Charlotte's web: A Middlesex University resource spinning Charlotte Mew's life with her words

"The most detailed and hyperlinked author site that I have ever seen" (Dirty Laundry blog 9.5.2007)
"No soul can breathe buried alive beneath the weight of all these tabulated facts." (Charlotte Mew)

Charlotte Mew Chronology

with mental, historical and geographical connections
linking with her own words, and listing her essays, stories, poems and friends.

Betty Falkenberg with Andrew Roberts

Introduction: life - inference - intensity - history - science - Chicks - evolution - dissolution - sensual - God - language - madness - faerie - spirit

Charlotte Mew was born in 1869. Her father was an architect and her mother the daughter and granddaughter of architects. Charlotte was the second of four children who survived early childhood. Their nursery and their childhood was watched over by Elizabeth Goodman, the servant who stirred their imaginations even though she did not value their writings. Charlotte wrote about her in An Old Servant (1913). Charlotte's first published work was a short story, Passed in 1894. The journey in Passed was through Clerkenwell. The Country Sunday , published before The London Sunday, in 1905, has been interpreted as an account of her childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight. Charlotte's best known work is a collection of poems, The Farmers Bride, in 1916. This includes the poem In a Nunhead Cemetery relating to her brother, Henry Herne Mew, who died in an asylum in 1901. Her sister, Freda, was also a patient in an asylum. On the Asylum Road and Ken are two of Charlotte's poems that explore her thoughts and feelings about insanity and asylums. Charlotte died from swallowing disinfectant in 1928. Freda lived in the mental hospital until she died in 1958.

Inference: Charlotte Mew published stories, essays and poems. She was very determined not to provide anyone with even the briefest of autobiography. I think we should be cautious about inferring her life from her writing. Even the most biographical of her essays could, in theory, be complete fiction; and poetry has a structure and content of its own, unconstrained by any relation to the life that generated it. One of the reasons for constructing a life and works of Charlotte Mew in this inter-linked web form, is to allow any speculation about the relation of her writing to her life to be tested against other sources of information. Her writing in Passed (fiction), An Old Servant and The Hay Market (New Statesman articles) reveal close links to the life of Elizabeth Goodman and the geography of Clerkenwell and Cumberland Market and this may be grounds for inferring links in other works where relationships cannot be so firmly established. It is not, however, intended to obscure the creative insight of Charlotte's art by reading it as a diary. Ken, for example, is a poem, and should not be read as a description of Freda Mew - Anymore than the old town with its nuns and priests is a description of Carisbrooke - Knowing about Freda, however, does allow us to think more about the issues on which Ken gives us insight. Without, in any way, distorting the internal unity of the art, we can say that Charlotte's writing maintains a remarkable relationship to her life and experience. This is so much so that Mary Davidow was convinced that E.V. Knox's parody of Charlotte's poetry revealed an insider's information about Charlotte's secrets. I do not think it does. Without his knowing it, the one short book of poems had revealed to him the architecture of the poet's life. No wonder Charlotte was upset.

Intensity: There is a concentrated intensity to Charlotte's perception. Twice, she suggests she shares her vision with the blind. (See The Country Sunday and Men and Trees). It is sight that hears and feels and smells every dimension of the immediate, imminent, reality and all its passion and energy. Her essay The Wheat, first published in 1954 shows how the soul of a bank worker is revealed in one delirious utterance. In this essay, she writes about "the throb in the breasts of things that ought to be flying". A few years before her suicide, she wrote in Domus Caedet Arborem about the city crouching, waiting to spring on living things. In her poem Madeleine in Church Charlotte describes how (from childhood?) Madeleine suffered an intensity of being and seeing that was, at once, mystical and sensual.
I could hardly bear
The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
The thick, close voice of musk,
The jessamine music on the thin night air,
Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere -
The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair
In A Country Book she explains, quoting Richard Jefferies, that there are no words to describe the colours of a dandelion - But quoting Byron she exclaims "Oh that my words were colours". How she conveys the immediacy of her perception, naming but not describing the colours, can be seen in her description of the flowers In the Curé's Garden.This, like much of Charlotte's writing, from Passed onwards, is about a dialogue between a spiritual and material reality: "God's parle with dust". In Passed she had discovered in a kiss "a page of gospel" that the priest facing the spiritual, with his back to the material, "might never read". In The Forest Road, the intensity of love is too much for her. She hears her soul singing amongst the trees, and escapes.

History: Usually quietly, many of Charlotte Mew's writings explore issues of the history she lived through. Her first publication, Passed reflects on her journeys into the slums of London, in the late 19th century, at the time when sociologists and religious leaders were making the same exploration. The significance of the century's turning is recorded in her poems on the death and funeral of Queen Victoria. In Notes in a Brittany Convent (1901) the new sciences approach old religion. Mary Stuart in Fiction, written during the miltant suffragette protests, argues her passion for victory. Men and Trees is not quiet comment. It attacks the destruction of the Congo, the Amazon and the people who live there, and defends the "barbarian" against the "culte du moi". Her censored poem Ken picks up on the theme of relations with people of "poor wits" that she raises in Passed, and may be her personal protest against the ideas behind the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. The Great War for Civilisation is commemorated in two 1915 poems, and reflected on in The Cenotaph in 1919. She is present at the birth of Labour, with the article on the life of Elizabeth Goodman and on the life in Cumberland Market, published in The New Statesman in 1913 and 1914, (poosibly) reviews in the Daily Herald in 1919, and her poem "Old Shepherd's Prayer" in the first edition of The New Leader in 1922. As she herself approches death, she sees in the destruction of the trees by her home, to make room for more buildings, something symbolic.

Science: Charlotte Mew's prose and poetry has in it reflections of the development of natural and social sciences. Natural scientists figure prominently amongst her circle of friends: notably Harriette Chick, the Tansleys, the Brownes and Francis Wall Oliver. In 1901, when Charlotte's brother died of tuberculosis, the new science bacteriology, that Harriette Chick had made her speciality, was reflected in Charlotte's writing. The germ theory of disease, applied to cancer, may even have been an element in the ideas that led to Charlotte's suicide. Brittany, where Charlotte stayed and whose mythologies she studied, was also the location of Francis Wall Oliver's pioneer field trips in the even newer science of ecology. Charlotte's interest in what we might now call "green issues" is evident throughout her writing, but reaches a manifesto peak in her (1913) Men and Trees essays. Charlotte regarded herself as an urban being, but with nature beneath her, in what we might call her subconscious. The Society for Psychical Research would have called it her subliminal self. This duality of being is reflected in many of her poems, including The Changeling, where the fairy call of nature draws the child away from the noise and urbanity of the nursery. This occupation with another consciousness is present in Charlotte's writing from the beginning and may partly explain the new interest in her work that appears to coincide with the interest in psychoanalysis and associated ideas that developed about the time of the first world war. The complexity of levels of consciousness may be strongest in her unfinished story Aglaë about the passions of a spinster aunt.

Chicks In the world that Charlotte Mew wrote about, science was not isolated from art and literature: And sociology was related to the natural sciences in a way that it no longer is. To recognise Charlotte's world we must recover these relationships. We are helped to do so by her friendship with the Chick sisters. The Chick sisters, and their descendants, were active in the arts and the sciences and it is clear from Harriette's diary that conversation flowed easily across all areas. The science of evolution was embedded in literature in the bookplate that Arthur Tansley (Edith's husband) designed. Similarly, Tansley's friend botanist Frederick Frost Blackman (Elsie's husband) was a patron of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Tansley's ecology might be regarded as a development of the biology of Herbert Spencer. Spencer sought the most general laws with the widest application and his evolutionary biology lay at the heart of his social science.

Evolution Before Herbert Spencer's evolutionary biology there was Georg Friedrich Hegel - Henri Saint Simon and Auguste Comte - with the concept of the evolution of mind in history that Comte formulated as a progress from religion (theology) through philosophy (metaphysics) to science (positivism). Edward Burnett Tylor's application of these ideas to the development of empirical anthropology in Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (1871) was published when Charlotte Mew was one or two years old. William Robertson Smith's application of anthropological thought to the Bible had been published by the time she was twenty one and James Frazer's application of anthropological thinking to the crucifixion of Christ was published when she was thirty. Her detailed analysis of these ideas, in Men and Trees, was published when she was in her early 40s. Men and Trees is an anthropological study that makes full use of Tylor's concept that present culture incorporates survivals of the past. The sacrifice of Christ on a tree, as analysed by Frazer, is central to Charlotte Mew's moral commentary on her times.

Dissolution The first part of Charlotte Mew's life was shaped by her family's objective of perpetuating itself. She and her brothers and sisters carried forward the names of relatives that would otherwise have been lost, and, with the names, endowments. The rest of her life, and that of her sister Anne, was shaped by their decision to extinguish the family line, to exterminate its taint. Whilst accepting the constraint that she should not have children, Charlotte took issue with other implications of the dominant sciences of evolution and dissolution; eugenics and social hygiene. Those sciences she leaves unnamed, but she battles explicitly with the related philosophy of the cult of selfishness and the omnipresence and omniscience of the market place. In Men and Trees, she argues that civilisation has replaced the old gods and devils by the worship of self. Civilisation is shocked by the blood sacrifices of the old religions, but it has its own blood sacrifices in the commercial exploitation of the rubber trees of the equatorial forests and the destruction of the barbarian cultures of their inhabitants. In Herbert Spencer's language of science, evolution is fuelled by the survival of the fittest and civilisation is the victory of the individual. Its opposite is dissolution, the degeneration of races and individuals - a dissolution that includes insanity in the individual as well as the degeneration of races. In Passed, in Ken and in On the Asylum Road, Charlotte describes the degenerate in terms that discover virtues in their being. In The Cenotaph, the empty tomb of the son or lover testifies against the cult of selfishness. It stands in the market place asking who will buy and sell those things that should not be bought and sold.

Sensual Charlotte's world is sensual. It is her sensuality that unites materialism with spirit. Like William Blake, who she much resembles, she sees [the] world in a grain of sand. Some of her writing pivots on death. Through death, she brings life to life. This is apparent in her comparison of this life with the idea of heaven in her poem In the Fields
Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?
And if there is
Will the heart of any everlasting thing
Bring me these dreams that take my breath away?

Two other striking death images are materialist ones. The first is one of death being like a candle going out. It is taught her by Miss Bolt, the agnostic needlewoman whose worldly wisdom tutored her childhood. As a young woman, in her poem An Ending, Charlotte uses the same metaphor to confront the religious judge (Samuel Chick?) who thinks she has missed her way. Her soul is "just a spark alight for her". In death it goes out. But the beauty of the sensual is heaven you would go to hell to experience again: A golden street? Give me the yellow wheat!. But this is not a spiritless or irreligious materialism, nor is it the materialism of the culte du moi. The golden wheat of her youth is the same experience of the spirit of sensual reality that enlightens grieving lovers and mothers at The Cenotaph and the delirious bank worker in The Wheat

The second death image is of a body rotting to a skeleton, whilst the hair continues to grow. This can be seen as part of Charlotte's exploration of the phenomena, the experience, of life and death. It is an image in her "mad-woman" poem The Forest Road in which the soul or spirit of the woman struggles with her body. In In Nunhead Cemetery the experienced contrast is emphasised by the word THAT:
There is something horrible about a flower;
This, broken in my hand, is one of those
He threw it in just now: it will not live another hour;
There are thousands more: you do not miss a rose.
One of the children hanging about
Pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled
This morning after THAT was carried out;
There is something terrible about a child.
We were like children last week, in the Strand;
That was the day you laughed at me ...
Life and death are experiences for the living. Requiescat says it would be "strange" if the dead had memories. In the experience of the living, however, life penetrates death (as in the growing hair) and death penetrates life (as in the living becoming something terrible in the face of the clay of death). Blake's Innocence and Experience comes into my mind as I read these images. The child becomes experienced by death, as Charlotte had. In The Fête, where only a woman's hair belongs to God, the adolescent becomes experienced through sex. In this poem, sex experience is not only development, it is also has elements of dying.
There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring -
The smell of beasts, the smell of dust - The Enchanted Thing!
All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern
And the black trunks of trees. Only the hair
Of any woman can belong to God.
The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod,
There had been violets there,
I shall not care
As I used to do when I see the bracken burn.

God In Charlotte Mew's writing, making one (atonement) appears more of a problem than even our all-knowing - all-suffering - all loving creator fathoms. Fallen flesh has questions that God does not answer. His arms are full of broken things. The world is fractured and, in its fracturing, we see, not only its cruelty, but its beauty. The trees murdered to make way for the Quaker temple, recall that even a rat should be alive in the spring. And heaven cannot equal the beauty that passes as the shadows of leaves on growing grass. The gift of Charlotte's writing is it problems. Even as she writes that only a woman's hair belongs to God, one realises that her hair has become the centre of sensual desire.

Language The language of Charlotte Mew's writing frequently includes the combined use of French and English, usually in dialogue; sometimes just in titles. There is occasional use of Latin and Spanish, but no German. At times, dialect is also used (English and French - See Pêcheresse). These features can be related to her analysis of culture and its relation to social relations and the nature of being. It is not just that she speaks more than one language at once, she also explores more than one world at once.......... In 1921, Punch depicted Charlotte as a precocious English school girl adding simple French phrases to her poems. One poems that it appears to parody, uses French to capture a children's street game. "'Tiens! que veux-tu acheter?' Renée cries, 'Mais, pour quat'sous, des oignons,' , Jean replies. And one pays down with pebbles from the shore." (The Narrow Door)

Madness E.V. Knox's parody of Charlotte Mew's poetry begins
The moonlight drips on the parlour floor;
I shall go mad if no one wipes it up.
When I was one year old Nurse used to say,
"It's no more use to cry when milk is spilt
Than cry about the moon." There were big bars
Across the nursery window
Knox conveys the image of a writer threatened with madness, and confinement, whose poetry uses the experience. Her poems also communicate to him that her visions are fashioned by her life and her family. To steal words from Freda Mew's casenotes, the "predisposing cause" of Charlotte's "madness", and her poetry, is "probably heredity", but not in the biological sense. In the sense that it is steeped in the experience of her family, her childhood, and her intimate relations. Madness in Charlotte's writing is softened or romanticised: She seeks to "obscure the tragic side by a gentleness of treatment". As is common for her time, her image combines elements of mental illness and retardation or learning disability. There are also similarities of form between her pictures of madmen (for example, Ken) and her pictures of fairies (for example, The Changeling), and between her pictures of these and her depicting people and cultures in contact with nature (for example Arracombe Wood). Madness is sometimes another world cut of from sanity by clouded glass, but sometimes her own being. More often, sanity and madness are two worlds between which we pass as in the same way that we pass from the nursery floor to fairyland.

Faerie - The word faerie can be used for the mythical land of fays (fairies), its inhabitants, and its enchantment. When Charlotte Mew was writing, the theosophists were drawing on many religions and mythologies to create their own world vision. Their sources including belief in elementals, faerie forces or spirits of the elements, from which races of humans and gods could have evolved. Charlotte was sufficiently close to theosophist circles in 1914 to have a story about a woman with supernatural communication published in The Theosophist. The death in 1895 of Bridget Cleary, an Irish labourer's wife , illustrates the relation in (some) popular cultures of the world of faerie and changes in human personality. I have argued that this theme of changing being and changing consciousness runs through much of Charlotte's writing. It is what Baring- Gould would have called a "radical" (motif) to her stories. The word and the motif that symbolises this most effectively, in relation to fairies, is changeling. The Farmer's Bride (1911/1912) is a fay, or fairy - The Changeling, a children's poem, (1912/1913) was published at the same time as Men and Trees, which finishes with Joan of Arc, as a child, dancing round a fairy tree. In The Smile, the child (then woman) who can see the enchanting smile without climbing to the enchantress, as others have to, had, as a baby, the characteristics that might have been interpreted as indicating a changeling.

