects continued to reverberate throughout the family long after his death in poverty some forty years later.

While the violent upheaval of the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath had cured many in Europe (not least Pietro) of their thirst for political change at any cost, the adolescent Francis acquired zealous republican enthusiasms of his own. After many travels and adventures, recounted in minute but selective detail in his memoirs, he abandoned his apprenticeship with the bank and instead settled in Naples to begin a lifelong passion for invention and to study science, medicine and finally diplomacy. But it was as a soldier of fortune that he found his first true vocation…

Back in London, Pietro paced the family home – That damned Italy! It’s been the ruin of my boy. And it was upon his younger son, George, that responsibility for the business increasingly fell.

Pietro Augusto Macirone and Mary Macirone née Wildsmith

Francis Maceroni

George Maceroni

Chapter Three

The Story of George and Mary Ann

Pietro’s bitter disappointment with Francis determined George to be everything his widowed father could wish for, and he devoted himself to a life of hard work and diligent self-improvement. He added German, Portuguese and Spanish to the Latin, French and Italian in which he was already proficient. He was a capable musician with a fine tenor voice and a talent for extemporising on the piano. He was also interested in the natural sciences and engineering, with a gift for accurate drawing and draftsmanship. All these accomplishments stood him in good stead, though the obsessive effort with which he pursued them would have ramifications for both his physical and mental wellbeing in later life…

George met his future wife, named Mary Ann like his mother, at seventeen. She was a frequent visitor to the Macirones with her pretty widowed mother, Marie Perriman née Tijou, three brothers, and sister, Clara (it is a feature of this family – and many others of this period – that names are repeated within and across generations: George, Francis, Mary and Clara chime like a confused and confusing peal of bells throughout this story).

Marie Perriman was of French extraction. Her great grandfather had come to London as a skilled ironworker to tender for employment at the rebuilding of St Paul’s. Marie was a charming and cultivated woman, left in a comfortable situation by her late husband, Thomas, who had been master of Tom’s Coffee House in Cornhill, one of the oldest in London, a place where chess players, businessmen, and men of science and letters met to exchange ideas and catch up on the latest news. Six years after his wife’s early death, this was where Pietro met Marie and the attraction was immediate. The same was true for his son and her daughter.

A letter from George to Mary Ann in 1807 is addressed to ‘Ma très chère Marie’, indicating that they were already engaged, if not formally. He admonishes her for not writing while on a visit to Margate – all in beautiful French and the most elegant handwriting.

Pietro, meanwhile, seriously considered marrying her mother. However, according to our Clara, one of his business partners thought that she was beneath him socially, and had too many dependent children besides:

My grandfather had friends who shrank from his second marriage and influenced him against it – and, as my grandmother saw her hope of such a happy future die, disappointment and a crowd of other suitors (for she was young, rich and handsome) made her listen to another lover, and her sweet, unsuspicious nature helped his consummate hypocrisy to keep her, as well as others, blind to his real nature till it was too late.

This ‘consummate hypocrite’ was a man called Dirk Langeveldt and, once married to Marie, he determined to break all family connections with the Macirones. He extracted a promise that Pietro would not see or write to Marie without his permission, moved the whole family to the country, and contrived to disinherit Marie’s children by Thomas Perriman. One son, John, soon died, another, Edward, lost his property and a third, George, emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). The girls, Mary Ann and Clara, also suffered. But Mary Ann in particular was heartbroken by the enforced separation from George Macirone. They did not see each other again for a decade.

George too was prostrate with grief. A young man of intense emotion, he went into a state of rapid decline, depressed and not eating, which greatly alarmed his father. Pietro’s remedy was work and distraction, so he arranged for his son to take a voyage to the West Indies on business. Sadly, it was disastrous for George’s health. We don’t know whether he even got to the West Indies or what his business there might have been, but, years later, Clara gives us an account of her father’s voyage:

…with a constitution weakened by sorrow and fasting he went on a journey with a bad and drunken Captain who had neglected all proper provisions, there was no sweet water, the biscuit was rotten and the meat putrid. My grandfather had put on board some proper provisions for his son, but some sailors, who had only the ship’s provisions, fell sick and of course my noble, generous father gave them virtually all he had – he saved them but he destroyed his own life. The burning heat to which he was so untrained, the foul ship and food, the want of water, to him who had never taken anything else, brought on the terrible illness from which he and we suffered all his dear life and which was utterly misunderstood by all the physicians of the time.

This is the first intimation of George’s troubles, which cast a shadow over his family for years.

