Being Irish in Victorian London

As a Canadian moving to Ohio, I've noticed there are an awful lot of Canadians in our neighbourhood, which, for me, begs the question: are there more Canadians in this place than there are in other parts of this American city or are we just seeking out our fellow expats in order to form some sense of community? As I research writers in London in the 1890s, primarily Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde who both came from Dublin and stayed in contact during their time in London, I wonder whether they experienced something like what my husband and I have experienced in Ohio.

 

A lot of famous writers were friends in 1890s London, just as they are today. Small communities in big cities are forged on the basis of common bonds, like cultural heritage (being Irish or Canadian), career (through professional associations and the work place), through religion (parish communities and Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), through common interests (Rational Dress), and through just about anything else you can think of that brings people together. Now I'm asking whether writers from Dublin formed their own circle in London in the 1890s, while I explore Victorian Irish communities other Dubliners may have been a part of.

I found a list of Irish Nests in Victorian London, but Stoker and Wilde lived in Chelsea, which had, in the 1890s, become a bit of a nest for affluent artistic types. Stoker lived in a lovely townhouse overlooking the park in Chelsea Way, while Wilde was living in his famous house on Tite Street and they attended each others' parties. Their wives were likely friends as well.

Yet, when I search for Irish communities in Victorian London, I keep coming up with racial slurs and statistics about poverty in Victorian London. English racism toward the Irish was pretty bad in Victorian times, but many Irish people in London avoided this kind of discrimination because of their wealth. Rather than meeting at a watering hole in one of London's Irish nests, I think my Irish writers would have met with W.B. Yeats and friends in the Irish Literary Society.

Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in 1892, though it seems to have waited until 1893 to hold its inaugural meeting. At this meeting, Stopford Brooke gave a talk on "The Need for Getting Irish Literature into the English Tounge."

Like Oscar Wilde's mother, Brooke was an elder member of the group and wrote histories, as well as poetry. Speranza, Wilde's mom, stopped participating in the Society in the mid-1890s because her health was failing, which leads me to suspect that membership involved some kind of active participation and they must have been holding regular meetings.

Outside of the Irish Literary Society, I'm left only with the Irish nests throughout London. In fact, by the time the writers that I'm interested in were moving to London, Irish immigration to the city was on the decline. These writers were also exceptional among their group because of their wealth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a survey of beggars on the streets of London found they were mostly Irish.

The oldest and most populated Irish community was in St Giles in the Fields and Seven Dials in the 1700s. By the nineteenth century, Irish Londoners lived all over the City. By this time, Irish communities had developed in Whitechapel and Saffron Hill, Poplar and Southwark, and perhaps most notoriously, in the Calmel Buildings off Orchard Street in Marylebone. By the 1890s, Irish communities were all over London and my favourite writers could afford to live anywhere they liked... well, most of them could.

None of the writers in my blog lived as poorly as most Irish Londoners did. Due to London's high cost of living, multiple Irish families often shared single-room dwellings. "In one house in Saffron Hill investigated by Thomas Beames in 1849, 88 men, women and children, were found living in a single five room house." Combine overcrowding with medieval plumbing and lack of laundry or bathing facilities and things didn't just get smelly; they also became unsafe, producing shocking mortality rates!

Through his education, Oscar Wilde dropped his Irish accent. He was primarily Anglican, though he flirted with converting to Catholicism. His brother, on the other hand, had the same education, retained his Irish accent and people thought it was charming. Hall Caine and Henry Irving spoke affectionately of Willie Wilde's Irish voice and Willie referred to himself as "an Irish gentleman." However, in Oscar Wilde's circle, Willie Wilde was mocked and Oscar was mocked for having such a brother (mostly due to Willie's drinking), but I wonder how much of it had to do with hanging on to his Irishness.

London was still, in the 1890s, an unkind place to the Irish. It's much easier being Canadian in the U.S.A.

Until my readers correct me, which one day I dearly hope you will, I'm concluding that, like my husband and I, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker simply sought out people they had things in common with and that sometimes one of those things was their heritage. Speranza lived in Ireland longer than her sons and her writing career was entrenched in her national heritage. It makes sense that Yeats's Irish Literary Society was something important for her to participate in, whereas Stoker and Wilde might have had nothing to do with it, but were glad their wives were Irish.