In Men and Trees, Charlotte partly explains the significance of fairies to the twentieth century. She says

"The Renaissance revered the ancient world, the nineteenth century was moved and lit by the Renaissance; we have no patience even with the nineteenth century. The past is a stupid corpse. The inspiration of the woods, the forest voices, the fairy dancers ... these are 'of old time' ... We must not speak in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest, says Hawthorne - [nowadays] Everything happens in the market-place. Where else? But the market-place is not real: the real things are happening in the forest still."

Spirit The spirit that animates Charlotte Mew's writings appears accesible to agnostic and believer alike, and disturbing to the proconceptions of all of us. Siegried Sasson wrote to, and of, Charlotte that poets "carry the world on their shoulders... And in their eyes the future of civilisation struggles to survive". Charlotte, he said, was "intensely" aware of her "responsibility" and sustained it "nobly". The world that is carried in Charlotte's writing is the material world of flesh and death, of life and grief, of desire and reverence. The spirit that animates it is "Everything there is to hear in the heart of hidden things".

eighth century AD Dream of the Rood carved in runes on a cross in Ruthwell churchyard in Scotland. Used by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

24.9.1541 Death of Paracelsus. His Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus [Latin title, but German text] was published after his death. In it he associated sprit people with air, earth, fire and water. Nymphis, nymph, undina or undine is the water spirit. Sylphis, sylph, or sylvestris is the air spirit. Pygmaeis, pygmy, gnomus or gnome is the earth spirit. Salamandris, salamander or vulcanus is the fire spirit. This is the main source of the idea of "elementals", linking science and fairie in the theories of theosophists and others (late 19th century onwards). African pygmies were perceived by some as real descendants of the earth elementals in an evolutionary process. Charlotte Mew published one story in The Theosophist (1914) and drew on the idea of elemental races in Men and Trees (1913).

1648

6.9.1648 - 30.11.1648 the "Treaty of Newport" between Parliament and King Charles

"During the negotiations the king and his friends occupied the grammar school and the Parliamentary Commissioners the Bull Inn, while the meetings took place in the town hall. The subject of the negotiations related chiefly to the governance of the church and the militia, but the treaty led to no satisfactory results." From: 'Parishes: Newport', A History of the County of Hampshire: Volume 5 (1912), pp. 253-65. available at British History Online

In Isle of Wight dialect, a young or wild bull is a "bugle". The Bull Inn of 1648 is the Bugle Inn that the Mew family acquired.

1650

Son-Days
by Henry Vaughan

Bright shadows of true rest! some shoots of bliss;
Heaven once a week;
The next world's gladness preposses'd in this;
A day to seek
Eternity in time; the steps by which
We climb above all ages; lamps that light
Man through his heap of dark days; and the rich
And full redemption of the whole week's flight!

The pulleys unto headlong man; Time's bower;
The narrow way;
Transplanted Paradise; God's walking hour,
The cool o' th' day!
The creature's jubilee; God's parle with dust;
Heaven here; man on those hills of myrrh, and flowers;
Angels descending; the returns of trust;
A gleam of glory after six-days-showers!

The Church's love-feasts; Time's prerogative,
And interest
Deducted from the whole; the combs, and hive,
And home of rest.
The milky way chalk'd out with suns; a clue
That guides through erring hours; and in full story
A taste of heav'n on earth; the pledge and cue
Of a full feast; and the out-Courts of glory.

The London Plane: Platanus x acerifolia (Aiton) Willdenow is a hybrid of the oriental and occidental planes, first described in writing, in Britain, in the Oxford Botanical Gardens in 1670. The London Planes were important to Charlotte Mew throughout her life. See Doughty Street - Gordon Street Map - Men and Trees - 1922. For some other planes in London see Bunhill and Wick Woodlands.
In her poems, the house sparrow Passer domesticus:, lives in the trees, the London pigeon sits on the houses and seagulls visit the town.

About 1731 Thomas Mew of Newport, Hampsire, born. He married Elizabeth Hains (born about 1735, of Newport) on 16.10.1756. Their (14?) children included Thomas christened 23.3.1757 - William christened 17.12.1758 - John christened 14.1.1761 - James christened 25.1.1763 - Richard (born 1764), a great grandfather of Charlotte Mew - Mary christened 27.1.1769, died 31.12.1770 - Mark christened 15.3.1771, died 7.5.1810 - Mary christened 14.7.1773 - George (baptised 1775), from whom Charlotte's grandfather took over the Bugle Inn in 1829, Anne, born about 1777, died 8.4.1781 - Joseph Haynes christened 20.5.1782 - William christened 2.1.1784 - and Benjamin (baptised 19.10.1786), who founded Mew's brewery. The evidence suggests to me that the whole Mew family were involved with one another and that the various businesses in the Isle of Wight and Lymington were family concerns, at least whilst fathers survived to hold the unit together.

1754 William Borlase (1695-1772) Antiquities of Cornwall published at Oxford. Used by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

1.10.1764: Richard Mew, the son of Thomas, christened Newport, Isle of Wight. He married Ann Coleman on 31.7.1787. One of their sons was Henry Mew, paternal grandfather of Charlotte Mew, and licencee of the Bugle Inn, in Newport.

All but one of Richard and Ann's known children were born in Newport. The children are: Edward born about 1789, died 26.4.1789 - Henry and Edward both christened 28.12.1792 - Richard christened 19.3.1794, died 9.2.1821 - Charles born 17.4.1795, christened 28.6.1795, died 24.1.1796 - Sarah, born 19.7.1797, christened 19.12.1797, married Robert Yele of Newchurch 3.1.1822 (no children traced) - Stephen born (Carisbooke) about 1804, died 23.1.1806.

Richard died at Newchurch on 25.5.1830, aged 63, and was buried at Newport. Ann died 28.1.183something, aged 71 and was buried at Newport

isle of wight index: 1775 - 1786 - 1790 - 1814 - 1824 - 1826 - 1829 - 1832 - 1845 - 1851 - 1859 - 1865 directory - holidays - St Pauls Church - 1881 South Fairlee Farm - the organ - County Asylum - 1901 death of Victoria - 1905 Country Sunday - 1914 The Hay Market - 1921 - 1958 Freda Mew dies

25.8.1775 George Mew (son of Thomas and Elizabeth) christened Newport. He may have married Christian Ceser in Newport on 10.11.1799. Alfed Ceser Mew was born 21.11.1802 in Newport and christened 25.9.1803 - Kate Mew born 1.11.1807, Christened 13.1.1808

23.3.1776 Henry Edward Kendall (senior), one of Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfathers, born. Although he is said to have been born York (Colvin, H.M. 1995), the census for 1841, 1861 and 1871 shows him as born in Middlesex (Marylebone - 1861, 1871). Colvin says that he married twice and had a son and two daughters. I have traced two sons and a daughter: The eldest son is Henry Edward Kendall (junior) (born 1805). Both Henry Edwards were architects. The daughter is Sophia Kendall (later Cubitt) (born 1811) - These are the two mentioned by Colvin. In 1822, Kendall senior married Ann(e) Lyon. (see 1841) . They had a son Charles Kendall, born 1829. Henry Edward senior died in 1875.

architecture index: 1776 - 1805 - 1823 - 1824 court and prison - 1828 seaside fashion - Cubitt wedding - 1832 - 1834 committee - 1835 to 1837 Rosherville - 1838 workhouses - 1838 schools - 1841 Kendalls - Italianate - Osborne House - Kendall and Pope - 1846 asylum - 1852 churches - Manning and Mew? Designs for schools Modern Architecture 1857 Fred joins in the asylum years - 1863 fantasy house - 1863 - 1875 - 1878 Vestry Hall - 1885 - 1887 - 1888 Clerkenwell Church - 1894 Passed - 1895 Fred listed - 1898 -

Mary Herne, Charlotte Mew's maternal great-grandmother on her grandmother's side, was born about 1784. She married Thomas Cobham in 1801. She was living with Kendalls in 1841 and died in 1855. The Cobham and Herne names reappear in children's names and inheritances. See Edward Herne Kendall, Thomas Cobham Kendall Henry Herne Mew, Richard Cobham Mew, will of 17.4.1883 and Caroline and James Herne and T.A. Cobham.

The Mew brewery business was established by Benjamin (died 1850), whose son William Baron Mew lived at Polars, close to the Barton village church.

1786 Benjamin Mew (son of Thomas) born. The Mew/Cull brewery in Crocker Street was established about 1814 (about age 28). Benjamin married Mary Ann Parker on 11.11.1818, in Norwood, London. Their children included - Thomas Parker Mew, christened 6.10.1819, who may have married Mary Julia Willslead, in Newport, in the October/December quarter of 1837 - William Baron Mew, christened 7.11.1820, Newport. - Mary Ann Mew, born 30.9.1821, christened: 23.1.1822 Newport - George Owen Mew, born 3.3.1824, christened 2.4.1824 Newport - James Alfred Mew, born 13.2.1826, christened 15.3.1826 Newport. He married Mariane Hooper at Alderbury, in Wiltshire, about 1852 - Ann Agnes Mew, born 3.9.1827, christened 3.10.1827 Newport - Joseph Parker Mew, born 2.4.1829, christened 29.4.1829 Newport - Sarah Jane Mew, born 29.4.1831, christened 1.6.1831 - Arthur Parker Mew, christened 9.1.1833 Newport. Benjamin Mew died 1850

Kevin Mitchell's website says that in the later part of the eighteenth century, Benjamin "apparently" began to collect inns and formed a partnership with his brother [which?] under the name of Mew and co., Brewers of Newport and Lymington. But Benjamin was only 14 in 1800 and the Lymington brewary appears to be after 1828].

26.3.1790 Henry Mew (son of Richard), paternal grandfather of Charlotte Mew, born. The son of Richard and Ann Mew. Henry and his younger brother, Edward (born 1.3.1792), were both baptised on 28.12.1792 at Newport. Sometime married Ann Norris of Lymington. In 1828, Henry Mew was licencee of the Anchor and Hope in Lymington. In 1852 (See also 1851) this was run by Henry Ackland, but the Angel Hotel, 108 High Street, Lymington was run by William Bay Norris

Their children (survivors highlighted) were:
Ann Mew, born about 1821, who died, aged 11, on 8.1.1832
Henry Mew born Lymington 5.7.1824 who died 15.5.1881 at Newport
Richard Mew, born Lymington about 1826
Frances Mew, born Lymington 1827?, who married Daniel Barnes, Proprietor (1859 or earlier) of Pier Hotel, Ryde, Isle of Wight. One of their children was Walter Mew Barnes.
Edward Mew, born about 1829, who died, aged 11, on 4.4.1840
Frederick Mew born Newport 1832: See 1843 for character.
Walter Mew, born 7.7.1834 in Newport

They appear to have lived in Lymington until becoming licensee of the Bugle Inn in Newport about 1829. Frederick Mew (Charlotte's father) was born in 1832. Henry Mew died in 1859. His wife, Ann, lived to 1878

About 1793 Birth of Anne Esther Lyon, who became the second wife (1822) of Henry Edward Kendall senior ( Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfather). See 1841 - 1861 - 1871. The year of birth is suggested by the 1861 and 1871 data (between about 1792 and 1794). I do not know the name of the first wife - One can guess her first name was Sophia. Ann(e) Kendall's son was Charles Kendall.

About 1796 Ann Norris (who married Henry Mew) paternal grandmother of Charlotte Mew, born Lymington. Following the death of Henry Mew (November 1858) Ann Mew was living with Richard Mew in Newport in 1861. In 1871 she ("Anne Mew") was living as a lodger in Ryde. With her was Maria Anne Norris, unmarried, age 29, no occupation, born Lymington. Relationship not shown, but possibly a niece. Maria Anne was the daughter of William B. and Henrietta Norris who (1861) ran the Angel Hotel, 108 High Street, Lymington. Ann Mew died in October 1878.

About 1800 Birth in Lymington of William Bay (or Benjamin) Norris, who married Henrietta. See 1851 Census - 1861 Census - 1871 Census -

1801

With the consent of her father (Thomas Herne) Mary Herne, a minor, married Thomas Cobham, of St Mary le Bone, at Whitechapel.

July/August 1805 Henry Edward Kendall (junior), Charlotte Mew's maternal grandfather, born Westminster (died 1885) [Dates in RIBA archive. Years in Colvin, H.M. 1995. The 1881 online Census calculates 1811 as his date of birth, but this is inconsistent with the 1841 census.] He trained as an architect in his father's office. By 1841, they had separate practices. Kendall junior's practice built three lunatic asylums - Essex in Tudor style, Sussex in the Italian style and a new one for Dorset. He married Mary Cobham in 1836. Charlotte Mew's mother seems to have been their oldest child. [See family listing 1861] He died in 1885

1811: Sophia Kendall, Henry Edward (junior)'s sister, born at Suffolk St, Westminster. In 1830 she married Lewis Cubitt, one of her father's architecture pupils. She died in 1879.

Suffolk Street was the Kendall senior address from 1811 or earlier until 1852, or later. By 1861 they had moved to Spring Gardens, by 1871 to Dean Street.

A sprig of Chick lace - probably late 19th century - from a photograph in Margaret Tomlinson's book
See 1863 - 1867 - 1887 -
See dialect
17.6.1811 Samuel Chick, grandfather in the Chick family Charlotte Mew knew, was born in Branscombe, Devon. He was christened on 7.7.1811. His father, also Samuel, had married Abigail Tutcher. Abigail Chick founded the Chick's Honiton Lace business in the early nineteenth century. She set up a shop in Dean (now called Street - north west of Branscombe) where the sprigs of lace were collected from the cottage workers, made into finished items and marketed in Sidmouth and elsewhere. (External link Branscombe Parish. Lace Industry - map). Charlotte Mew gave a poem in dialect called An Ending to Edith Chick. The scenery seems relevant to this part of Devon and the dialect is the same as that in The China Bowl. The poem was not published until Margaret Chick sent it to Mary Davidow in 1958 - But it is said to have been written in the early 1890s and is, therefore, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, Charlotte Mew poem we have.
[Although "mazed" is in a Cornish dialect list, and in the BBC's Devon list, John Weyell, from Sidmouth, says "Mazed was in common use for daft 'Er be mazed' - he's daft". when he was a child (he is now retired). On the same page: Richard Longridge from Starcross, Exeter "My maid be prapper 'mazed" Translation: "My daughter is off her head/confused/silly". See also Edmund Forte "Ee Bee Proper Mazed = He is really daft", in relation to Dawlish Warren (south of Exmouth) and Exeter]
Honiton Lace Museum

About 1812 Mary Cobham [Kendall] Charlotte Mew's maternal grandmother, born St Pancras. She married Henry Edward Kendall (junior) in Sussex in 1836. Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 calls her "Maria Kendall". See 1841 - 1861 (fullest view of family) - 1871 - 1881 and 1891 Census. Her will was written in 1883 and she died in Brighton in 1892. Anna Maria Kendall, Charlotte's mother, was born in 1837 and Mary Leonora Kendall (Charlotte's maternal aunt) about 1847.

The Mew Brewery

The Brewery History by Kevin Mitchell http://www.insula.vecta.btinternet.co.uk/Mews1.html
Also on the same website:
Newport Pubs - An Illustrated History by Kevin Mitchell
http://www.insula.vecta.btinternet.co.uk/NP1.html
An Isle of Wight Records Office summary of the Mew Brewery History says "The connection of the Mew family with Crocker Street dates at least from 1814, when Benjamin Mew and his partner James Cull, brewers, were jointly occupying premises there." [The partnership with James Cull was over by 1816]
The Records Office summary also says that "Small scale brewing and malting were carried out at various premises in Crocker Street, Newport by a succession of individuals and partnerships from the 17th century down to Regency times". Kevin Mitchell's web story that breweries are recorded in Crocker Street from 1643.