Towards the end of his life, George wrote to his daughter Clara that, after his mother’s death and until he met and fell in love with Mary Ann, no one cared a button for him… and at this point he thought he had lost Mary Ann forever. Was it this anguish, the undermining of his constitution, or the introduction to grog for want of clean water that was his undoing? Perhaps all of these.

Eventually Marie’s unhappy marriage ended, presumably with the death of her fortune-hunting husband. She and her children were left in straitened circumstances, but George and Mary Ann finally reunited. They married in 1818 and set up house at 163 Bishopsgate Street in the city of London, Pietro and his indispensable valet moving in with them. They lived a life of elegance and apparent prosperity for eight years until Pietro’s death hastened the downward spiral in their fortunes. Many years later, our Clara would fondly recall leaning out of the bedroom window at the age of three or four, watching the sunset, and listening to the chimes of the muffin man’s bell.

Thomas Perriman

Nineteenth Century Bishopsgate Street

Chapter Four

Clara’s Account of Childhood

Mary Ann passed on to her daughter Clara many details of their life in Bishopsgate Street. Clara herself remembered hiding under the dining room table with her toys as a very small child to avoid disturbing her grandfather. Pietro always behaved and was treated as a ‘grand seigneur’: dignified, courtly and reserved, often receiving distinguished and aristocratic visitors from Italy who addressed him as Count Macirone.

But George and Mary Ann were living in a style they could ill afford, believing that they owed it to Pietro’s position and that after his death they would inherit a substantial business. George was in his prime and the family mixed with the artistic and scientific intelligentsia of London. Clara recounts these happy days from the other side of what she describes as ‘the great darkness’, which was to separate the family from so many of their friends – the great darkness of illness and insolvency.

Nearly every Sunday evening, Papa and Mama used to spend with my father’s old friends Mr and Mrs Wentworth Dilke, the editor of the Athenaeum, and with other friends of theirs at his house, names now household words of literary people. Keats and the lady Miss Brawne to whom he was so desperately attached, but whom my mother never liked, were there – she looking very lovely, with pearls in her hair loosely looping it up. Strangely enough, Mama told me she said to herself when she first saw her, that is just the girl for a poet to fall in love with, but her voice was hard and her conversation insipid. Tom Hood and his wife, and many other eminent people were intimates in that elegant little drawing room now gone… dear Mrs Dilke, so bright and plump and kindly, always with some genial, pleasant thing to say in a feminine pretty way, while her husband looked down from the height of his mental observatory and had the essence of all that was to be said or thought on any possible question on the tip of his tongue while he took snuff in his calm observing way – and how fond they were of each other.

Among other notable friends of the Macirones, Clara refers to John Payne Collier, a highly respected Shakespearean scholar at the time, later discredited when it was found that some of his Shakespearean and contemporary ‘discoveries’ were forgeries. There was also the poet and humourist Tom Hood, fond of practical jokes and a stringent commentator on the social scene. His Song of the Shirt, describing the fate of the exploited women home-workers of the day, created a sensation and was set to music. One of his best-known verses is November, which conjures up the winter smoke and fog of Victorian London:

No sun – no moon –- no morn – no noon

No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

No comfortable feel in any member –

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds – November!

What was the setting for these amiable soirées? Clara describes the suite of rooms in which guests were entertained as ‘irregularly beautiful’, consisting of a large low drawing-room, piano in pride of place, with several smaller rooms giving off from it, providing nooks and crannies for ‘loungers and tatlers’, decorated with pictures and nick-nacks, all lit by the new, soft and wavering gas lights – an informal, cosy, Dickensian scene.

The names recalled by Clara might well have been drawn from Dickens himself – Bowestock, Peschier, the Marquise of Floria and her two daughters Zela and Elise and Captain Dobbyn, so very handsome and intellectual, who told the most wonderfully comical stories… our Papa used to laugh so much there was no dinner eaten those days… but he and his family went to America and we never saw them again.

Was this the same Captain Dobbyn who was kidnapped by a press-gang at sea and transported to the Southern Seas where he jumped ship at night and swam to an American brig? The Americans hid him from the British search party and a month later, delivered him to Montreal where his wife joined him. He became one of the early pioneer settlers of Upper Canada. The dates fit for him to have been Clara’s handsome Captain.