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Wired Love and Thereby Hangs a Tale

By the 1890s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle achieved considerable success, as the author of Sherlock Holmes, but was anxious to start writing something different. In 1892, he wrote a play, which was immediately snatched up by London's most famous actor, Henry Irving, and presented to his theatre manager, Bram Stoker.

In his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker recorded the event, as follows:

WATERLOO 

"KING ARTHUR" 

"DON QUIXOTE" 

ONE day early in March 1892, whilst we were rehearsing Tennyson's play, The Foresters, which in accordance with the author's request was produced for copyright purposes at the Lyceum, Irving came into the office in a hurry. He was a little late. He, Loveday and myself always used the same office, as we found it in all ways convenient for our perpetual consultations. As he came hurrying out to the stage, after putting on the brown soft broad-brimmed felt hat for which he usually exchanged his "topper" during rehearsals, he stopped beside my table where I was writing, and laying a parcel on it said: 

"I wish you would throw an eye over that during rehearsal. It came this morning. You can tell me what you think of it when I come off!" 

I took up the packet and unrolled a number of type-written sheets a little longer than foolscap. I read it with profound interest and was touched to my very heart's core by its humour and pathos. It was very short, and before Irving came in again from the stage I had read it a second time. When he came in he said presently in an unconcerned way: 

"By the way, did you read that play?"

"Yes!" 

"What do you think of it?" 

"I think this," I said, "that that play is never going to leave the Lyceum. You must own it at any price. It is made for you." 

"So I think, too!" he said heartily. 

"You had better write to the author to-day and ask him what cheque we are to send. We had better buy the whole rights!' 

"Who is the author?" 

"Conan Doyle!" 

The author answered at once and the cheque was sent in due course. The play was then named A Straggler of '15. This Irving changed to A Story of Waterloo, when the play was down for production. Later this was simplified to Waterloo. 

Irving fell in love with the character, and began to study it right away. The only change in the play he made was to get Sir Arthur then "Dr." or "Mr." Conan Doyle to consolidate the matter of the first few pages into a shorter space. The rest of the MS. remained exactly as written. 

It was not, however, for nearly two years that he got an opportunity of playing it. It is a difficult matter to find a place for an hour-long play in a working bill. Henry VII., King Lear, and Becket held the Lyceum stage till the middle of 1893. Then came a tour in America lasting up to end of March 1 894. The short London season was taken up with a prearranged reproduction of Faust. 

Then followed a provincial tour from September to Christmas. Here was found the opportunity. The Bells is a short play, and for mere length allows of an addition. 

In the first week of the tour at the Princes Theatre, Bristol, on September 21, 1894, A Story of Waterloo was given. The matter was one of considerable importance in the dramatic world ; not only was Irving to play a new piece, but that piece was Conan Doyle's first attempt at the drama. The chief newspapers of London and some of the greater provincial cities wished to be represented on the occasion ; the American press also wished to send its critical contingent. Accordingly we arranged for a special train to bring the critical force. Hearing that so many of his London journalistic friends were coming an old friend of Irving' s then resident in Bristol, Mr. John Saunders, arranged to give a supper in the Liberal Club, to which they were all invited, together with many persons of local importance. 

The play met with a success extraordinary even for Irving. The audience followed with rapt attention and manifest emotion, swaying with the varying sentiments of the scene. The brief aid to memory in my diary of that day runs: 

"New play enormous success. H. I. fine and great. All laughed and wept. Marvellous study of senility. Eight calls at end." Unfortunately the author was not present to share the triumph, for it would have been a delightful memory for him. He was on a tour in America; "and thereby hangs a tale."

 Amongst the audience who had come specially from London was  Mr. H. H. Kohlsaat, owner and editor of the Chicago Times Herald,  a close and valued friend of Irving and myself. He was booked  to leave for America the next day. When the play was over  and the curtain finally down, he hurried away just in time to  catch the train for Southampton, whence the American Line boat  started in the morning. He got on board all right. The follow-  ing Saturday he arrived in New York, just in time to catch the "flyer," as they call the fast train to Chicago on the New York  Central line. On Sunday night a public dinner was given to Conan  Doyle to which of course Kohlsaat had been bidden. He arrived  too late for the dining part ; but having dressed in the train he  came on to the hotel just as dinner was finished and before  the speeches began. He took a chair next to Doyle and said  to him:

"I am delighted to tell you that your play at Bristol was an  enormous success!"   