See Bugle Inn 1816 - New Fairlee Farm 1816 - Mew family business 1828 (my earliest original reference to the Crocker Street brewery - Benjamin brewer) - 1841 Census (Thomas brewer in Sea Street, Newport, Benjamin brewer in Brading) -
Benjamin Mew died in 1850. The Kevin Mitchell website says that Lymington Brewery was left to Thomas and the Newport business to William.
In the 1851 Census Thomas is shown as both a wine and spirit merchant and a brewer in Lymington. [Also in an 1852 Trade Directory] - William is the brewer at Crocker Street. -
The Records Office summary says that in 1854 the Newport interests William Baron Mew (including the Crocker Street brewery) and the Lymington, interests of Thomas Parker Mew, were combined.
In the 1861 Census, both William (newly widowed) and Thomas are brewers in Newport. The birth places of Thomas's children suggest he had been in Newport for at least seven years
The Kevin Mitchell website says that (at some date) William bought out the Lymington business from Thomas.
The 1865 Trade Directory has W. B. Mew and Co. Brewers to Her Majesty, Crocker Street, and at Esplanade, Ryde" [No mention of Lymington] and "W.B. Mew and Co., wine and spirit merchants, Crocker street, and at West Cowes, Ryde and Lymington" -
At the 1871 Census William Mew is at Crocker Street and Thomas Mew at Medham Farm, near Cowes. At 68 Sea Street, Newport, Joseph Parker Mew is "Brewer's Manager" - In 1861 he was a "Brass and Iron Founder" in Cowes. -
The Records Office summary says that Walter Langton, late of Lambeth, injected £20,000 capital into the business in 1873 which then became W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. - William Baron Mew, Joseph Parker Mew and Charles Edward Templeman Mew of Newport, brewers, maltsters and spirit merchants, traded in partnership as W. B. Mew, Langton & Co.
At the 1881 Census William Baron Mew was living at Polars. Thomas, age 61, was at Wallhampton, outside Lymington, Brewer "retired". Joseph Parker Mew was the brewer at Crocker Street and at St James Street his son Herbert Mew (Brewer) is living with William Baron Mew's brewer son, Charles. -
[1887?] Fourteen years after W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. was formed it became W. B. Mew, Langton & Co. Ltd. The death of William Baron Mew was registered in the January/March quarter of 1887. His brother and son continued trading under the name "W.B. Mew [etc]"
1891 Census -
The death of Joseph Parker Mew (age 66, born about 1829) was registered Alderbury, Wiltshire in the January/March quarter of 1895

"Control of the new company remained in the hands of the Mew family throughout its life. It passed to William Baron Mew's son, Francis Templeman Mew and, after the latter's death in 1922, to his son Francis Joseph Templeman Mew. By 1965 two hundred public houses and twenty off- licences on the Isle of Wight, around Lymington and in Southampton and Portsmouth were controlled and annual sales amounted to more than �1.5 million. In that year, however, a take-over by Strong & Co. of Romsey was accepted and Mew, Langton's independent existence came to an end. In 1968 Strong's itself was bought out by Whitbread. Part of the Crocker Street brewery site is still used by Whitbreads as a depot but the major part, including most of the buildings, has been adapted and redeveloped as sheltered housing."

Ryde Pier 1814: Opening of the pier at Ryde, Isle of Wight. (external link) - Ryde addresses related to the Mews are the Royal Pier Hotel (below) - 9 Barfield (Barfield Lodge) and 75 Union Street

In 1828 no "Pier" hotel is listed in the Trade Directory - but Daniel Hale is at the Bugle, Ryde. The "Royal Pier Hotel", Pier Street is in the 1841 Census, with George Rendall, age about 30, Hotel Keeper, not born in Hampshire, and his wife, Caroline, age about 25, born in Hampshire - It is the "Pier Hotel" (a posting inn) in an 1844 Trade Directory. - The 1851 Census has the "Pier Hotel", with Caroline Rendell, wife (no husband shown) age 38, born Ryde, as Hotel Keeper. She is living with Martha Hale, mother, widow, age 67, Annuitant, born Kingston? Dorset (died December quarter 1852?) and Daniel Barnes, nephew, unmarried, age 29, clerk, born Somerset - 1852 Directory: Royal Pier Hotel, Pier Street, posting and family, George Rendell - 1859 Royal Pier Hotel, Pier Gates, Daniel Barnes. - The 1861 Census - The 1871 Census - The 1881 Census - The 1881 Census - 1898 Trade Directory: Royal Pier, The Gordon Hotels Limited, (Louis Henry Claridge, Manager) Pier Street - The 1901 Census - The Royal Pier Hotel Ryde was demolished in the early 1930's to allow better traffic access from the bottom of Union Street onto the Esplanade. (external link)

1815

Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge founded by a bequest. (museum web) - Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1867-1962) was the Director from 1908 to 1937. He took this post following his marriage in 1907. Arthur Tansley had lectured at Cambridge from 1906. Frederick Frost Blackman "was for many years a syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum during Cockerell's long directorship". The Syndic is appointed by the University to manage the museum. A copy of a Psalter, printed at the Chiswick Press in 1905, has the inscription "To F.F. Blackman with S.C. Cockerell's thanks, Christmas 1913". Blackman married Elsie Chick in 1917. Sydney Cockerell went to the Poetry Bookshop in the hope of meeting Charlotte Mew, who sent him a manuscript of a poem in 1918. At this time, he lived at 3 Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge. Sydney Cockerell wrote an obituary for Charlotte Mew, which Elsie Blackman thanked him for. Our two major sources of manuscript archives relating to Charlotte Mew are Alida Monro and the Poetry Bookshop and Sydney Cockerell and the people he introduced Charlotte to. Alida Monro and Sydney Cockerell are also the two people who did the most to preserve and promote Charlotte's literary heritage after her death. [ Sydney Cockerell biography, Exeter

1816

26.11.1816 "Bargain and sale" - reference JER/OSBORNE/2 "New Fairlee Farm with barns, stables and outhouses lately erected on Fairlee Common and Fairlee Common Fourgrounds (18 acres 1 rood 7 perches), lying together near road from Newport, towards East Cowes, with Middle Field (18 acres) and close on west side of it (12 acres), both part of Fairlee Common Lower Ground. Also Barn Ground Closes: the Thirteen Acre Close (13 acres), the Ten Acres (10½ acres), the Seven Acres (7½ acres), Ilems and Tilsons Close (5 acres), one close (17 acres), parcel of Heathy Ground (42 acres), parcel of lands called Blakes Heath (above) lying on east side of highway leading to East Cowes, together with so much ground, part of Brick Kiln Close (alias Sixteen Acres), part of the said Blakes Heath as shall be marked out for a way from Lower Blakes Heath to pond in or near Brick Kiln Close." (Isle of Wight Record Office - Deeds and Documents of Osborne Estate: Catalogue Ref. JER/OSBORNE. Creator(s): Blachford family of Osborne) - See 1841 Census New Fairlee Farm 1843 - Newport 1865 - Isle of Wight Holidays - 1881 South Fairlee Farm - 4.2.1899 - 1901 New Fairlee Farm (and South Fairlee Farm distinct) - 1936 Fairlee House and South Fairlee Farm - 1963 change of ownership - 2006 New Fairlee Farm.

1819: Birth of Victoria who was to become Queen. Elizabeth Goodman was born about five years later and may have celebrated 25 years of domestic service about the time that Victoria celebrated 50 years of being Queen.

6.10.1819 Thomas Parker Mew, son of Benjamin, christened

1820

Sometime about here, Henry Mew married Ann Norris of Lymington. Their first child, Ann, was born about 1821. This is the earliest connection I have for the Mew family and Lymington.

Lymington connections:

I do not know where Ann Mew was born, but her older siblings, Henry, Florence and Richard, were born in Lymington. Henry (the father) was landlord of the Anchor and Hope, Lymington, in 1828, at a time when the brewery business appears to have been limited to Newport. Thomas Parker Mew was a brewer in Newport in 1841, but appears to have moved to Lymington between the biths of a child in 1843 and 1845. In 1851 he is listed as a a Wine and Spirit Merchant on the Quay at Lymington. In 1865 the Trade Directory has "W.B. Mew and Co., wine and spirit merchants, Crocker street, and at West Cowes, Ryde and Lymington", but the brewery is only at Crocker street and Ryde.

7.11.1820 Christening of William Baron Mew, who inherited the Newport brewery and bought the Lymington one (see his father). He is shown (unmarried) as Maltster and Brewer in Crocker Street in the 1851 Census. He married Frances Mary Templeman in the April/June quarter of 1854, at Chard in Somerset. Charles Edward Templeman Mew (birth registered Isle of Wight July/September quarter 1856) was William Baron Mew's eldest son. Francis (Frank) Templeman Mew (birth registered Isle of Wight October/December quarter 1857) was his second son. Henrietta Bernard Mew's birth was registered Isle of Wight in the April/June quarter or 1859. The birth of Amy Bernard Mew and the death of her mother, Frances Mary Mew, were both registered on the isle of Wight in the October/December quarter of 1860.

[Charles became a partner in the brewery whilst William trained as an architect in London and Paris. In 1884, F. Templeman Mew was an architect practising at 3 Mitre Court, Fleet Street, EC. When Charles had an accident, Frank was brought into the brewery management and turned it into a Limited Company in 1887. Frank died 1921] (Kevin Mitchell's website) and another) ].

1821

1822

about 1822 Daniel Barnes born Somerset - marrried Frances Mew - died 1881

Henry Edward Kendall senior married his second wife, Anne Esther Lyon, at St Andrew's church, Holborn. He already had two children: Henry Edward Kendall junior (17) and Sophia (11). Ann(e) and Henry's son, Charles Kendall, was born in 1829.

7.5.1822 Dedication of the new church, St Pancras. Links to: church website with history - map to new church - Notes on old and new on GenUKI pages - map to old church References to St Pancras Old Church are an anomaly of the online 1881 Census and other LDS sources "The LDS rather confusingly continues to call the registers for St.Pancras New, St Pancras Old" (GenUKI) - [See 1837 example]
So St Pancras New Church appears to have been the parish church of Henry Edward Kendal Junior and his family (see 1841) and Frederick Mew and his family (see 1863) -

1823 Henry Edward Kendall (senior), Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfather, became District Surveyor for the Parishes of St Martins in the Fields and St Anne's, Soho. He had previously worked for the Barrack Department of the War Office. He was about 47 years old, and held the post of District Surveyor for over 50 years.

Her head hung down, and her long hair in stooping
Conceal'd her features better than a veil;
And one hand o'er the ottoman lay drooping,
White, waxen, and as alabaster pale:
Would that I were a painter! to be grouping
All that a poet drags into detail
Oh that my words were colours! but their tints
May serve perhaps as outlines or slight hints.
(Byron, 6th Canto of Don Juan)

5.7.1824: Henry Mew, son of Henry and Ann, and a paternal uncle of Charlotte, born. In 1841 (aged 15) he was with a group of men in St James, Westminster (I do not think it is a school) being looked after by mainly female servants. In 1851 he is shown as "Wine Merchant" living with his parents at the Bugle Inn. He married Mary Toward in 1854. Henry succeeded his father at the Bugle Inn/Hotel. He was the mayor of Newport three times: in 1864, 1865 and 1870. The Bugle Hotel. is still a Mew family business in the 1875 Trade Directory, but, by 1881, Henry and Mary were living in Ventnor. He died 13.5.1881. The Bugle Hotel may have left the Mew family when Henry and Mary left.

In 1824-1826, A Sessions House and a House of Corrections were built at Spilsby. They were designed by Henry Edward Kendall (senior). ["The stately Sessions House of 1826, where quarter sessions for the area of Lindsey were held until 1878, is now home to the Spilsby Theatre"] [The House of Correction occupied about two acres. It was enlarged in 1869 to accommodate 85 cells]

Canon Mahé's Essai sur les antiquités du département du Morbihan published at Vannes in 1825 was used by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

About 1825: Birth of Elizabeth Goodman, the "Old Servant" of Charlotte's essay, born at Barton On Humber, Lincolnshire. (link to GENUKI website). The life story of the real Elizabeth Goodman, traced through the censuses, is very close to that of the Old Servant described by Charlotte. "That grey remote village on the hillside" does not describe Barton, which is a market town on the Lincolnshire bank of the river. It could be a village outside Barton in the Yorkshire Wolds. Charlotte wrote that it as a village none of the Mew children ever saw, but "all the ways of which we knew so well by hearsay". The census descriptions show the Goodman's district (from 1841) as mixed farms, brickworks and potteries. Their street, "Newport", appears to have been on the edge of Barton in an area that was being absorbed - The "new road" (Queen Street) was opened "in 1827... It cuts across the former gardens of the great house which stood on the site of the present police station. Its grounds originally occupied most of the area bordered by High Street, Finkle Lane, Newport, Catherine Street and Marsh lane" (Barton on Humber virtual Victorian Walk). Elizabeth's mother, also Elizabeth Goodman, was born at Horkstow in Lincolnshire about 1782. She was a widow by 1841. In the 1861 census she is shown as a "farmer's widow". Living with her in 1841 were William Goodman, age 20, an agricultural labourer, and our Elizabeth, age 16, shown as a female servant. By inference from Charlotte Mew's story, Elizabeth came to London in 1845, 20 years old, and became a servant in the Kendall grandparent's house. In the 1851 census she is shown (26) as the children's nurse. The Kendall household had high care needs. There were three nurses in 1851: a "nurse" who may have cared for Mary Cobham, Charlotte's great grandmother, Elizabeth, who is the "children's nurse" and a "children's nursemaid". It seems likely that the nursemaid cared for Arthur (2) and Mary (4) and that Elizabeth cared for Anna Maria (14), Thomas (10) and Edward (6). There was no live-in governess. By 1861 Elizabeth had returned to her mother's residence in Barton. Her profession as "quilter" suggests this is more than a visit. Perhaps she stayed with her mother until her death in 1866. If so, this means she was not with the Mew family until after their marriage, in 1863, and after the birth of Henry Herne Mew in 1865. But, this is not the impression given by Charlotte's story, which says [Elizabeth] was "chosen to follow her young mistress on her marriage". In the 1871 census Elizabeth is shown as "cook". But she was the kind of cook that takes care of children when they are ill: She recorded the deaths of baby Frederick in 1867, and Christopher and Richard in 1876. See 1841 census - 1845 - 1851 census - 1861 census - 1865 - 1866 - 1867 - 1871 - 1874 (Chapel) - 1875 - holidays - 1876 - 1881 census - 1891 census - 1892 - 1893.

The Every-Day Book by William Hone appeared in weekly instalments in 1825 and 1826. Bound volumes appeared in 1826 and 1827. Kyle Grimes has created an online version. The blessing of the apple tree takes place on January 5th (see index)

Here's to thee, old apple-tree,
hence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! caps full!
Bushel-bushel-sacks full,
And my pockets full too! Huzza!"

A very similar "jolly couplet" is quoted by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees

About 1826: Birth of Richard Mew, Charlotte's paternal uncle (older than her father) who was to farm New Fairlee Farm. He was born in Lymington, as was his sister, Frances. Their father, Henry Mew was ran the Anchor and Hope Inn in Lymington in 1828, before moving to the Bugle Inn about 1829. In 1841, Richard appears to be in charge of New Fairlee Farm. (Charlotte's father, Frederick, and uncle Walter are also there). A letter Richard wrote in 1843 survives. At this time, Frederick had just returned from a trip to London. In 1851 Richard is shown as "bailiff for his father". In 1861, Richard Mew is shown as a wine merchant living with his widowed mother, Ann Mew (aged 65, born Lymington), plus a female general servant and a groom, in Lugley Street, Newport (external link) and Walter was in charge of the farm. An 1865 trade directory shows Richard as the farmer and also lists the family business as Henry Mew, farmer - and sons, Bugle Inn. and wine importers. Richard married Fanny Read in 1866. He is shown as the farmer in subsequent censuses. Charlotte Mew spent time, as a child, with Richard's family on the Isle of Wight and Fanny's family in Somerset. Richard acted in the place of father to Freda Mew after the death of her father in 1898. He died in 1903, but I suspect his family would have continued with some responsibility for Freda in the Isle of Wight Asylum. Charlotte remained in contact with this part of the family throughout her life and they were a major source of information for Mary Davidow's biography.