The Macirones were enthusiastic, talented musicians and keen theatregoers. Mary Ann played the piano and the guests would be handed music and expected to sight read and join in the singing. Louis Peschier, an old émigré, was a friend of the great actress Fanny Kemble and enjoyed regaling the company with theatrical tales, though he was apparently still scandalised by the impropriety of the ‘Walz’, which had become fashionable during the Regency. He said as much to little Clara who never forgot it.

Clara also remembered being taken by her father to the Mathematical Society where she would sit among the books in the library during meetings. Bowestock, an eminent geologist, was an old friend who enchanted Clara with his collection of curiosities. He was remembered with affection as one of the few who remained faithful to the family after the storm came on and we were drenched in the rain and cold of such troubles as rarely come in this world.

Considerably older than Emily and George Augustus, Clara experienced more of the good times than either of her siblings.

From infancy, the children had foreign, usually French, nurses, and Clara was fluent in French, Italian and German from an early age. A note to her parents from 1825, when she was four, survives. It is all in French in childish capitals and signed off – Je suis avec le plus profond respect votre tendre et obeissante fille [I am with the deepest respect your loving and obedient daughter]. Another letter to her mother when she was eight years old confessing to a broken glass, is a telling insight into the style of parenting:

My dear Mamma,

I am very sorry to tell you that I have broken a glass before I went from London. I wished to drink for I was very thirsty and as I took the glass out of the pitcher, the glass broke and my courage failed to confess it, but I hope you will forgive me for I sincerely beg it. I have been very good here and hope I shall be so for ever. I am quite happy to think that one day, Sunday hence, I shall be able to receive your forgiveness and kind kiss. It was quite accidental. I long to see you and Papa but remember that if you don’t forgive me, you will break the heart of her who loves and cannot forget you and all your kindnesses to her, and only begs your forgiveness and your love.

Adieu and remember your obedient and affectionate daughter, Clara Angela Macirone

Aged twelve, she writes a note for her father to find when he returns late from work:

My dear Papa,

I am very glad that I have been able to finish this sum. I hope it is right and that you will approve of it. I did it as well as I could and I should have done it after dinner had not I my lessons to learn. I have a shilling now. I long for my birthday. You will find the list of the sums… in my letter. I have been waiting to hear your knock some time. I hope you will stay at home this evening…

Your affectionate and dutiful daughter, Clara Angela Macirone

In the light of George’s later troubles, I hope you will stay at home this evening strikes a melancholy note.

There survives a scrap of notepaper from 1823, when Clara was two years old. It is her mother Mary Ann’s memo to herself of the duties of the day. It is written partly in English, partly in French. The day would start with one hour of reading from the Bible or William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, a popular evangelical work. Then came breakfast and giving orders for dinner, followed by a half an hour of ‘instruction’ for little Clara, then one hour of music practice. Next came going to the market, visiting or making up her ‘house book’ of accounts etc. until around four. She would then do needlework until dinner at six. Afterwards she practised shorthand, piano and singing and studied French and Italian.

Did two-year-old Clara really get just half an hour of her mother’s time each day? Clara’s memories of childhood paint a different picture, although Mary Ann’s pursuit of self-improvement certainly lasted throughout her life. In her diary of 1863, at the age of seventy-two, Mary Ann would write:

I am almost in despair of ever correcting my fatal habit of making and taking no account of my time and thus wasting the precious remnant of life graciously granted me to work out my own salvation by God’s grace and mercy. Let me adopt some clear distinct rule such as never to allow myself more than one hour for newspapers, which I now find so extremely interesting. One hour of secular reading, two of sound religious reading, to fit and prepare me for the great and important change from time to Eternity. Help me, Oh Lord. By thy help alone can I overcome my besetting sins of self-indulgence.

In 1911, at the age of ninety, Clara fleshed out her mother’s diary, which she had faithfully preserved, with her own reminiscences. She was prompted by the birth that same year of her niece Lutugarda’s daughter, Fiona. Her younger brother, George Augustus, Lutugarda’s father, had died the year before. She writes in the wavering but determined hand of the very old:

Mamma’s ways – written with dear love to Lutugarda, hoping they may suggest little ways of making loving happy times, and to my dearest little God-daughter Fiona. May they make recollections full of home loveliness for her – long years after now –- 1911

The ninety-year-old Clara goes on:

Our daily life in our dear old home in Bishopsgate Street. At five a.m. we had to be up and dressed to go down to the great hall with the two nurses ready for Papa who took us out at six to the circus gardens with our hoops and skipping ropes to play till breakfast…

My first music lessons: our old square piano… the little green thin board was drawn over the whole body of the strings and the keys, so then I had to play without being able to see my hands. I imagine an old china dish filled with delicious summer fruit, ripe strawberries, cherries or currants or when they were out of season, raisins, almonds and figs, looking so pretty. I began with scales – the major scales and then the minor scales. NB: a scale played perfectly earned a strawberry… Every Saturday I was expected or allowed to play to Papa – a great privilege and honour.