"So I am told," said Doyle modestly. "The cables are excellent."   

"They are not half enough!" answered Kohlsaat, who had been  reading in the train the papers for the last week.   

"Indeed! I am rejoiced to hear it! " said Conan Doyle  somewhat dubiously. 

"May I ask if you have had any special  report?"   

"I didn't need any report, I saw it! "   

"Oh, come!" said Conan Doyle, who thought that he was in  some way chaffing him." 

That is impossible!"   

"Not to me! But I am in all human probability the only man on the American continent who was there?" 

Then whilst the  gratified author listened he gave him a full description of the play  and the scene which followed it. To my own mind Waterloo as an acting play is perfect ; and  Irving's playing in it was the high-water mark of histrionic art.  Nothing was wanting in the whole gamut of human feeling. It was a cameo, with all the delicacy of touch of a master-hand  working in the fine material of the layered shell. It seemed to  touch all hearts always. When the dying veteran sprang from his  chair to salute the colonel of his old regiment the whole house  simultaneously burst into a wild roar of applause. This was  often the effect at subsequent performances both at home and in America.

There's so much in this tale that I love, but mostly it's the global nature of the story. Even years later, as Stoker sits writing it, he can hardly believe the speed with which his friend got from the Lyceum Theatre in London to Doyle in Chicago - faster than the cables even! No wonder Victorians were interested in evolution and felt they were sitting on the edge of the future. No wonder we relate to them so well today.

Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes tells a very contemporary story, which, after being forgetten for many years, is resurfacing as something very much like internet dating, and is near the top of my reading list. Stoker's Dracula was also considered a bit of technofiction, in which the protagonists used half a dozen new modes of recording their thoughts to tell the story of a vampire in London. I wonder what Stoker and Doyle would have thought of FaceTime and Skype.

I'm not, however, convinced that Stoker ever used most of the technology he was fascinated with. For many Victorians, new technology was frightening. Sigmund Freud and Queen Victoria were afraid of trains. The first time they showed a movie of a train in London, people fled the theatre afraid that the train was headed right for them!

Back to Stoker's story above, I love almost any story that can incorporate the word foolscap. It's a word I'm afraid will drop out of usage, during my lifetime. And I love that Stoker explains why he shared an office at the Lyceum, though my heart breaks for him a little bit.

He was the theatre manager and he was sitting there writing (maybe working on Dracula, when Irving barged in. Mrs. Stoker didn't like it when he wrote at home because he liked to act out his characters, so maybe the theatre was the right place for him to be writing, but he probably justified his sharing an office to his father too.

Abraham Stoker, Bram Stoker's father, was a petty Dublin cleric, who felt he had let his employers walk all over him throughout his career and wanted his sons to have more than him. Stoker doted on Irving and still had to share an office - poor guy.

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The Unlikely Archivist

Much of what we know about writers in London in the 1890s comes from an unlikely source, with a complicated and controversial past. Perhaps, the wife of a writer as the source doesn't seem so unlikely, but that she was such a devoted archivist, considering her background, does come as a bit of a surprise.

I'm talking about Mrs. Mary Alice Caine née Chandler.

When this beautiful woman was thirteen years-old, her step-father did something he could be arrested for today and my stomach turns just thinking about it. When Mary Chandler was only 13 years-old and working at her step-father's restaurant/coffee shop with her sister, the Manx writer, Hall Caine was staying nearby with bachelor friend and frequented the restaurant. One day, he asked that their meal be delivered to them and Chandler's step-father sent her and her sister to make the delivery. Afterwards, he implied that something indecent happened during the delivery and demanded that the two single men make "honest women" of his step-daughters. He didn't really care if the men married the girls, he just wasn't willing to look after his step-daughters anymore.

Caine refused to marry Chandler. Evidence suggests he was embarrassed by her age. Chandler's step-father turned her out of the house, presuming Caine would take her in. He did.

Caine had a sister Chandler's age, who attended a boarding school called Sevenoaks. Caine swore his sister, Lily, to secrecy and sent Chandler to live with her there. Secrecy mattered because he was embarrassed by Chandler's age and didn't want his devoutly religious parents to find out he had been having sex with her.