About 1827: Birth, in Lymington, of Frances (known as Fanny) Mew, Charlotte's paternal aunt (older than her father). In 1841, "Fanny Mew", age 14, was living with fifteen other girls ("pupils") of about the same age, in a house on the south side of Neport High St - In 1851 she is shown as "housekeeper" at New Fairlee Farm - She married Daniel Barnes of Ryde in 1853 - see 1861 - 1871 - 1881 - She may have died on the Isle of Wight in the April/June quarter of 1911, but that Frances Mew as age 87

23.10.1827 The consecration of St George the Martyr, Ramsgate. Designed by Henry Hemsley and H E Kendall and constucted between 1824 and 1827, it seats 1,300 people and has a lantern tower (placed at the request of Trinity House) as a navigational aid to passing ships. Described as one of the two "most architechturally distinguished" Kent churches in the first half of the nineteenth century. However it is in a "free versions of Gothic". This style became "unacceptable" after the launching of the Cambridge Camden Society and ecclesiology in the 1840s. "The ecclesiologists wanted to return the Church of England to an idealised version of the Middle Ages, both for the architecture of its buildings and the arrangements for public worship." [Detailed discussion in Jonathan Smith's (1994) Architecture and Induction: Whewell and Ruskin on Gothic ]

1828-1829 Henry Edward Kendall senior and junior were the architects of the esplanade and tunnel for Kemp Town, the fashionable new eastern extension to Brighton.

"the principal feature is an extensive crescent and square, the opening between the wings of which is 840 feet, and the wings, each 350 feet in extent, present a frontage towards the sea of 1,540 feet: the glacis is terminated by an esplanade commanding a beautiful and sheltered prospect of the ocean: beneath this, at the base of the cliff on which Kemp Town stands, a road is carried to the west end of the Marine-parade and is united with the gardens and lawns in the centre of the crescent by a tunnel." (Kelly's 1867 Directory - GenUKI website)

Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.14 says that during the development of Kemp Town, the Kendalls became a Brighton family of distinction. They had a seaside house in Brighton at 6 Codrington Place

The Mew family business about 1828 - 1829
Piggots Commercial Directory 1828
I think this list includes all the Mews listed (Hampshire, including the Isle of Wight). The Morris and Richard Mew may not be related to our Mews
Lymington
Of three "Inns and Hotels" (distinct from "Taverns and Public Houses"), the "Anchor and Hope (and commercial hotel)" is owned by "H. Mew". The Anchor Inn (hotel and posting house) is owned by M. Butcher - Mary Butcher is a wine merchant.
The Brewers are William Best and William Hebberd
Linking Lymington to the Isle of Wight, a "Packet" sailed every day between Yarmouth, on the island, and Lymington, carrying passengers and mail.

Newport
The Brewers are William Cooke and son, Sea Street - Thomas Self, Lugley Street - George Linington, Sea Street - Benjamin Mew, Croker Street - Wise and Co. Quay Street.
There are seven "Inns and Hotels", one of which is Bugle (and posting house) George Mew, High Street.
There are 38 "Taverns and Public Houses". Only the Waggon and Horses in Crocker Street has a Mew: Morris Mew
There is a Richard Mew in the High Street under Cabinet Makers and Upholsterers
About 1829: Birth of Edward Mew who died, aged 11, on 4.4.1840
Alehouse Licences for Newport show George Mew at the Bugle Inn for 1816, 1822 and 1826. In 1829 the licensee is Henry Mew (IOW 18.1.2005).
"By 1804 the Bugle was said to be "the best and chief hosteirie in Newport" and was the chief departure point for coaches to all parts of the Island." Gay Baldwin - Whitewash - Summer Issue 2002
The Bugle was the Newport "posting house". I think this means it was the inn where stage coaches stopped overnight. Horses would be kept to provide fresh horse when needed. I believe posting inns also kept horse for hire. The New Fairlee Farm may have provided provisions for the horses as well as the guests at the inn, and may have been somewhere to quarter and possibly breed horses.
I think the Bugle Inn became the Bugle Hotel under the second Henry Mew. See Bugle Hotel sign. The Bugle Hotel was closed in the 1960s or later
Frederick Mew born at the Bugle Inn in 1832 - 1841 Census - Death of Henry Mew senior 1859

1829 Christening at St Martin in the Fields of "Chas" (Charles) Kendall, son of Henry Edward and Anne. Architect.

About 1829 Lydia Rous (aged 10) began at Friends School Croydon. "All individuality was sternly repressed; the children were known...by numbers and wore a uniform of the plainest description... Organised games were... unknown in all girl's schools at that time. Education consisted of reading, writing, sewing, the four rules of arithmetic, the drawing of maps for the boys, and the making of samplers for the girls... these subjects were studied to perfection... She, one of her brothers, and six sisters, each headed the school in turn. 'No great credit to us', she said... 'What a little we knew when we left' (Rous 1967 page 2). [See Quaker policies on education from the 1834 Book of Discipline]. Lydia's biography describes her education as "narrow though solid". She went on to teach and "by self-study and in intervals of teaching, to work at Algebra, Geometry, Logic and Latin... She read widely, making a special study of English language and literature and took a keen interest in all that was going on in the political world and in the realm of thought" (Rous 1967 page 2).

Baby Wek
Alida Monro's estimate of the age of Charlotte Mew's parrot, would place his birth a little earlier than 1830. She calls him "Willie". Charlotte's letters speak of "Wek". Wek first appears in the letters Mary Davidow reproduces on 14.7.1909, when Charlotte wonders if he is to be trusted on the floor. Ninety years would be an extreme old age for a parrot. Given his longevity, Wek would have been one of the larger parrots, such as an Amazon Green. They were (and are) an expensive pet to buy. About 1880, the prices of parrots were: grey African from £1.5/- to £2 - Amazon Green from £1 to £2; Australian parakeets (budgerigars) 5/- to £1. "The parrots most in favour as pets are the grey and green varieties". A good cage for a grey would cost 14/- to 25/-. A parrot that could talk would cost £5 to £10. Macaws (£5) and cockatoos (£3 to £5) were also more expensive. Cassell's Household Guide (about 1880), volume 4, pages 248 "Cage-Birds - 14: Parrots).
If Wek was a family heirloom (so to speak), he may have entered the Mew family on the death of aunt Mary Kendall in 1902

23.1.1830 Marriage of Sophia Kendall to Lewis Cubitt (29.9.1799 - 9.6.1883), the younger brother of Thomas Cubitt. At Saint Nicholas Church, Brighton. Lewis had been a pupil of her father. He designed many of the housing developments constructed by Thomas. Lewis also designed Kings Cross Railway Station. Their son, Lewis Cubitt, was born 5.12.1834 and christened at Old Church, St Pancras, London. Their daughter, Ada, was born about 1841 and was a witness at the marriage of Frederick Mew and Anna Kendall in 1863. Sophia died in London in 1879. In 1881, her widower and Ada were living in Lewes Crescent, Brighton, where he died.

Building of first houses of what was to become Rosherville New Town

14.3.1832 Frederick Mew, Charlotte's father, born Newport, Isle of Wight. Penelope Fitzgerald's supposition (1988 p.3) that he was born in the Bugle Inn seems reasonable. He was baptised 13.4.1832. His parents were Henry and Ann Mew (born Norris). In 1841 (9 years old) he was living with his older brother, Richard (15), on New Fairlee Farm. In 1843, however, he had been in London, possibly at school - By 1851 he was an "architect" (19 years old) living in lodgings at 5 Sidmouth Street, just north of Mecklenburgh Square, where Charlotte was to be born 18 years later. - He worked with Michael Prendergast Manning (1832- ), a young architect his own age, on the design for the Sheffield School of Design. The plans were exhibited in 1856 and the college opened in 1857. The office address they used was Frederick's (new) lodgings in 2 Great James Street. In 1859 he became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. By 1860, when he again exhibited at the Royal Academy, he was using the address of Henry Kendall, architect, his future father in law, at 33 Brunswick Square. He was still living at 2 Great James Street at the time of the 1861 census. Frederick's lodgings in 1851 and 1861 are in easy walking distance of 33 Brunswick Square. He may have joined the firm between 1856 and 1860, or have been working for Henry Kendall earlier and used his own address for the Sheffield Design School exhibit. Frederick joined the firm at a time when Henry Mew was designing some of the new county asylums - Warley - Haywards Heath and Dorset. His father-in-law provided design books for schools and homes in a variety of styles, but specialised in the Italianate. The utilitarian aspect of this, illustrated by Kings Cross Station, designed by Cubit, may be related, in some way, to Frederick's ability to design the Sheffield Design School on a small budget. But there was a fantasy element to Henry Kendall's work manifest in his exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1856, which inspired Baudelaire; in the asylum architecture of Warley; and in the domestic architecture of Farnborough Hill, which Henry was designing as Frederick and Anna prepared to marry. - In May 1863 Frederick was named as (an?) executer in Henry Kendall's will. The provisions meant he would become a trustee of a fund to care for Mrs Kendall after Henry's death. In December 1863 he married Henry Kendall's oldest daughter, Anna, at a fashionable Bloomsbury church. One of the witnesses to their wedding was the sister (or mother) of Henry Gillum Webb who (later?) was co-trustee with Frederick of the funds to care for Mrs Kendall and her children. - Frederick and Anna moved into their new home at Doughty Street. Their children's "second mother", Elizabeth Goodman, previously Anna's nurse, may have moved in with them, or joined them shortly after. Between 1864 (after the marriage) and the 1871 census, Henry and Mrs Kendall, and the architect's firm, moved from Brunswick Square to Paddington, a move possibly facilitated by the opening of the first underground railway in 1863. The Trade Directories I have looked at do not show Frederick Mew as an architect until after Henry Kendall's death. Doughty Street (nor Brunswick Square after the move) does not appear to have been used as an architect's office before Henry's death. Frederick Mew appears to have worked as part of his father-in-law's firm until Henry died. In 1876, the year that two of Charlotte's brothers died, the Kendall firm submitted plans for a new Vestry Hall at Hampstead. The Hall, by "Kendall and Mew", may have opened in 1878 (or it may have opened later) - 1881 - Henry Kendall died in June 1885. In February 1890 the Mew's moved from Doughty Street to Gordon Street. This does appear to have acted as an architect's office. - 1891 - Frederick died in 1898, probably of stomach cancer.

Kensal Green Cemetery (then known as All Souls, Kensal Green) founded 1832. It was completed in 1837. Established by the General Cemetery Company, it was London's first cemetery and at the time by far the largest in Britain. The architect, John Griffith, followed the layout from an original plan by H E Kendall. It is now grade two listed.

about 1833: Birth in Somerset of Fanny Read who married Richard Mew in 1866. They farmed South Fairlee Farm. She died in 1891

First two parts of Alfred Tennyson's The May Queen published 1833. That is "The May Queen" and "New Year's Eve". "Conclusion" was added in 1842. Charlotte Mew refers to in Men and Trees

1833 John Constable's only publication in his lifetime: Various subjects of landscape, characteristic of English scenery : principally intended to display the phenomena of the chiar'oscuro of nature from pictures painted by John Constable, R.A.; engraved by David Lucas. London: Published by Mr. Constable, 1833. - 22 mezzotints. Originally issued in parts. The introduction by Constable, drafted in the spring of 1832, was quoted by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

1834

A committee formed to bring into existence the (Royal) Institute of British Architects. (RIBA - Link to its website). Some of its committee meetings were held in the house of Henry Edward Kendall senior in Suffolk Street

7.7.1834 Birth of Walter Mew, Charlotte's paternal uncle (younger than her father) who married Georgina Selby (born about 1839), the daughter of a farmer, on the Isle of Wight in the April/June quarter of 1860. Walter and Georgina were farming South Fairlee Farm in 1861, when Frederick was in London and Richard was a Newport wine merchant. However, by 1871, they were running a hotel in Sandown (Isle of Wight) and Richard and Fanny Mew were at South Fairlee Farm. In the July/August quarter of 1869, Georgina's sister, Ellen Anne, married the Newport grocer, Broadley Wilson Way (born about 1832). It was his second marriage. Their daughter, Georgina Selby Way (born October/September quarter 1871) was living with Walter and Georgina in 1881. Broadley Wilson Way died (age 42) in the January/March quarter of 1874. Ellen Anne Way moved to Sandown to run another hotel. Georgina died (age 43) in the October/December quarter of 1881. Walter moved to Abingdon, Berkshire, and died there (age 66) in the July/September quarter of 1900. Georgina Selby Way (niece - barmaid) was living with him in 1891.

In 1834, the headmaster of Friends Boys School, York, founded The Natural History, Literary and Polytechnic Society (external link). Francis Oliver was a scholar at the school in the 1880s. The school opened in 1823 on land leased from the Quaker asylum (Retreat). It was burnt down in 1899 when a natural history experiment was left unattended - (External link to Bootham School website. Friends Girls School, York opened in 1831 - although it is considered a development from a school founded by Esther Tuke in 1785, that had closed in 1814. Winifred and Ethel Oliver were scholars at the school in the 1880s. - (External links to Mount School website and archives)] See Some helpful people

1835

August 1835: Rosherville. Particulars of land, situate at Northfleet, in the county of Kent, to be let, on building leases 4 pages with a lithograph illustration. Printed for H.E. Kendall and William Rosher in London. Library of RIBA

18.5.1835: Marriage of Sophia Charlwood (born about 1820, Summerhill, Berkshire) to Stephen Gillum Webb (born Hampstead, about 1799 "Gentleman") in Old Church, Saint Pancras. Their children include Sophia Ellen Webb, born 20.6.1840 and christened 30.8.1840 at Saint Peter, Walworth, Surrey, and Henry Gillum Webb, born 18.9.1842 and christened on 4.12.1842, also at Saint Peter, Walworth. In 1861, Sophia [Ellen], aged 20, and Henry [Gillum], aged 18, were with their aunt, Julia Webb, aged 55, at 34 Cadogan Place, Chelsea St Luke Middlesex. I have not been able to trace their parents in this census. Sophia Ellen Webb (or her mother) may be the Sophia Webb who witnessed the marriage of Frederick Mew and Anna Maria Kendall in 1863. Henry Gillum Webb became a soldier in the Worcestershire Regiment (with which his family may have had a long standing connection), retiring with the rank of Colonel. He was the co-trustee with Frederick Mew of the trust set up to provide for Anna Maria Mew and her children. He married Florence Atlay on 23.5.1878, and died (aged 61) in the March quarter of 1904.

1836

About 1836, the existing St Catherine's Lighthouse was built to warn ships off the Needles on the western tip of the isle of Wight (opposite Swanage). A light for this purpose dates back to 1312

23.1.1836 Mary Cobham married Henry Edward Kendall (junior) (of St Martins in the Fields, Middlesex) at Uckfield, East Sussex. Her mother was also Mary Cobham and was living with the Kendalls in 1841 and 1851. [Cobham is a largely Lancashire name. In the 1861 census there is only one Cobham (a servant) in the whole of Sussex. The Lancashire Cobhams, in 1861 and later, were mainly basketmakers. There is a Cobham family in Devon (in 1851 and 1861/1871) who have money, and another in Hertfordshire with land.]