Every evening when the light faded and before the lamps and candles came in, Mother sat down to the piano and played all the old tunes to us, and we children all played about the drawing room, and sat on Mother’s knee if tired to be cuddled and cosseted, and warmed with love and bright stories and talk of the day’s doings, and be happy. And then best of all was the going to bed –- Mother coming up to us and putting her dear arms around us, and there was the time for our little confidences and any hints about little things she had noticed that were not quite so perfect as she wished, and in the gentlest way we were helped into loving what was best and trying to get rid of our faults… a sort of heart’s homecoming as I remember now, with such a yearning for those old times and their love and peace and sympathy as makes the hard life of this time very tedious by comparison – and the life of the present day is as different from those days as if we were in another planet.

Clara’s letter (age 4) to her parents.

Chapter Five

Francis Maceroni

And what of the errant Francis?

If George Macirone ever expressed resentment of his elder brother’s decision to abandon the family business, there is no surviving evidence. In fact, what is clear is their mutual love and admiration, and Francis writes in his memoirs with warmth and generosity of George’s character and intellect. They had much in common, including voracious academic curiosity and a tendency to obsession. However, the choices the pair made as very young men led them down profoundly different paths.

A committed anti-clerical, anti-monarchist supporter of the French Republic (and, therefore, Napoleon, archenemy of his father’s adopted country), in Italy, Francis joined the struggle against the Bourbon King Ferdinand of Naples. Francis was not yet out of his teens. With victory, Napoleon installed first his brother, Joseph (1806), and then his brother-in-law Joachim Murat (1808) on the throne. Francis’s services to the republican cause (and, perhaps, his friendship with Murat, ‘the Dandy King’) were recognised. Napoleon awarded him the Légion d’Honneur and, in 1814, Murat appointed him his aide-de-camp with the rank of cavalry colonel. Having reverted to the original ancestral spelling of his surname, Francis now went by the grand title, Colonel Maceroni.

To judge by his memoirs, Francis’s senior rank and military responsibilities nonetheless left him plenty of time for leisure. He describes, for example, introducing cricket to the gentlemen of Naples in 1811. It is an entertaining illustration of his general style:

My cricket club included almost every man (not in his senility) of the Neapolitan Court, of the French and Neapolitan chief authorities, military, naval and administrative. The first difficulty was to get bats and balls: I set to work and made both with my own hands… the cricket play was always followed up by a field repast of macaroni, cold fowls, hams, tongues etc. and store of wine.

There follows a list of Princes, Counts, Colonels and Commissaries, including the sons of the Queen of Naples (Napoleon’s nephews), who played, thirty in all, plus ‘many others’, winding up with a ‘worthy Englishman named Jones… also of the party and a good player and… a distinguished diplomatist’. Starting with this group, Francis then established an English-style dining club – the Imperturbabili.

In 1812, the year after the foundation of the cricket club, Murat commanded Napoleon’s cavalry in the invasion of Russia, taking with him 2,000 of the Neapolitan Guard and 8,000 troops of the line. Somehow, Francis escaped this ill-fated expedition, which limped home from Moscow in the snow and ice. Instead, he was in Rome in the spring of 1813 when many of my friends and members of our cricket, archery and weekly dinner clubs arrived from the Russian expedition – among these the Duke of Roccoramana minus five fingers and sundry toes: the Prince Campano ditto: General Pepe the same: Rambaud only two top joints of fingers the worse. In fine, all more or less crippled either by wounds or frost.

Francis was not easily deterred: Upon my return to Naples in 1813, the cricket, archery and weekly dinners were resumed… Amongst other novelties I also established a swimming school for ladies.

The fall of Napoleon and the execution of his patron Murat saw Francis involved as a diplomat in unsuccessful negotiations with Britain on behalf of the French republicans, who were hoping to avoid the restoration of the French monarchy. He claims to have conducted negotiations between Wellington and the French after the battle of Waterloo, in order to secure the former’s peaceful entry into Paris and a smooth transition of power.