Chandler attended Sevenoaks for just six months before she became pregnant with Caine's first child. Caine delayed for a month in registering the birth, then perjured himself by describing Chandler as "Mary Alice Caine, formerly Chandler." They didn't legally marry until 1886 in Edinburgh, where Caine could avoid bad publicity. Even then, he lied, giving her age as 23, when she was 17 to his 33.

In spite of all that, they seem to have had many children and a happy marriage. Caine grew successful writer in the 1890s. They became fabulously wealthy and bought a big house, where he and Chandler enjoyed posing for photos on the terrace and she became obsessed with scrapbooking.

Scrapbooking was a popular Victorian pastime. Chandler kept scrapbooks about everything that happened in Caine's career. She had piles and piles of scrapbooks and was known within their influential circle as a meticulous record keeper, so much so that later in their lives when people, like Bram Stoker, were writing memoirs and histories of their friends' lives, they would come to her to borrow her scrapbooks.

Beginning in the 15th century, commonplace books became popular in England as a way to compile recipes, quotes, correspondence and more. Friendship albums became popular in the 16th century. These albums were the first scrapbooks. In 1775, James Granger published a history of England with several blank pages at the end of the book. The pages were designed to allow the book's owner to personalize the book with his own memorabilia.

I think there must have been a lot of Victorian women, like Chandler, who are responsible for documenting the history of the period. As an archivist (in one of my former lives), I even got to work on one such scrapbook, that served as a record of a trip to Boston that two young Victorian women went on. It was filled with letters, pages of their diaries, postcards that they wrote, but forgot to send, and photos, of course.

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The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks

The Lyceum Theatre, in the 1890s, was best known for its stars: Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. Irving cultivated a reputation for himself as a serious professional. He purchased the theatre in 1878 and was the first actor ever knighted for his professional achievements in the performing arts. Irving's earnest reputation, however, was largely due to the earnest devotion of his manager, Bram Stoker, who, through Irving's success, also managed to maintain a place at the top of London Society. Although, Irving was wholeheartedly devoted to raising the status of the performing arts among his contemporaries, Stoker really did all of the earnest business work, leaving Terry free to slide down the bannister from her dressing room, when making an entrance, and Irving free to contemplate other things, like beefsteak!

The Lyceum was the centre of Irving's highly successful career, but was also a place where he gathered people to eat a lot of beef (and drink a lot of wine). The present-day Beefsteak Club is (intentionally?) located on Irving Street in London. In the 1890s, Irving had his Beefsteak Room behind the stage of the Lyceum theatre. He decorated it in the most elaborate gothic fashion and used it to hold star-studded events. Stoker organized most of these events, but Irving and Terry presided over them, "as if they were hosting a royal court."

With help from his friends, 18th-century actor, Richard Estcourt, established the first Beefsteak Club in 1705, but this club lasted less than ten years. Twenty years later, another actor, John Rich, established the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks. The Society was a big success within the performing arts community and was joined by Samuel Johnson in 1780. The Prince of Wales even joined in 1785. Members wore a blue coat and buff waistcoat with brass buttons, with a gridiron motif that read "Beef and liberty." And yes, together they sat around eating steak and potatoes. The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks met regularly until 1867.

Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, courtesy of "Supersizers Go: Regency"

The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks was revived as the Beefsteak Club in 1876. Initially, organizers wanted to rent the room at the Lyceum, but didn't get the chance, until Irving bought the Lyceum two years later. Beefsteakers were and are an odd bunch. Two features of the club were, and are, that all members and guests sit together at a single long table, and that by tradition the club steward and the waiters are all addressed as "Charles."

Curiously, the beefsteak was (and maybe still is) seen as a symbol of patriotic Whig concepts of liberty and prosperity. The beefsteak fit with Irving's vision for the Lyceum, where he hoped to establish a place of cultural importance that would firmly legitimize theatre as an art form. I suspect he was more fond of the famous historic figures, who once belonged to the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, than he was of Whig concepts of anything, especially because he and Stoker established a strong relationship between the theatre and Tory Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

Though I'm not sure if Gladstone ever dined there, Irving liked to host intellectual celebrities, like Franz Lizst, as well as travelling celebrities and other actors, which is where and how the Actor's Benevolent Fund was formed.

In most accounts, Irving's Beefsteak Room is described in the most respectable of Victorian terms, but Irving had the occasional wild rumpus in this well-appointed room behind the stage in his theatre. Oscar Wilde's brother partook of some shenanigans there. And, sometimes, the police even had to break up a few ruckuses at the door. If not through having a good time with Beefeaters, I think Irving achieved his goals (with Stoker's help) through the Lyceum theatre.