1837

Anna Maria Mardon Kendall, Charlotte's mother, born St Pancras.
Various figures have been given for Anna Maria's age but, not only was she was four in 1841 and 24 in 1861, but her christening at St Pancras is recorded (1837) in Pallot's Baptism Index. From this, the date of her parents' marriage, and the 1861 family list, it seems reasonable to conclude that Anna Maria was the eldest child and born in 1837.
The shade of insanity (and possibly other shadows) on Charlotte's life appear to have come from the Kendall side of the family. Anna Maria's own character is outlined later.
Her brother, Henry (born 1839), probably died as a child. Her brother Thomas (born 1840) died, aged 33, in 1873, in circumstances suggesting other shadows on the Kendall family apart from insanity. Her brother Edward (born 1844) lived the longest, but information of his life between childhood and death seems to have escaped record. Anna Maria's sister, Mary Leonora (born about 1847), lived at home all her life and died of "nervous debility and inanition 12 years" in 1902. Her death was within three years of Freda Mew's admission to the Isle of Wight asylum and Henry Herne Mew's death in Peckham asylum. The youngest child, Arthur, born about 1849, was a sailor in 1871.
Anna Maria married Frederick Mew in 1863 She died in 1923.
For brief descriptions of Anna Maria, see family 1915-1923 and recollections of the 1880s.
Mary Davidow (1960) (pages 20) says "Mrs Mew is remembered by two of Charlotte and Anne's contemporaries", at Lucy Harrison's School, "as a 'silly' person and not at all what one might call 'intellectual'". She says Anna Mew "believed all her life that in marrying Frederick Mew she had lowered her social rank". She also says Anna was never taught to manage the household finances and regarded "domestic tasks" as the sole responsibility of hired help". Davidow suggests that Anna Mew was never "head" of the household. On her husband's death (after Elizabeth Goodman), that role passed to Charlotte. Later (pages 74-75) she says that Anna Mew was "an extremely dependent person" and "had to have a companion provided for her" if her daughters went on holiday. If she was displeased with the companion, she would dismiss her and send a "dispatch" to Charlotte demanding her return. Alida Monro (1953 page ix) says that "mother... was treated very much as if she was a naughty child, and on the evenings that I went there she was always told to go up to bed". Margaret Jarman expressed suprise that, when she and her husband visited Charlotte and Anne Mew, "their mother... didn't appear at dinner".

In disused chalk pits at Gravesend, covering 17 acres, George Jones established the Kent Zoological and Botanical Gardens Institution. At Rosherville, Northfleet, Kent, Henry Edward Kendall senior, with junior, designed the hotel, pier and gardens "Their designs for development were too grandiose for realisation and it eventually degenerated into an amusement park" Colvin, H.M. 1995 and F.W. Leakey 1956

1838

Melksham Union workhouse at Semington, Wiltshire built. The architect was Henry Edward Kendall (senior), Charlotte Mew's maternal great- grandfather. (Peter Higginbotham's website has several photographs). He also designed the workhouse at Uckfield in Sussex which was built in 1838/1839. (Peter Higginbotham's website). Both were built to the Poor Law Commission's standard design.

A 1838 print (lithograph, with watercolour) in the Wellcome Library shows "Schools of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, Avenue Road, - Regent's Park". The architect is "H. E. Kendall, Junr. Archt. F.S.A" who published it from 33 Brunswick Square

1839

Auguste Comte used the term sociology for the new science of society - See History - Science and Chicks

9.1.1839 First number of the Dublin Medical Press, which became the Dublin Medical Press and Circular and then Medical Press and Circular [Medical Press]

1.2.1839 Henry Robert John Edmonds Kendall born to Mary Kendall and Henry Edward Kendall. He was christened at Old Church, Saint Pancras on 28.8.1839. See 1841. Possibly their eldest boy child. I have not found any further reference to him. He may have died young. See 1851 and 1861.

October/December 1839 Birth of Maria Anne Norris registered Lymington, Hampshire

10.11.1839 Birth of Gertrude Mary Dalby, daughter of John Watson and Anne Dalby. John Watson Dalby was a poet and story teller who wrote a memoir of Charles Lamb. Through her father, she was a friend of Barry Cornwall and Leigh Hunt. (The 1894 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, under her husband, says she was "a great favourite with Leigh Hunt and B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall)". The marriage of Gertrude Mary Mayer to Samuel Ralph Townshend Mayer (born August 1841) was registered Strand in the July/August quarter of 1867 (no 1868 as in DNB). Mayer was an editor and writer, a Conservative and an Anglican who campaigned for the abolition of pew rents and argued about the origins of sunday schools. He had published a short novel, Amy Fairfax: or, Bearing and forbearing, the lesson of life in 1859. He may have been associated in some way with Richard Bentley and Son. Gertrude Mary published Sir Hubert's Marriage, a three volume novel, in 1876 (Richard Bentley and Son) - The Fatal Inheritance and other Stories in 1878 (Moxon's popular novels) - Belmore in 1880 (Illustrated by J. Moyr Smith - only 80 pages - No 2 in Moxon's select novelettes). Her husband died on 28.5.1880 at their home in Crown Terrace, Mortlake Road, Richmond, Surrey (He was buried in Gloucester). Mrs Mayer was still living in Crown Terrace in 1881 [1881 Census]. Her parents, John Watson and Anne Dalby, lived next door. John Watson Dalby's death (aged 85) was registered Richmond in the April/June quarter of 1885. Mr and Mrs Mayer were both contributors to Temple Bar. Starting in 1887, Gertrude contributed a series of biographies of women writers. These were expanded as a two volume book in 1894. Mrs Mayer became the editor of Temple Bar in September 1898, at about the time that Charlotte Mew's first contribution was published in the magazine. It is not clear how long she remained editor. However, Charlotte and she appear to have been friends (and mutual friends with Catherine Amy Dawson Scott): Charlotte Mew broke into Mrs Mayer's house in March 1913, and found her ill. In May 1914 Mrs Mayer gave her a eulogy about Mrs Scott's unpublished novel and Mrs Mayer was still keeping Charlotte informed about Mrs Scott's literary affairs in February 1917. Gertrude Mayer died in 1932.

During the 1840s, University College London purpose-built a chemistry laboratory.

1440- 1840 Contrasts The pictures below are from Contrasts, the architectural challenge published by Augustus Welby Pugin in 1836. It shows the losses and gains over 400 years.

Victorian architecture was self-consciously significant - Seeking to integrate modern power and plumbing with a restoration of beauty and community. Pugin's contrasts showed the architects what the issues were - But they did not all adopt one solution.

The building at the front that has replaced the half-timbered house is the gas storage for the town. Gas lights can be seen on the bridge. The bridge, a free community facility in the medieval picture, has become a toll-bridge in the 1840 picture. The building at the front that has replaced the green [outside a church, which I have not included] where children played with their parents is a Panopticon - The all purpose institution of the utilitarian Bentham that could serve as school, workhouse, prison, or even factory. The cathedral is a ruin, the warehouses crowd out the spires of the churches, there is nowhere shown for the workers to live and the smoke from the factory chimneys has blackened everything. Pugin illustrates this last point in his illustration of the church - not shown. Finally, the town smothers nature. Town and countryside become separate worlds that do not seem to communicate with one another. In much of her work, Charlotte Mew explores and compares the rhythms of the two worlds.
Architects responded differently to the challenge of the age. The response of Charlotte Mew's family was not the gothic revival adopted by Gilbert Scott. They drew on Early English, Tudor and Italian inspiration, used local materials, and favoured creative fantasy in the integration of elements in buildings. The familys' use of styles (at least, its use of Italianate) does not attempt to disguise the function of the building in the way that Gilbert Scott did at St Pancras Station, and in this sense they are more modern.

Nunhead Cemetery (then known a All Saints) opened in 1840. It was established by London Cemetery Company. Much of it has now been cleared of monuments. The chapel is burnt out, but the shell remains. The nonconformist section reverted to woodland; the anglican section is managed as a nature reserve. Grade 2 listed.

about October 1840: Birth of Thomas Cobham J. Kendall (see 1841), architect uncle of Charlotte, who died when she was about three years old

2.10.1840 Birth of Thomas Hardy (external link - Macmillan guide). He married his second wife, Florence Emily Dugdale (1881-1937), at St. Andrew's Church, Enfield, on 10.2.1914. Charlotte Mew's correspondence with Florence dates from September 1918.

1841

1841 Post Office London Directory - Architects:
Kendall, Edwd. Henry, 33 Brunswick Square
+Kendall Hen. E. 17 Suffolk Street , Pall Mall 1830 map
Marked thus + are surveyors
1841 Census: (6.6.1841/7.6.1841)

Brunswick Square: (modern map)
Henry Kendall aged 38 Architect
Henry Kendall 2 years
Thomas Kendall 8 months
Mary Kendall 26 years
Anna Kendall 4 years
Mary Cobham 55 Independent means
Henry Cox 17 Pupil
Thomas Parker 17 Pupil
Elizabeth Church 35 Servant
Susan Hankey 30 Servant
Elizabeth Davies 35 Servant
Sarah Apps 17 Servant
[Everyone in the house born in Middlesex] Brunswick Square index:
Other censuses: 1851 - 1861 and 1871
Description, including trees
1838 - 1846 - 1852 -
1857 (Frederick Mew's start) -
1860 -
Brunswick Square Clinic (1913-)

Suffolk Street:
Henry Kendall aged about 60 Architect
Ann Kendall aged about 50
Harriet Geedings aged about 25 Female Servant
Francis Morris aged about 25 Female Servant
[The Kendalls are shown as born in Middlesex - The servants as not]. Names (especially servants) indistinct in original.]
Scott and Moffatt (Architects) had their offices in nearby Spring Gardens. Whilst Suffolk Square appears a very high class residential area, Spring Gardens was being occupied by governnment offices. [The history of the Lunacy Commission gives some background on this area].
1841 census, Isle of Wight
The 1841 Census shows Henry Mew, aged 50 and Ann Mew, aged 47, in the High Street, Newport. Henry is described as an innkeeper. (IOW 18.1.2005)
New Fairlee
Richard Mew 15
Frederic Mew 9
Walter Mew 7
Fanny Gale 30 Female servant
John Read 30 Male servant
Ann Read 35 Female servant
John Fry 15 Male servant
William Fry Male servant
Henry Fry Male servant
Sea Street, Newport
Thomas Mew aged 20 Brewer
Ann Mew age 15
Sandown, Brading
Benj- Mew age 55 Brewer
Mary Mew age 45
William Mew age 20
Joseph Mew age 12
Nathan Mew age 8
Emily Nunn age 16
Three servants
St Mary's, Barton upon Humber - Newport Strret
District includes two farms (Eddie's and Sawyer's) and two brickyards (Union and Winship's) and a pottery (Himbrough's)
Elizabeth Goodman age 55
William Goodman age 20 agricultural labourer
Elizabeth Goodman 16 female servant

"The architectural style known as Italianate first began to appear in England in the 1840s. It was an inspiration from the Italian Renaissance that occurred through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This style had come to North America by the 1850's and had quickly dominated architecture. It had lasted in both America and in England up until the late 1890s" [See architecture links] - The architecture of the basilica has much deeper roots: See Wikipedia on basilica - See St Francis and Our Holy Redeemer (below) - See Wikipedia on Romanesque

1842:

Henry Edward Kendall (junior or senior) designed additions to Wimpole Hall (archive), near Cambridge, which were removed as ugly in the mid-20th century. An large ornate porch entrance was removed in the early 1940s and added on eastern and western service wings with "Italianate towers" in 1953.

1905 photograph (loaned by Mr and Mrs John Proctor) from Steve Odell's website. It shows one of Kendall's service wings clearly to the left of the trees, and also the ornate porch. Kendall may have also built a stable (Peter Evans' website)

1843:

"The families I've had,' said Mrs Gamp, 'if all was knowd and credit done where credit's doo, would take a week to chris'en at Saint Polge's fontin!'" (Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit)

Note in Isle of Wight Record Office: "(New Fairlee Farm held by Henry Mew 1843 = 173 acres 3 roods 18 perches)".

Island and London: [In 1841] Nos 5 and 6 Love Lane, (St Mary) Aldermanbury, in the City of London were the premises of Spence, Begallay, Westall and Co., wholesale haberdashers. [1841 Trade Directury]]. 29 people lived there: five clerks, 20 journeymen warehousemen (there are no apprentices listed) and three female and one male domestic servant. One of the warehousemen was James Bull, aged 15 (indexed as Rull) - The recipient of the following letter in 1843. In 1861, at Staplers Toll Gate, just down the road from Fairlee Farm, a James Bull "Storekeeper", aged 29, born Whippingham, was living with his wife and children. There is a six (or more) year discrepancy in the age of the 1841 and 1861 James. The 1841 age could have been anywhere between 15 and 19 - So we cannot identify the two Jameses.

From "Rd. Mew - Fairlee" [Wednesday] 4.10.1843 to Mr James Bull, 5 Love Lane, Aldermanbury, London. Dear James, Not feeling inclined to go out this evening, I thought I would let you know how things are with us in the Island. It would be useless telling you things prior to H. Wadmore's departure for town, as you must have had everything over and over again by this time. By the bye, Fred is not much altered by his stay in London. He is just as droll as ever - The next time you see him ask him whether he will take a "little more of the Patent" "Lovely night"...

I take this to be from Frederick Mew's brother Richard. Richard would be about 18 and Fred eleven. If Fred is Charlotte's father to be, this is one of the few glimpses we have of his character. Another is from letters he wrote in 1894 and another the description by Alida Monro, purporting to reflect what she had heard from Charlotte.

1843 The Governesses' Benevolent Institution founded to train and award certificates to governesses.

1844

Henry Edward Kendall (junior) appointed District Surveyor for Hampstead. (F.W. Leakey 1956 page 55). Sometime around here (spring 1844?), Edward Herne Kendall, Henry and Mary's fourth? child was born. He was Charlotte's longest surviving? Kendall uncle, dying just before she did. He is in the 1851 and 1861 census, but I have not traced him in subsequent ones.

Littell's Living Age (also known as The Living Age) was an American general magazine largely consisting of selections from various English and American magazines and newspapers. It was published weekly, for the most part. 11.5.1844 to August 1941. (Serial Archives Listings) - Reproduced some of Charlotte Mew's writings

Daniel and Smith Harrison, Quaker brothers, formed "Harrisons and Crosfield", in Liverpool, to trade in tea and coffee. In the same year, Daniel Harrison's wife, Anna, gave birth to Lucy Harrison. The firm later moved its headquarters to London, the world centre of capital and commercial information. It was primarily a tea and coffee trader until the early twentieth century, when it diversified into rubber and many other products.

1845

Richard Wagner's opera Tannhauser was first performed (in Dresden) in 1845. Wagner revived it for Paris in 1861. Charlotte Mew (1904) compares conflicting voices within Emily Brontë to the different voices of instruments in the overture to the opera. (External link describing overture)

By inference from An Old Servant, about 1845: Elizabeth Goodman came to London to become a servant to Charlotte's maternal grandparents. The real Elizabeth Goodman (16) was in Barton, Lincolnshire in 1841 and a children's nurse (age 26) with Charlotte's maternal grandparents in 1851. The 1861 census shows her (36) back at Barton On Humber. She may have returned to London soon after her mother died in the winter of 1866. She was working for the Mews by September 1867 (about 42). She was their cook in 1871 (46). In 1846: The Believer's Daily Remembrancer: or, Pastor's Morning Visit by James Smith 1802-1862), a Baptist Minister, was published in London by S. Marshall & co. Over 380 pages of meditations. Editions published in 1864, 1871 and 1911. It may have been Elizabeth who pleged Charlotte Mew to read the book "at night and morning"

The architecture of St John The Evangelist, Kensal Green, designed by Henry Edward Kendall (junior) in 1843, and opened in 1845 has been "much criticised". It is a building of white and yellow brick with black flint dressings in Romanesque style, seating 600 (300 free). It had a shallow apse, nave, twin west towers with pinnacles and short spires flanking a three-order portal. In 1903 a chancel in Gothic style, replaced the apse. (Paddington: Churches in A History of the County of Middlesex Volume 9

In 1845, Victoria and Albert bought Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. With the assistance of Thomas Cubitt, a new building in the "Italianate Style" was built over the next few years. (External link to Osborne House website). In 1850, the Mew brewaries were granted a Royal Warrant to supply Queen Victoria when she was in residence at Osborne

Messrs. Kendall and Pope, architects
clicking on the brickwork will take you to the full colour photograph on Simon Cornwall's website

1846

From 1846 to 1853, Kendall and Pope, architects, were constructing the new Essex County Asylum, required by the 1845 County Lunatic Asylums Act. Kendall was Henry Edward Kendall (junior), Charlotte Mew's maternal grandfather. (Not his father - See below). The firm was Kendall and Pope, Architects, 33 Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury. Mr Pope was Robert Philip Pope and the partnesrhip continued until at least the mid 1850s. Churches they designed include Holy Trinity, New Hythe, Kent (1852-1855) and St. Laurence [Lawrence], Skellingthorpe, Lincolnshire (1854-1856)

The asylum was built in red brick, as was Farnborough Hill (below). See "that red brick barn upon the hill"

At University College Hospital Robert Lister performed the first ever operation under anaesthetic in Europe. (Some time in 1846)

1846 Death of Caroline (born Flaubert), sister of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Her husband lost his reason. In the same year, just before this, their daughter Caroline (who became Caroline Franklin-Grout in 1900) was born. She grew up with Gustave Flaubert. She is mentioned by Charlotte Mew in 1902. She died in 1931. [External link "A Chance Meeting"]

Summer 1846: publication of the Brontë poems: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell Of Emily's, Charlotte Mew wrote "Unique in their originality, sincerity and force... they speak for themselves and their creator in unflinching tones" (The Poems of Emily Brontë 1904). Further poems by Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) were published by Currer (Charlotte Brontë) in 1850, after their deaths

about 1847 Mary Leonora Kendall, Charlotte Mew's maternal aunt, born St Pancras. She lived with her parents throughout their lives. She died early in 1902.