Under the Bourbon restoration of Louis XVIII, Francis was jailed in Paris for his earlier attempts to arrange asylum for the deposed Murat as a private person in Austria (efforts that earn him a walk-on part in Alexandre Dumas’s essay about Murat in the collection Celebrated Crimes). In fact, Murat seems to have used the passport Francis provided to mount an attempt to regain Naples. Consequently, Francis, much to his disgust, was charged with treachery on his return to England in 1819. The book he published the following year, Ars Logica Copleiana or Solicitor General’s Logic, tears into his opponents with typically fiery rhetoric.

All of these experiences only fuelled Francis’s republicanism. Soon we find him putting together an international expeditionary force of 2,000 troops to support Simon Bolivar in the South American wars of independence. Francis became a Brigadier General in Bolivar’s service, but the expedition decimated his troops and ruined him financially. He was left with promises of payment in Gran Colombia, which were never met.

In 1821 (the year of his niece, our Clara’s birth), Francis was plotting, with Napoleon’s doctor on St Helena, Barry Edward O’Meara, to spring the former Emperor from captivity by ‘means of no insignificant character’. This refers to a prototype steam-powered submarine, invented by an accomplice, Tom Johnson – smuggler, adventurer, inventor – who had already managed a couple of remarkable escapes from prison. The plot was only forestalled by Napoleon’s death. O’Meara gave Francis one of the great man’s teeth as a relic. It was passed down the family and fetched nearly £13,000 at auction in London in 2005.

That same year, Francis supported the popular revolution in Naples against the restored King Ferdinand (he had nothing but scorn for Ferdinand’s favourites, Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton). Francis became secretary to a group calling themselves the ‘Frères Constitutionnels Européens’ [Brothers for a Constitutional Europe] headed by Lafayette and comprising ‘all the left of France, Spain and Portugal’, and joined military operations in Spain with a plan for ‘revolutionising the French army and thus saving Spain and the rest of Europe from the hideous iron sway of despots and priests’.

By 1823, however, Francis was back in England recovering from a long illness and devoting himself to writing and his growing catalogue of ingenious inventions. Sadly, none brought him significant financial reward. He formed a company in London in 1825, The Atlantic and Pacific Ship Canal Co., to promote his own plans for the best route for what was to be the Panama Canal. They were not adopted. The same year, at the request of his father Pietro, Francis applied for a passport to Italy to try to recover the family’s misappropriated properties around Rome, but the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, refused it because of his radical tendencies. Still, in 1828, passport or no, there he is in Turkey, back in arms, training the locals in support of the Ottoman Empire against the Russians. It was his last military excursion.

By now, Francis’s fortunes were sliding rapidly. In London once more, he designed, among other things, a prototype flying machine and a steam road carriage. The latter was successfully built and road tested, but couldn’t secure adequate backing to turn a profit. He invented a new method of road paving, with tar-coated wooden blocks, which had moderate success, though a contemporary ditty suggests that other uses were soon found for them:

When London roads are paved with wood,

Long live Maceroni.

We’ll go in for something good,

And save on our coal money.

In 1841, at the nadir of his financial problems, Francis was imprisoned for debt and his fortunes never recovered.

Throughout his life, Francis remained a passionate republican, writing many political articles and papers. He also opposed the death penalty and supported universal suffrage and the Reform Bill. He believed that reform in England would require an armed struggle and published a paper on ‘Defensive Instructions for the People’ with advice on small arms and street fighting. He died in 1846; two years before the Chartist demonstrations might have given some substance to his predictions. 1848 was a year of revolutions throughout Europe. Queen Victoria moved to Osborne House in the Isle of Wight for her protection and the Bank of England was fortified with sandbags. But the crisis passed without the revolutionary violence Francis anticipated.

A contemporary account (Life of Sir George Grove by CL Graves) throws some light on Francis’s character in later life, and corroborates the impression given by his memoirs that his volatile and hyperactive behaviour bordered on mania (another similarity with brother George). He was probably by this time addicted to laudanum, an alcoholic tincture of opium, which was legal and widely available and used for a variety of medical purposes:

Another old soldier who used to come to us was Colonel Maceroni, who had been on the staff of Murat. He was in London on some mysterious errand connected with the Reform Bill. He had, I remember, a pamphlet of instructions how to make barricades, shells and other articles useful to rioters. He would come in about half an hour before our dinnertime – six o’clock – and was always welcome when he made his appearance. He always seemed extraordinarily tired, and excited. He would then retire into a corner of the room and take a bottle of laudanum out of his pocket, pour out and drink a full wine glass. By the time dinner was ready, he had entirely recovered his spirits and used to keep us amused and transfixed during the whole meal.