As I already mentioned, Irving was knighted in 1895, the first ever accorded an actor. He was also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Dublin (LL.D 1892), Cambridge (Litt.D 1898), and Glasgow (LL.D 1899). He also received the Komthur Cross, 2nd class, of the Saxe-Ernestine House Order of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Saxe-Meiningen.

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Enchanting Woman, Tragic Life

I found this enchanting collection of photos of actress Gabrielle Ray, while I was looking at portraits of Victorian women for inspiration. Not being able to read the words on a page drives me crazy, which might be why I was driven to find out more about Ray.

In her day, Ray was regarded as one of the most beautiful actresses in the London theatre and had the kind of celebrity status Princess Diana did, as one of the most photographed women in the world. She began her career at age ten, in 1893 and was most popular around the turn of the century. Sadly, after a failed marriage, Ray never regained her former success and spent much of her later years in mental hospitals.

She was the fourth child of an iron merchant in Stockport and amazingly made her debut at the Royal Princess theatre in 1893. I don't know how she got from the little town called Cheadle, where she was born, to London's West End, but she was met with instant success!

During the 1890s, she also danced in the Blackpool Ballet.

She married Eric Loder in 1912, but he was unfaithful and the marriage only lasted two years. It's said that, after this split, she suffered from depression and alcoholism, which probably lead to her nervous breakdown in 1936. She was institutionalized for the next 40 years.

I've included some of my favourite photos of Ray here, but strongly recommend a visit to the site that I found them on: http://yablor.ru/blogs/gabriel-rey1883-1973-zvezda-s-tragicheskoy-sudboy/2492657

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Miss Behaviour

The narrator in my book was a real woman, not a famous woman, not a talented woman, not an especially pretty woman, though it is said that she had nice lips and looked like a lily. She came from a respectable home, but didn't always do respectable things. I don't think she was a prostitute of any kind, but I think she may have met a few. I know there were many other women like her in the 1890s, but it is so difficult to find information about them because of the overwhelming urge for these women to appear "respectable."

I know that not all Victorian women were obsessed with being respectable. Oscar Wilde's mother disliked the term “respectable” and wouldn’t have anyone respectable in her house. She went by the name Speranza and liked shocking people. Still, many people respected her.

I'm not denying that many Victorians were obsessed with respectability. Bram Stoker, who was a close personal friend of Speranza, lived out his life in a sexless marriage and there's no evidence of him ever hiring a prostitute (though he might have actually been gay - don't believe me? Google his relationship with Walt Whitman...).

What I am saying is that for these Victorians, obsessed with respectability, maybe their obsession with it was part of the trap. Being a middle-class women probably meant that there was a lot of pressure on a woman to follow her family's wishes and avoid saying and doing dozens of things every day, but it didn't mean they all avoided those things all of the time. These Victorian women paid for their transgrassions, socially, see Degeneration, Decadence & Drink, but I don't think we can sum up a culture so easily.

"In order to merit protection a woman had to be obedient, submissive, and incapable of defending herself. Chivalry was reserved for those women who both needed and deserved protection -- a relatively select group. The right to protection was based on the assumption that women were weaker, softer, and generally very different from the strong men who protected them. Therefore protection was often reserved for middle class women. While it was possible for a working class woman to be respectable, some of the more delicate aspects of the feminine ideal were clearly beyond her." - Caroline Conley

We know from court records that most sexual assaults against women happened in the home. Most of these were by someone that was known to the victim. We also know that this kind of vulnerability did not fit with the Victorian ideal of respectability and didn't make those women any more worthy of the chivalrous protection of her male relatives. In many cases that went unreported, there are documents that indicate many women were even forced to mary their attackers.

Yet, as Conley asserts, it was possible for a working class woman to be respectable. Indeed, there was likely a working-class version of respectability, that may fit into some of the gray areas I wish to explore. Now, just because the rest of this blog post is about prostitution doesn't mean that I think that there wasn't a huge gray area between angel of the household and prostitute. My narrator wasn't either. She was just a woman, but the rest of this post is about prostitutes.