1847 Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote the first version of his poem The Portrait which Charlotte Mew quotes from in Men and Trees (1913)

12.5.1847 Grafton Street Chapel, St Anne's Soho - Kendall, district surveyor: Metropolitan Archives reference MBO/PLANS/98

October 1847: "Jayne Eyre was a forbidden book: we doubt however if it was a closed one...many a young mentor... pored over it in secret, burning her candle low over its pages..." (The Governess in Fiction 1899)
December 1847: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey published. "It is mainly upon Wuthering Heights that Emily Brontë's reputation as a great artist and a repulsive woman has been built" (The Poems of Emily Brontë 1904).
see poems - 1850 - 1883 - 1899 - 1903? and 1904 - 1909
Brontë weblinks

1848

After 1848

Hampstead Workhouse built by H.E. Kendall. (external link)
"Messrs. Kendall and Pope, architects" on an archive (Hampstead Workhouse board room - ref. MBO/PLANS/6 - date: 1845-53? Elliptic beam Messrs. Kendall and Pope, architects]

The Victorian Education by Deb Taft (Massachsetts 1999) - British History Online: Private Education in the reign of Victoria - Queen's College, Harley Street - The North London Collegiate School - Queen's College web.
Queen's College was started in 1848 by Frederick Dennison Maurice, the Christian Socialist lecturer of King's College, under the auspices of the Governesses Benevolent Institution. The college was open to girls and women over twelve years old. There were preparatory classes for younger girls, and evening classes for girls already governesses. Llewellyn Davies, brother of Emily Davies, was involved in Queen's College. (Margaret Forster 1984) Female teachers who studied at Queens included Dorothea Beale and Frances Mary Buss

"The following year Bedford College had opened on much the same lines. Both schools quickly drew to themselves all the intelligent, middle-class girls in London whose thwarted ambition to learn was recognised and approved by liberal parents" (Margaret Forster 1984) - However, Mary Cathcart Borer (1975/1976) contrasts the success of Queen's with the initial near failure of Bedford.

1848: The future of labour - and women

1849

Montague House, the old British Museum, was demolished between 1842 and 1845. The first phase of the new building was largely completed by 1852, when the idea was put forward of a domed heaven of learning in the central quadrangle - the new reading room that opened in 1857. In 1850, Karl Marx, started to use the old, and now forgotten, library. Next door to the museum, at 47 Bedford Square, some wives and daughters of the rich were beginning their own cultural revolution:

"Bedford College" (external link)
The Ladies College at 47 Bedford Square was founded in 1849 by Mrs Elizabeth Jesser Reid (born Sturch 25.12.1789 - died 1.4.1866), a rich widow who had been "in contact with leading figures in the revolutions in France and Germany in 1848" . (Quote may be from Margaret Forster 1984) Elizabeth Reid leased the house, gave £1,500 to three (male) trustees, and persuaded friends serve on the management committees and act as teaching professors. It was to provide a broad and non-sectarian education for women - much as London University did for men. It opened in October 1849. At the end of 1851 Mrs Reid wrote "Can anyone explain the failure of this college? or tell how it is that where one might reasonably expect several hundreds, the number who seem to look for Education here is somewhat under nineteen?" (Borer 1975/1976 p.266)

In 1853 a school was opened on the premises to provide a better standard of entry to the classes in the College.

Some college students became resident when "The Residence" was opened in Grenville Street (see 1861). Later 48 Bedford Square became the residence. [In the 1861 Census, 47 Bedford Square has only two people living in it: John Dawson, aged 37, born Ipswich, the Hall Porter - and Ann, his wife, born Vauxhall, the House Keeper. Number 46 has a family (including servants) of fourteen people. In 1871, 47 Bedford Square is occupied by a retired merchant (Mosco Joseph) whose large family were mostly born in Australia. Number 48 has only three people living in it: Elizabeth Barclay? aged 55, Resident of Bedford College? born Teddington - Janet Barclay, aged 46, something Visitor, also born Teddington - Harriet Liddard, servant, aged 57, Cook, born London. Number 49 also has only three people living in it: Ann Bradd, aged 27, Parlour Maid - M.A. Marshall, aged 30, House Maid - Elizabeth A. Bostook, aged 53, Boarder "Interest of Money", born Liverpool who is, like the others listed, unmarried. The census was taken seven days before Easter, so 49 could be the residential unit with only one boarder due to a vacation.

The preparatory school was, at some stage, run by Miss Frances Martin, who retired in 1868. The school was then given up by the college, but Caroline Bolton - Mary Dixon and Lucy Harrison continued a school in Gower Street. This may have moved (over time) from a school to prepare women for college to a girls' day school, some of whose pupils may have gone on to boarding school (the Olivers?), others to college (Ann Mew?), others straight into life (perhaps with part time college classes) Charlotte Mew?.
Bedford College moved to York Place in 1874.

See The Cambridge History... Literature (1907-19221) on The education of women, which concludes: "No doubt, girls' schools, at the beginning, voluntarily handicapped themselves by trying to teach most of the things taught in boys' schools, as well as those things which women either need to know, or are conventionally expected to know, or to be skilled in. But this mistake was not slow to disclose itself and be corrected. On the other hand, they were not handicapped by traditional methods; and the professional bent encouraged by the advocates of a better education for girls gave the teachers a critical attitude towards educational principles and their own work."

About 1849 Arthur Kendall born: See 1851 - 1861 and 1871

school in the Old Kent Road: Mary Davidow (1960 pages 5-6) says "In due time Frederick Mew followed his brothers to London to attend Mr Wotton's School in the Old Kent Road." (Footnote, "from letters and papers in the possession of the family of Mr Richard Percy Mew, Charlotte Mew's first cousin"). On 11.11.1982, Southwark Local Studies Library advised Penelope Fitzgerald that they could not find a school of that ("Wootton's") name. "However, the Post Office London Directory for 1849 lists a Mr T. Walton at the Albany House Academy, in the Old Kent Road."
Mary Davidow continues:Since an apprenticeship in architecture generally commenced at the age of sixteen, lasting for five or six years (Colvin, H.M. 1954 page 4), one may assume that Frederick Mew, upon reaching that age" [that would be 1848] "received his training in the office of some established architect.
In March 1849, Frederick would have been seventeen. It is possible that Frederick's stay in London in 1843 refers to his first weeks at school.
An architect in the 1851 census

Mary Davidow continues: "In 1856 he exhibited a design for the "School of Art, Sheffield" at the Royal Academy from the office of Manning and Mew at 2 Great James Street, London" (reference Royal Academy dictionary, 1905, volume 5) ["Manning and Mew" designed the new block for the Sheffield School of Design (opened 1857) - "in 1853 the emphasis of the school was changed from the education of designers to the teaching of fine arts. In order to meet increased demand for places a new block was designed by architects Manning and Mew, these plans were in a simple style due to a restrictive budget" web information]. "The school of design, founded in 1841, now occupies a building erected in 1857 at a cost of above £7,000" (The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland 1868)
In 1852 (Trade Directory), 2 Great James Street was the office of Armstrong and Westbrook, solicitors. There were several solicitors in Great James Street, but no architects. There was no architect under Manning or Mew. However, the 1861 Census shows Frederick Mew in lodgings at 2 Great James Street and Michael Prendergast Manning (below) living with his parents in St Pancras.

Michael Prendergast Manning (born St Pancras, 1832 - so the same age as Frederick) was active as a London architect between 1851 and 1902. [Not in an 1852 London Directory] In 1861 ("architect") he was living with his parents at 3 Holmes Terrace, St Pancras. He designed some churches after 1870. Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 pp 263-264 says he became an associate of the RIBA in 1866, and retired in 1902. In 1881 ("surveyor and architect") he was married, with several children, living at 5 Provost Road, Hampstead. His widowed father ("retired tradesman") was living with them. In 1884 "Manning and Simpson" were at 6 Mitre Court Chambers, Fleet Street and "Mew F. Templeman" was at 3 Mitre Court, Fleet Street. In 1891 ("architect"), the family were at Pounds Farm, Higham, Suffolk.
"In 1859 Frederick Mew became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects".
In 1860, he exhibited at the Royal Academy "from the office of Kendall and Mew at 33 Brunswick Square".
See the 1861 census

1850

Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. By Ellis and Acton Bell [respectively]. A new edition revised, with a biographical notice of the authors, a selection from their literary remains, and a preface, by Currer Bell [i.e. Charlotte Brontë]. Publisher: London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1850. Contained further poems by Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë

4.4.1850 The North London Collegiate School for Ladies opened in the Buss family home in Camden Street with 38 pupils and Frances Mary Buss as head. (archive link)

15.11.1850 Death of Benjamin Mew, the brewer. The inscription beneath the memorial windows in the parish church reads

In memory of Benjamin Mew who departrd this life 15th Nov 1850 aged LXV

Also said to be in 1850 that a Royal Warrent was granted to Mew's Brewery - Although the earliest original evidence I have for this is 1865.

December 1850 Beginnings of "England's first external examinations for private schools" in a boys school, by the College of Preceptors. "In December 1851 thirty-five girls were examined, two gaining higher and five lower certificates." (Richard Willis, History Today 1.8.2005

1851

1851-1852 Lewis Cubitt's design for the Kings Cross Railway Terminus erected by William Cubitt (see termini in Looking at Buildings). The parish church of St Pancras is along the road opposite the Euston terminus. (1838 - external weblink). The church had ionic columns and Euston station a doric arch, but both were in the Greek classical style. Kings Cross was self-consciously modern, utilitarian in its structure, although "recognisably in the Italianate style then in favour". By contrast, the neighbouring St Pancras Station (1868-1878) hides its utilitarian terminus behind a hotel built in an "advanced medieval style" by Gilbert Scott. (See Looking at Buildings)

1851 is one date usually given for the birth of Ella D'Arcy. Another is either 1856 or 1857. Her death is given as either 1937 or 1939. She appears untraceable in British censuses, under that name. There is a photograph of her on The Victoriam Web. Penelope Fitzgerald says she was born in 1857 and that Ella D'Arcy was her real name "though her publishers wouldn't believe it". Charlotte Mew may have met her in 1894. She visited her ("E. D'A") in Paris in 1902.

James Fleming says that Ella d'Arcy was the daughter of Anthony Bryne D'Arcy and Sophia Anne. The marriage of Sophia Anne Sutherland to Anthony D'Arcy took place at Gravesend in the October/December quarter of 1863. Anthony was a corn merchant. He was born in Ireland about 1820. Sophia was born in Kent about 1823. She may have died in Kensington in the January/March quarter of 1892. She is shown as a widow in the 1881 census. Ella d'Arcy is not shown on the census records of this family that I have traced.

James Fleming says that Ella D'Arcy was educated in France and Germany and that she studied at the Slade School of Art from 1880 to 1881. She moved to literature because her eyesight began to fail.

30.3.1851/31.3.1851 census:

Frederick Mew, architect, aged 19, born Newport, Isle of Wight was lodging at 5 Sidmouth Street, St Pancras (This is just north of Mecklenburgh Square). It is not clear if he has a completely separate apartment or is one of several lodgers with Edward Thurlow, age 53, pattern maker, and his wife, Elizabeth, age 52.

33 Brunswick Square:
Henry E. Kendall, junior ("architect" age 45) and his wife, Mary (age 35).
[No Henry Kendal son]
[Anna Maria Kendal elsewhere]
[No Thomas Kendal]
Edward Kendall, son, age 6
Mary Kendall, daughter, age 4
Arthur Kendall, son, age 2
Mary Cobham Mother-in-Law - Widow, age 70, Annuitant, born Marylebone
Sarah Tomlin servant age 38 nurse
Mary Endicot servant age 42 cook
Elizabeth Goodman servant age 26 children's nurse, born Barton upon Humber, Lincolnshire
Jane Beedle servant age 24 housemaid
Mary Ann Cook servant age 14 children's nursmaid

23 Wilton something. St George's, Hanover Square
William H[enry] Covey 47 General Practitioner, MRCS and LAC, born Basingstoke, Hampshire.
Emma S[arah] Covey 40 his wife
Emma Covey 20 daughter
Fanny C Covey 17 daughter
Charles Covey 16 son
Myra J Covey 14 daughter
Francis Day 21 visitor
Anna M Kendall 14 visitor, born Middlesex
Elizabeth Lunn 25 servant
Ellen Barton 26 servant
Arthur Gardener 17 servant

William Henry Covey, born about 1804, death registered April June quarter of 1878, age 74, St George Hanover Square

1851 census, Isle of Wight
and 1851 Trade Directory

Bugle Inn, 195 High Street, Newport
Henry Mew, age 61, Inn Keeper, born Newport
Ann Mew, age 55, wife, born Lymington
Henry Mew, age 26, son, Wine Merchant, born Lymington
Jane James, servant, unmarried, age 40, Barmaid
Henry Holloway, visitor, married, age 42, Nail Maker?
William Newham, servant, unmarried, age 20, Porter
Harriet Blanchard, servant, unmarried, age 34, Chambermaid
Mary Mackell, servant, unmarried, age 36, Cook
Eliza Woods, servant, unmarried, age 20, Chambermaid
Jane Prince, servant, unmarried, age 23, Cook

New Fairlee Farm
[No head of household shown]
Richard Mew, son, age 25 Bailiff for his father, born Lymington, Hampshire
Fanny Mew, daughter, age 23 Housekeeper, born Lymington, Hampshire
Walter Mew, son, age 17, Agricultural Labourer, born Newport
Frances Goodall 48 servant
John Croad 42
Keziat Croad 50
John Cooke 17
Mark Morris 13

Crocker Street
William Baron Mew, unmarried, age 30, Malster employing 9 men, Brewer employing 17 men.
Ann Agnes Mew, sister, unmarried, age 23, born Newport
Joseph Parker Mew, brother, unmarried, age 22, Brewery Assistant [?] Manager of Brig Harriet [?], Cowes. Coal Trade

Lymington - Hampshire
Trade Directory: Parish of Lymington: 4,164 inhabitants

Quay
Thomas P. Mew age 31 Wine and Spirit Merchant born Newport
Mary J. Mew wife age 28 born Portsmouth
Julia Mew daughter age 10 born Scholar Portsmouth
Mary E.E. Mew daughter age 9 Scholar born Newport
Frances N. Mew daughter age 8 Scholar born Newport
Benjamin P. N. Mew son age 6 Scholar born Lymington
Ellen Mew daughter age six months born Lymington
Maria Hooper, visitor unmarried, age 20, born Downham, Wiltshire
Three House Servants

Trade Directory: Thomas P. Mew, Quay shown as Wine and Spirit Merchant "spirit only" and also (Thomas Parker Mew, Quay) as one of the towns five Brewers

Angel Hotel - High Street
Willam Norris age 50 Hotel Keeper born Lymington
Henrietta Norris, wife, age 31 born Exbury
Georgina Norris, daughter, age 8, scholar, born Exbury
Willam Norris, son, age 7, scholar, born Exbury,
Thomas Norris, son, age 6, scholar, born Exbury
Four servants

Trade Directory: Anchor and Hope, High Street (commercial and posting) Elizabeth and Henry Ackland
Angel Inn, High Street (family and posting) William Benjamin Norris
Introduction on Lymington says "Concerts, balls and other amusements occasionally take place at the Assembly Rooms at the Angel Hotel"

Trade Directory: Mary and Sarah Peress (school) High Street. One that took boarders. Pupils (census) include:

Maria Norris, age 11, pupil, born Lymington

St Mary's, Barton upon Humber - Newport Strret

William Carlile age 75 agricultural labourer
Sarah Carlile age 75 his wife
Elizabeth Goodman age 67 lodger, widow, annuitant

1.5.1851 Queen Victoria opened the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park where the Great Exhibition was held for the next five months. It made over 100% profit, some of which established fellowships and scholarships for science and engineering graduates: The "1851 Exhibition Scholarships". One of these enabled Harriette Chick to study bacteria in Germany. (external link)

1852

Holy Trinity, New Hythe, Kent (1852-1855) was designed by Robert Philip Pope, the partner in the Kendall's firm. It is built of the native ragstone. "The edifice is small, capable of seating about 300 persons. Its architectural style is early English, plain but imposing from its massive simplicity". Click on the bell-tower to visit.