It seems that Francis’s company was never dull though his opinions and behaviour may have been alarming. Nearly 200 years after his death, Fiona Neate reflected upon her great great uncle’s exploits:

Colonel Macirone was a rogue, an adventurer – no doubt about it – but I always think that strain reappears from time to time in his descendants and leavens the rather heavy, sanctimonious blood of all the Fortescues and the Spooners who were to marry into the family.

Colonel Francis Maceroni, soldier of fortune

Napoleon’s tooth

Chapter Six

Uncle Colonel’s Secret

If the memoirs of Colonel Francis (or ‘Uncle Colonel’ as his nephew and nieces called him) make for a colourful, sometimes implausible, read, one fact he fails to include is that he had two separate families to support.

As a young man, Francis was very friendly with the Williams or Williams-Wynne family, having met Thomas Williams during his time in Italy. When Thomas’s sister Jane left her gambling husband and moved into another brother’s house with her five children, Francis moved in too. He helped with her boys’ education and taught them engineering – one of his many amateur passions. He was perhaps an inspiring teacher since Alfred, the youngest, was later apprenticed to Brunel on the construction of the Thames Tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping, then described as the eighth wonder of the world. Meanwhile Francis had ample opportunity to acquaint himself with Jane’s two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Charlotte.

He married Elizabeth Williams-Wynne on board a ship in the Mediterranean in 1821, and they had two daughters, Emilia and Giulia. In unrecorded circumstances, he then moved on to the youngest sister, Charlotte, married her in Spain, and they had four more daughters. There had been no divorce and the wives kept separate households. Both ladies were known as Mrs Maceroni and all the daughters carried his name.

Francis’s first wife, Elizabeth, was a capable lady. After his departure, she opened a respectable lodging house, The Limes, in Weybridge, frequented by artists and literary gentlemen, including George Meredith. The famous writer was inspired by Elizabeth’s attractive elder daughter Emilia, who later married Sir Edmund Hornby, to create the eponymous heroine of his novel Sandra Belloni (in fact, Sandra Belloni was first published under the title Emilia in England). Meredith’s biographer, Jack Lindsay, describes the writer’s relationship with the family:

A house where they [Meredith and his wife] liked staying was The Limes at Weybridge… run by Mrs Maceroni, widow of a colonel who’d been A.D.C to Murat, King of Naples, as well as a pioneer in aviation, a brigadier in the Colombian army and constructor of a ‘steam road carriage’. The two lovely daughters were more than half Italian, and the elder Emilia was an impulsive girl with a fine voice… Like Sandra [in the novel], she had a democratic feeling for her audience; as Lady Hornby, on the voyage to the Crimea in 1855, she sang almost every evening to the soldiers and the sailors…

In his autobiography, Sir Edmund Hornby gives an entertaining account of his accomplished wife, starting with their first meeting:

As luck would have it, whilst on a trip to Weybridge on the Thames… I pulled out of the river a young lady who had fallen out of a punt. She had a huge crinoline on, so that I acted as a sort of ‘tug’, and being a girl of pluck I had no difficulty in getting her ashore, and as I felt pretty confident I could earn my bread and cheese, married her…

Among other works, Emilia wrote a book In and Around Stamboul about her experiences when Hornby was a diplomat in Constantinople at the time of the Crimean War. In 1853, her younger sister Giulia made an advantageous marriage to Major Albert Vaillant who had served in India and the East Indies.

Francis’s second family, with Charlotte Williams, fared less well, at times bordering destitution. His brother George and later George’s three children (our Clara, Emily and George Augustus) became closely concerned with their welfare, particularly the education of the elder daughters Cecilia and Laura. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the George Macirones felt they could only maintain a relationship with one of Francis’s two wives and seem to have chosen this second family mainly because it was for them that Francis appealed for help. Mary Ann commented to George on the tricky situation:

You heard that Emilia, a daughter of your brother, was going to be married to a Mr Hornby [later Sir Edmund], a barrister. His family is very rich and intimate with the Colliers [also good friends of George’s family]. The Maceronis told them they were not on terms with us. We certainly cannot know both of his families at the same time, nor, had they not been in misery, at any time. However, we will never say anything to compromise them – their position is sufficiently painful.

The name Macirone/Maceroni was unusual enough to arouse curiosity, which could cause confusion and embarrassment. In another letter, Mary Ann reported:

Mr Dilke [editor of the Athenaeum and good friend of George Macirone] spoke of the Maceronis of Weybridge, and wondered how anyone belonging