Website after website, journal after journal talks about how poor and working class women were forced into prostitution. When they talk about middle-class women breaking the mold, they overwhelming put it in a positive light and talk about women getting educations. But there were middle-class women who were not the least bit "respectable" and who made a living sleeping with men or having a boyfriend, someone we might call a Sugar Daddy today. These women were middle-class prostitutes who settled down into respectable middle-class lives - often with men who basically used to be their Johns.

As Mike J. Higgins says about male sexuality at this time, "Different contexts brought out different types of sexual behaviour." Unless we are talking about male homosexuality, we are also discussing women's sexuality when we talk about men's sexuality and I think that Higgins' observation is incredibly astute, especially when we consider the different spheres women were expected to operate within.

The ideology of the angel of the household restricted the way that many middle-class women performed their identities. It also changed the way that men interacted with them. In a letter to the Times (4 November 1847), "Joseph" writes:

I doubt if it ever occurred to any man to attempt the seduction of a woman whom he really believed to be modest and virtuous.

For a man to call an unmarried middle-class woman (angel of the household) by her first name, implied that he wanted to marry her! Meanwhile, many poor and working-class girls were called by their first names all the time. A poorer woman named Kathryn might have been called Kate, but "Kate" was also a slang term for prostitute!

Through my research, I'm growing to believe that poor and working-class women "turned tricks" because it was expected or assumed. The context, in which poorer women lived, was one, in which men behaved differently toward them than they would the "purer" angel of the household. I've also grown to believe that the more middle-class a prostitute was the greater her physical mobility throughout social spaces.

Physical mobility through social spaces: I think that a poor or working-class prostitute could be seen in a working class pub without anyone falling off their bar stool. I think that a better-dressed middle-class prostitute might have been escorted into Henry Irving's Beefsteak Room.

Please, if you disagree with any of these thoughts, let me know. The quality of my story depends on it!

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Woman's World Magazine

Fashion is such an essential part of the mundus muliebris of our day, that it seems to me absolutely necessary that its growth, development, and phases should be duly chronicled.

Oscar Wilde was editor of Woman's World Magazine from 1887-1889 and wrote the above in response to criticisms of the magazine's fashion pages. As a writer, trying to recapture some sense of the times, I'm incredibly grateful to those, like Wilde, who documented the frivolity of their times.

Wildeans often think of Oscar Wilde's love of ancient Greece in terms of how he idealized the ancient Greek approaches to men's sexuality, but we can see how he used the classics as models for women's lives as well, when we look at articles he published in Woman's World during those years, articles like “The Women of Greece,” “Woman and Democracy,” “Roman Women at the Beginning of the Empire,” and “A Pompeian Lady.”

The Woman’s World, edited by Mr. Oscar Wilde, gracefully got up as it is in every respect, has taken a high place among the illustrated magazines. Written by women, for women and about women, striking out an original line, it merited the success it has obtained. - The Times (December 1888)

In the 1890s, journalism was increasingly seen as an acceptable career path for a woman. Oscar Wilde's mother supplemented her income this way, she even wrote a piece for Woman's World called "Historic Women." Oscar Wilde's contributors were established female writers, society women, students, professional women and feminist campaigners. Julia Wedgewood, a well-known suffragist, authored "Women and Democracy." 

Readers followed social issues and philanthropy and were overwhelmingly feminist. Of course, with Oscar Wilde at its helm, Woman's World became associated with aestheticism, but it was also linked to women in pursuit of higher education.

Something new that I learned today is the an 1880s and 90s synonym for the "New Woman" was "Girton Girl" because Girton referred to England's first residential college for women, established in 1869. Annie Edwards published a novel called A Girton Girl (1885), which has been digitized by Google, and was published in three volumes, dealing with many of the themes of a late-Victorian New Woman's life.

A laboratory at Girton College Cambridge (1900) 

Poetically, Elaine Showalter writes:

New Women and decadent artists were linked together as twin monsters of a decadent age, sexual anarchists who blurred the boundaries of gender.

I imagine them as very well-dressed and likable monsters, which reminds me that I started this tangent thinking about what my protagonists would wear to a very formal dinner party in 1889/90. 

Toward this end, Oscar Wilde called upon the ancient Greeks and wrote in  Woman's World that women could follow the ancient principles of Greek dress by suspending their dresses from their shoulders, even with sleeves, thereby creating rich and rippling folds.

Most of the information in this post comes from my own research and an essay by Isobel Hurst "Ancient and Modern Women in Woman's World."

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