1852 Post Office London Directory -

Kendall and Pope, architects and surveyors, 33 Brunswick Square
Kendall, Henry Edward, architect, 17 Suffolk Street , Pall Mall East
Kendall, Henry Edward junior, architect and district surveyor, 33 Brunswick Square and Holly Cottage, Heath Street, Hampstead (1862 map)

1853 Designs for schools and school houses, parochial and national. By H.E. Kendall [Junior] 11 pages, 21 plates. Printed by Atchley & Co.... [National Art Library Shelfmark: 62.C.57 Fiche Number: 4.2.1606] The British Library catalogues the same title published 1847.
Said it was possible to build an "artistic and tasty village school" for £300. It would be cheaper if the casements had wrought iron frames and the gargoyles and parapets were made in cement. (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p. 284)

Jayne Eyre was a revelation, but Villette [January 1853]... Happy the critic when Villette was young." (The Governess in Fiction 1899)

Daniel Barnes, who became the proprietor of the Royal Pier Hotel, Ryde, married Frances Mew, on the Isle of Wight, in the October/December quarter of 1853. Their children included:
Walter Mew Barnes birth registered July/September 1856
Marian Barnes, birth registered January/February 1862
Edward Daniel Barnes birth registered July/September 1863
George Frederick Barnes birth registered October/December 1866
The names Walter and Frederick were names of Frances' brothers. In 1875 the names Daniel and Barnes were used for one of Charlotte's brothers. At this time, the Barnes children lived (in Ryde) away from the hotel with a governess, and the grandmother of the Mew and Barnes children lived with an aunt in Ryde. It seems reasonable to assume that the Mew children sometimes visited. Walter Mew Barnes had a role with respect to the Mew family trusts (See letter 20.12.1892).

1854

George Bentham (1800-1884) (nephew of Jeremy Bentham offered his herbarium and library to the government on the understanding that they should be used for research in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. (1911 Encyclopedia) Daniel Oliver began working at Kew in 1858 - It would appear, as Bentham's assistant in sorting specimens as they came in from explorers. When Daniel Oliver, "author of various botanical papers in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London etc" was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (4.6.1863) his first two proposers were William Jackson Hooker (Kew biography), the then Director of Kew, and George Bentham.

February 1854 Cheltenham Ladies College opened. Dorothea Beale was Principal from 1858 to 1906 (School website)

April/June quarter 1854: Marriage of Henry Mew to Mary Toward, daughter of Andrew Toward (born Scotland about 1796, died Isle of Wight 1881) who was the land agent for Barton's Farm, Whippingham.

5.7.1854 Death of the French novelist Emile Souvestre (born 1806). In Derniers Bretons (4 volumes 1835-1837) and Foyer Breton (1844) the folk-lore and natural features of Brittany were worked up into story form. (1911 Encyclopedia). A fully revised and corrected edition of Derniers Bretons was published in 1854, which Charlotte Mew references in her discussion of the midsummer fires at Guingamp

1855

31.3.1855 The death of Charlotte Brontë. Matthew Arnold wrote his poem Haworth Churchyard in April 1855. It was published in Fraser's Magazine in May 1855. - (external link to a copy) - See Charlotte Mew 1904

The death of a Mary Cobham was registered in St Giles (Bloomsbury) in the June quarter of 1855. (volume 1b, page 228)

1856: The Universal Exposition Paris: Henry Edward Kendall (junior) exhibited his Composition architecturale. F.W. Leakey 1956 page 56 says this seems to be the only dessin "libre" that Kendall published. [A free drawing as distinct from an architect's drawing?]. It is now lost but may once have hung above Charlotte Mew's mantlepiece. Alida Monro wrote "I have a faint recollection of the Architectural Composition... I feel sure Charlotte showed it to me on one of my first visits to her. I think it hung over her mantlepiece... I remember an airy lightness in the picture..." (F.W. Leakey 1956 page 62)
France: Language - 1859 - school? - her earlier days - 1889 - automile - 1901 (Brittany) - April 1902 (Paris) - June/July 1902 (Brittany?) - 1904 Mademoiselle - cinematograph - 1909 (Brittany) - 1911 (Boulogne) - 1913 (Dieppe) - Frazer - 1914 (Dieppe) - 1926 Aglaë (set in Normandy) -
The study of architectural style would presumably have taken the architects in the Kendal/Mew family to the continent. Charlotte may have had childhood holidays abroad and may have had a period at school in Paris. She became bi-cultural English/French and mentally lived on both sides of the Channel.
Charlotte Mew included French in Some Ways of Love and Notes in a Brittany Convent in 1901 - In the Curé's Garden in 1902 - Mademoiselle in 1904 - The Fête in 1913 - Madeleine in Church (1915?) - Â Quoi Bon Dire and Jour des Morts (just the titles) - Le Sacre Coeur - Monsieur Qui Passe and Fin de féte (1923) (just the titles) - and Aglaë -
Alida Monro (1953 page x) says "In her earlier days, while her father was alive and money was plentiful, she made several sojourns in northern France, and always had a great nostalgia for that country. She read French fluently and introduced many interesting books to her acquaintances. She always had a French book going at the same time as an English one and was an indefatigable reader."

In 1856 Friends School Croydon began to use names instead of numbers for its pupils. One of students under the old regime was Lydia Rous (1819- 1896) who became Superintendent of Friends Girls School, York in 1866. She was a pupil of the Croydon School from about 1829

1856: Modern Architecture by Henry Edward Kendall. [junior] 2 volumes, 36 plates. [National Art Library Shelfmark: F.17.38,39 Fiche Number: 4.2.1719] The British Library catalogues the same title "By H. E. K.?" published 1846.
(Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 pp 4-5 describes this as having "handsome illustrations" which showed clients "exactly what to expect". A variety of styles are shown, which can be mixed. She lists Greek, Early English, Gothic, Italian Renaissance, Tudor, Jacobean and Queen Anne. She says the firm "specialised in private houses from villa to mansion, Board Schools and lunatic asylums".

detail from the architect's original drawing for Sussex Asylum, Haywards Heath built between 1856 and 1859 to the design of H.E. Kendall, Junior "a structure of brick, in the Italianate Lombardo-Venetian style" (Kelly's Directory 1891) - [See external link Lombardo]

"Ruskin... jumped to the conclusion that only a Gothic church was worthy of worship and that Renaissance architecture was pagan in spirit. The reason for this is plain. The total impression of a typical Renaissance building upon Ruskin's sensibility was the antithesis of the naturalistic detail he loved so much in Gothic architecture. Lombardo's church, Santa Maria dei Miracoli, a prime example of Renaissance architecture in Venice, became one of Ruskin's betes noires simply because it substituted for Venetian Gothic a harmonious order of parts which offended Ruskin's proclivity for a semblance of wildness and rudeness in architecture. When Lombardo based his blueprint upon a symmetrical design of circles and rectangles, he was only following an ideal of beauty codified in the 1450s by Leon Battista Alberti. But such an ideal was anathema to Ruskin. It was his assumption that "Whatever is in architecture fair or beautiful, is imitated from natural forms." And natural forms are antipodal to the Renaissance ideal. Natural forms flow, blossom and grow, as the craftsmen of medieval Venice recognized when they preferred to carve the leaf and the flower rather than the square and the triangle upon the rich facades and capitals of San Marco. It is not difficult to understand why Ruskin, who cherished the "look of mountain brotherhood between cathedral and the Alp", found the Euclidean order of Lombardo's church both sterile and inhuman. Ruskin was unable to appreciate almost any Renaissance edifice because its governing ideal of harmonic proportion, which through all the vicissitudes of the Baroque and Rococo periods dominated European architecture until the last century, was unequivocally hostile to the Gothic imitation of natural forms." (Richard Titlebaum "John Ruskin and the Italian Renaissance")

Sussex County Lunatic Asylum, opened 1859, and Our Holy Redeemer in Clerkenwell, opened in 1888, were designed by different architects in a similar style. The asylum was designed by Charlotte Mew's grandfather. In her first published short story, Charlotte writes of the Church of the Holy Redeemer as "a church in the district, newly built by an infallible architect, which I had been directed to seek at leisure". - Compare Basilica di San Francesco di Assisi

"In 1856 Octavia Hill became secretary to the classes for women at the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street" (external link)

July/September quarter 1856 The birth of Walter Mew Barnes, son of Daniel Barnes and Frances Mew registered. In 1871, aged 14, he was at school in Sherbourne, Dorset. He went to Oxford University. Simon Blackwell (email 13.10.2006) has a two-volume edition of Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens that belonged to Walter Mew Barnes when he was a student at Brasenose College in Oxford. - He is in the 1895 Post Office London Directory (under Barristers) as a Special Pleader at 4 Harcourt Buildings, Temple EC. His area being the Western Circuit: Hampshire, Portsmouth, Southampton and Winchester Sessions. He appears to have lived in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. He was staying with his (newly) widowed mother in Ryde in 1881 - and also in 1891 and 1901. A letter to Walter from Charlotte's father on 20.12.1892 shows that he had a role with respect to the family trusts.

Penelope Fitzgerald 1988, pp 2-3 says it was about 1857 that Frederick Mew (Charlotte Mew's father) became architectural assistant to H.E. Kendell Junior. She says this was Spring Gardens, Trafalger Square. This is a reasonable guess at when Frederick joined the firm, but may differ by a few years either way. However, I think Frederick would have started at 33 Brunswick Square. The address Penelope Fitzgerald gives is that of H.E. Kendell senior who, in 1861, lived at Spring Gardens, which is near Suffolk Street, where he previously lived.

1857

16.5.1857 The Builder page 275: A wood engraving: Lettering "Essex County Lunatic Asylum, Brentwood. - Mr. H.E. Kendall, Jun. architect". A birds-eye view of the asylum.

Some time after 1857, Emily Davies was introduced to the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft

1858

2.3.1858 Det gamle Egetraees sidste Drom - [The Old Oak Tree's Last Dream] by Hans Christian Anderson, published in Denmark. It was discussed by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

1859

1859 Adam Bede by George Eliot. In Men and Trees (1913) Charlotte Mew quoted the line "Melodies die out like the Pipe of Pan with the ears that love them and listen for them".

Spring: Le Salon de 1859. Review by Charles Baudelaire regrets the absence of the English, including a visionary dreamer of an architect (whose name escapes him) who builds on paper towns whose bridges have the legs of elephants under which pass gigantic three- masted ships. (In "L'Artiste Moderne")

14.11.1859 Death of Henry Mew, Charlotte Mew's paternal grandfather, licensee of the Bugle Inn and owner of New Fairlee Farm, at Whippingham, aged 69. His wife, Ann, lived to 1878. I seems that after Henry senior's death the family business was divided amongst (at least two of) his sons with Henry junior taking control of the Bugle and Richard the farm and wine merchant's. The business still had entries as [Henry] Mew and Sons in the 1865 Trade Directory. (Henry Mew junior did not have sons).

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, tipping the balance of scientific credibility in favour of evolution - See Chicks

Charminster (second Dorset county asylum) built between 1859 and 1863 to the design of H.E. Kendall, Junior

Society for Promoting the Employment of Women founded in 1859

1860

1861

Temple Bar: a London magazine for town and country readers [monthly 1/-] first published. (external link). From 1866 to 1898 this was owned by Richard Bentley and Son (London publishers from 1829 to 1898) and edited by the "sons" George Bentley, (born 1828, died 1895) and Richard Bentley junior (born 1854, died 1936). See October 1893. Their previous Bentley's Miscellany was first edited (1837) by Charles Dickens, who left because he wanted more editorial freedom than Richard Bentley senior would give him. Bentley's Miscellany was discontinued when they took over Temple Bar. Temple Bar was published by Macmillan and Co. from 1898. It continued to 1906 Its first contribution from Charlotte Mew was The China Bowl in 1899. During the next six years it published several contributions from her each year. [See Lane Library Early British list]

7.4.1861/8.4.1861 census:

Frederick Mew, architect, aged 29, born Newport, Isle of Wight was lodging at 2 Great James Street, Finsbury, with Abraham Bateman (45), coach wheelwright, his wife, Unity (46), and Leah Astley, the housekeeper, aged 60. This is close to Doughty Street, Brunswick Square and St George's Church, Bloomsbury

33 Brunswick Square:
Henry E. Kendall, junior ("architect and surveyor" aged 55) and his wife, Mary (aged 45).
[No Henry Kendal son]
Anna Maria Kendall aged 24
Thomas C. Kendall, son, aged 21, "architect and surveyor"
Edward H. Kendall, son, aged 16, scholar
Mary L. Kendall, daughter, aged 14, scholar
Arthur Kendall, son, aged 12, scholar
Elizabeth Johnson, "nurse", aged 34
Laura Rowe, "housemaid", aged 33
Emily Howard, "cook", aged 25

15 Spring Gardens
Henry Kendall aged 81 Architect
Ann Kendall aged 67
Charles Kendall, son, aged 31, Clerk to Defense Committee: Horse Guards.
Emily Sills, house servant aged 25
Sarah Taylor house servant aged 26

93 Euston Road, Islington
Leonora Herne, aged 64, born Middlesex and her sister, Caroline Herne, aged 62 "Independent Lady" (both unmarried) living with a servant. The death of Leonora Herne (age 80) was registered Islington, in the October/December quarter of 1870. The death of Caroline Parr Herne (age 75) was registered (volume 1b, page 178), Islington, in the January/March quarter of 1874. This may be the "Caroline F. Herne" (Aunt Caroline) whose £500 was included in the trust for Anna Maria Kendall and her children. Charlotte's sister was christened Caroline in the autumn of 1873. In 1851, Leonora Herne (age 50) was living in the home of her widowed sister in law, Mariane Herne (age 60, born Plymouth, Devon) at 38 Beumont Street, Marylebone. In 1841 she was living at 39 Beumont Street with her husband, Robert, (age 55), independant means, born Middlesex). In 1851, Caroline (age 54) was living at 11 Tonbridge Place St Pancras, with her sister, Charlotte Herne (age 52). Both were unmarried and "fundholders". Both were born in St George's, Hanover Square. The death of Charlotte Henrietta Herne was registered St Pancras in the July/September quarter of 1851.

1861 census, Isle of Wight

Bugle Hotel, High Street, Newport
Henry Mew 36
Mary Mew 30
Thomas Toward, visitor, age 20
Samuel Cooper, visitor, age 60
James W Turner, visitor, age 24
James Fullford, visitor, age 36
John Goode, visitor, age 32
Chas Wm Cooke, visitor, age 38
John Erves, visitor, age 71
Caroline Mills, servant, unmarried, age 29, Barmaid
Alfred Hathway, servant, married, age 32, Waiter
Emma Dennett, servant, unmarried, age 25, Chambermaid
Charlotte Dore, servant, unmarried, age 21, Chambermaid
Mary Gallop, servant, unmarried, age 17, Kitchenmaid
Sarah Salter, servant, unmarried, age 15, Scullerymaid
William Denton, servant, married, age 30, Poeter

Lugley Street (Newport, Isle of Wight?)
Anne Mew, widow, head of household, age 65, retired hotel keeper, born Lymington, Hampshire
Richard Mew, son, unmarried, age 65, wine merchant, born Lymington, Hampshire
Mary Beaumot? servant, unmarried, age 20, general servant, born Clareton?, Hampshire
George Beaumot? servant, unmarried, age 20, groom, born Whippingham,

New Fairlee Farm
Walter Mew, age 27, Farmer, born Newport
Georgina Mew, wife, age 22, born Hamsters? Hampshire
Sarrah I. Slippens, servant, unmarried, age 19, House Servant, born Rookley
John Croad?, servant, age 52, Agricultural Labourer, born Arreton
Kesiah? Croad?, servant, age 60, Dairy Woman, born Northwood

Crocker Street
William Baron Mew, widow, aged 40. "Alderman. Brewer employing about 35 servants"
Elizabeth Constance? Bishop, Governess, unmarried, age 40, born Maidenhead, Berkshire
No children shown
Five house servants

88 High Street, Newport
Thomas P. Mew, age 41, Brewer
Mary J. Mew, wife, age 38
Julia Mew, daughter, age 21
Frances P. Mew, daughter, age 18
Benjamin T.P. Mew, son, age 16, scholar, born Lymington
Agnes G. Mew, daughter, age 13, scholar, born Lymington
Ellen Mew, daughter, age 10, scholar, born Lymington
William C. Mew, son, age 7 scholar, born Isle of Wight
Two house servants

Royal Pier Hotel, Ryde
Daniel Barnes, Hotel keeper, age 39, born Somerset
Frances Barnes, wife, age 32, born Lymington, Hampshire
Frances E Barnes, daughter, age 6, born Ryde
Walter M. Barnes, son, age 4, born Ryde
Arthur Henry Barnes, son, age 3, born Ryde
Anna Barnes 32 - sister

Barton on Humber, Lincolnshire - April 1861
28 Newport Street, St Mary's, Elizabeth Goodman, farmer's widow, aged 79, born Howstow, and Elizabeth Goodman, her daughter, quilter?, aged 35, born Barton.
The death of an Elizabeth Goodman, aged 84, was recorded in the December quarter of 1866 in Glanford Brigg (which includes Barton) volume 7a, page 385. If Elizabeth Goodman born Barton about 1825, came to London as a cook in 1867, she would have celebrated 25 years of domestic service in 1892.

In March 1857, Charles Darwin took a fortnight's water treatment at the Moor Park spa run by Dr Edward Lane. In April 1861, two of Edward W. Lane's visitor's were Anna M. Harrison, aged 34, born Liverpool, and Emma L. Harrison, aged 17, born Birkenhead. - (External link with picture). For two years (1861-1862) Lucy and Annie Harrison studied at Bedford College. They boarded at College House in Grenville Street. Lucy "studied... Latin, History, and English Literature. She regretted in later life that she had not given serious thought to the study of Science and Mathematics" (Mary Davidow 1960 pages 33-34)

1862

Committee for obtaining the admission of women to university examinations established with Emily Davies (1830-1921) as Secretary from 1862 to 1869. In 1865 (1863?) girls were admitted to the Cambridge senior and junior local examinations. Degree examinations of the University of London were opened to women in 1878. See also London Association of Schoolmistresses

In 1862 Octavia Hill and her sisters started a school at 14 Nottingham Place. (Nottingham Street?). Octavia was effectively the headmistress. She continued a connection until the school closed in 1891. She taught drawing and bookkeeping. "On Saturday evenings _ every child had to submit the account of her week's pocket money to Octavia, and it had to be absolutely accurate" (see Stephen Walker)

1862 Herbert Spencer's First Principles include the principles of evolution and dissolution.

1863

Julia Turner born. She died in 1946. (Elizabeth Valentine by email). See BA 1889 - 19.7.1913 - clinic 1913 - 1923 self- consciousness - 1924 dream.

In 1863, Anna Kendall's architect father was designing Farnborough Hill in Hampshire as a house for the publisher, Sir Thomas Longman. This is now a school (Farnborough Hill Convent College) (archive with history)

A grade one listed building. Recently described as "Stockbroker/ baronial fantasy style, two storeys with five-storey tower. Red brick, stone dressings, steep tiled roof, turrets, pinnacles, ornate carved bargeboards." and "turrets, towers and many gables. Steep pitch roofs in plain and patterned tiles. Once owned by the widowed Empress of Napoleon 3rd".

10.1.1863 The Metropolitan Railway opened the world's first underground railway from Paddington (Bishop's Road), via Euston and Kings Cross, to Farringdon Street. Paddington, the overground terminus for the Great Western Railway, was linked to Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross, termini for the north. The line was extended west from Paddington, through Westbourne Park, to Hammersmith (opening 13.6.1864), and south to Kensington (opening 1.7.1864?) and, later, South Kensington (opening 24.12.1868). What is now the circle line was completed in 1884 - making underground travel all round London possible. [But the name circle line did not arrive until after the second world war. It was 'Metropolitan Railway Company' until nationalisation in July 1933, and then 'Metropolitan line'] This was a shallow level underground, with trains drawn by steam engines until 1905, when the line was electrified. (external link). (external link). See 1900 to 1908.

The Metropolitan Railway would have enabled commuting between Doughty Street and Burlington Road.

13.5.1863 Will of Henry Edward Kendall (junior) signed. This made Frederick Mew his executer. The residue of his estate was bequeathed to his wife and Frederick jointly, but it as to be invested in Government or real securities in England and Mrs Kendall was to get the income. After her death, the capital was to be divided between [her?] children equally. (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 pages 5 and 264)

19.12.1863 Marriage of Frederick Mew and Anna Kendall at St George's Church, Bloomsbury. The witnesses being Henry Kendell, Anna's cousin Ada Cubitt (aged about 22) [Not her mother Mrs Lewis Cubitt] and Sophia Webb (probably aged 23). I would guess that the witnesses were the father of the bride and her two bridesmaids. [Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 (p.6) says Sophia Webb was "wife of the proprietor of the Fountain Inn,West Cowes" - but this does not appear to be correct].
Frederick and Anna's children

Penelope Fitzgerald also says that the newly-weds moved into 30 Doughty Street [Not 10 Doughty Street as sometimes stated]. They were at 30 Doughty Street in 1871. They lived there until about January 1890.
Doughty Street: map on this page - "At the time of writing this house has been taken by Camden Borough Council for restoration" (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 pages 7 and 264) external map - another showing Mecklenburgh Square.

Penelope Fitzgerald says the house was "at the end of the street, overlooking the airy trees of Mecklenburgh Square" In fact, Number 30 is further south than the square. But, as the pictures suggest, the children should be able to see north to the square from the nursery window

The privet hedge around Mecklenburgh Square is now very high. From a side street one can peer in on the private playground under the trees that the Mew children shared with the other children of their houses.
This is where Freda and her Isle of Wight cousins spent a joyous afternoon getting hot and sweaty and dirty.
This and the other pictures around the house were taken by Andrea Nagy on Sunday 26.8.2007

Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street. He and his new family lived there from April 1837 to December 1839. From February 1837 to March 1839 Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress was published in Bentley's Miscellany as a monthly serial. He called this his "first novel". By the summer of 1837, his "second [planned] novel" had a subject and draft title. This became Barnaby Rudge, not published until 1841. Its London settings include Clerkenwell, which appears to be the setting of Charlotte's fictional walk in Passed. (1881 Census)
Doughty Street is on the other side of Coram's Fields from Brunswick Square. The Georgian Houses in Doughty Street were erected between 1792 and 1810. Mecklenbourgh Square and Brunswick Square were laid out in 1794.

The London plane trees in Brunswick Square are about the same size as those in Lincolns Inn, which are believed to have been planted about 1820 (external link). The oldest in central London may be those in Berkley Square, thought to have been planted in 1789. (external link)

The 1868 Gazetteer for St Pancras, on the GenUKI site, describes the Foundling Hospital (not the present one) as between Mecklenburgh Square and Brunswick Square. This area is now Corams Fields.

This 1950s map has Doughty Street and Mecklenburgh Square on the eastern edge, then Brunswick Square to the west and Gordon Square and Gordon Street on the far west. St Pancras Church is north east of Gordon Square. St George's Church, Bloomsbury is south of the British Museum. [Click on the map to go to the key map]

See 1811 - 1867 - 1887 In 1863, Samuel Chick the father (to be) established the London office for the firm's lace at 5 Newman Street. This remained his London business centre, and became his family home. Newman Street is not shown on the above map. It is just to the west of Tottenham Court Road (south west corner of map). Samuel Chick's ledger of business letters from 1863 to 1865 provides the material for chapter eleven ("Early Days at Newman Street") of Margaret Tomlinson's history.

Newman Street: See 1867 - 1887 - 1924 - 1952 - 1956

December 1863 Eighty three girls sat the Cambridge Local Examinations. Twenty five were from North London Collegiate - twenty from Queen's College - twenty from school like Octavia Hill's. The results were encouraging, except for arithmetic. It has been said that these were the first public examinations to which girls were admitted, but, according to Richard Willis, the first were in the early 1850s.

1864

"La priere d'une vierge - A maiden's prayer - composee pour le piano par Thecla Badarzewska" 1864 - 1866 (4 pages)
(Sheet music cover at National Library of Australia) -
It is possible that this was only available in French until the 1920s. The "vocalist" parodies it in Charlotte Mew's Notes in a Brittany Convent

1864 Birth of Florence Mary [Wilson?] Poole (died 1934) in Cambridge where she lived until 1891 or later. She married Clement Valantino Parsons, Leather Merchant of Paddington, London, in September 1893. [The marriage of Clement Valentine Parsons and Florence Mary Wilson was regustered Paddington in the July/September quarter of 1893 - The birth of Sylvia Parsons was registered in Paddington in the July/September quarter of 1894.] They and Sylvia, their six year old daughter, were at 72 Warwick Road, Paddington in 1901. She is entered as a "writer", working from home at times. In 1899 she was a speaker at the International Congress of Women 1899 . Penelope Fitzgerald says that (about this time) "Mrs Clement Parsons" recommended Temple Bar to Charlotte Mew as an outlet for her writing. In 1913 she appears in Catherine Amy Dawson Scott's diaries [as I read Penelope Fitzgerald, page 111] as one of the small group who met at her house. She told Catherine Scott that she would cancel every other appointment if Charlotte was going to read, it was the "heart of life to her", Sylvia Parsons died in 1919

1864 Birth of Arthur St. John Adcock. He was acting or co-editor of the (London) Bookman by 1913. One source says that he was (sole?) editor from 1923 to his death. - See 9.10.1920 - 1923 - 7.9.1925 - 1928 - Died 1930.

Daniel and Anna Harrison's home from 1864 was Beckenham (Bromley) in Kent. Mary Davidow says that new friends here included Mrs Craik, author of John Halfax, Gentleman - William de Morgan - Professor S.R. Gardiner, Holman Hunt, Albert Godwin and Arthur Hughes. During 1865-1866 Lucy Harrison went into town to read Latin with Miss Octavia Hill and to attend lectures at Bedford College. [External link: mentions "Latin class at home" (November 1870) in connection with Octavia Hill]. It was this period of attending lectures that led to her involvement in what became the Gower Street School. Emily Davies started the London Association of Schoolmistresses in 1866.

Octavia Hill links Philanthropic women and accounting. Octavia Hill and the exercise of `quiet power and sympathy' by Stephen P. Walker, Cardiff: (html) (pdf)

July/September 1864 Death of James Herne registered Islington (See 1861) This may be James Herne, master auctioneer of Shadwell (born St George's, Hanover Square, about 1790).

1865

Henry Herne Mew (1865- 1901), Charlotte's oldest sibling, born. If the age given on his death certificate is correct, he was born after 23.3.1865. This is consistent with his age on the 1871 and 1881 census forms: placing his birth after early April 1865. His birth was registered in St Pancras in the April-June quarter of 1865.

see name Herne. The death of James Herne just before the birth of Henry Herne, and his money to Henry Herne's mother, suggest a bequest conditional on her son bearing the name of Herne. The names Charlotte and Caroline are also Herne names.

The known children of Frederick and Anna Mew are Henry Herne Mew - Frederick Mew - Charlotte Mew - Richard Cobham Mew - Caroline (Anne) Mew - Daniel Kendall Mew (Christopher Barnes) - Freda Kendall Mew

Twenty six years of Elizabeth Goodman's life between "the attic nursery and the basement kitchen... planning for us small treats and great careers" would fit with Henry Herne's birth if years are counted from January 1866 to January 1892 - The real Elizabeth Goodman died in January 1893. Freda Mew (the youngest) would have been thirteen, approaching fourteen, when Elizabeth Goodman died. See below. [The number "twenty-six" may have been in Charlotte's mind because Elizabeth Goodman received a certificate for twenty-five year's service a year before she died]

Harrod & Co.'s Directory of Hampshire & Isle of Wight, 1865
Richard Mew, farmer, New Fairlea. This is in Cowes (East) and Whippingham - The most illustrious resident of which is Queen Victoria. [Re New Fairlea, however, see Henry Mew below]

GenUKI on the Parish of Whippingham in 1868

Newport
Newport Corporation: Mayor Henry Mew esquire. Justices headed by William Baron Mew esquire - Who was also an Alderman. Councillors for North Ward included Henry Mew and Thomas Parker Mew.
Posting Houses in Newport: Bugle Hotel in the High Street - Mew and Sons.
The Clergy, Gentry section includes Thomas Parker Mew, esquire in Crocker Street and William Baron Mew esquire of Polars.
In the Commercial section for Newport:
Emily Mew. registrar office for servants, High Street
Henry Mew, farmer, New Fairlee Farm
Henry Mew and sons, importers and bonders of foreign wines and spirits, merchants, St James Street,
Henry Mew and sons, Bugle Hotel, Commercial inn and posting house, High Street
James Tucker Mew, professor of music, Westminster
W. B. Mew and Co. Brewers to Her Majesty, Crocker Street, and at Esplanade, Ryde
W.B. Mew and Co., wine and spirit merchants, Crocker street, and at West Cowes, Ryde and Lymington

Sometime in 1865 birth, in Ireland, of James George O'Keeffe (sometimes spelt O'Keefe). He was educated at University College, Dublin. He was a civil servant. In 1891 he was a boarder at 39 Rossiter Road, Steatham, aged 24, a clerk in the War Office. In 1902 he published A Hand-book of Irish Dances - He married Elsie Millard in 1902. In November 1913, Charlotte proposed introducing him to Mrs Scott as an expert in Old Irish. It was in 1913 that he published Buile Suibhne: (The frenzy of Suibhne) being the adventures of Subhne Geilt, a Middle Irish Romance - Edited, with a translation into English, introduction, notes and glossary. This was done for the Irish Text Society. Mary Davidow, (1960) page 44, says this may have influenced T.S. Eliot in the creation of Sweeney - (external link: Patricia Sloane - Notes on Sweeney). An online version is provided by CyberScotia Books. James was financial representative in the USA and Canada during the first world war and in the Far East and then Baghdad until 1926, when he retired. James George O'Keeffe was one of Charlotte Mew's two executers in 1928. J.G. O'Keeffe, 1 Dynevor Road. Richmond 3845 is in the London telephone directory from 1927 to 1935). He is indexed as J.O. O'Keeffe. He died 1937.

Sometime in 1865 birth of Janet Syrett, who became Netta Syrett. She died in 1943. She appears to have been a friend of Catherine Amy Dawson from the mid 1890s. She was also a friend of May Sinclair (named in her will). See Marjorie Watts 1982

August 1865 Catherine Amy Dawson born Dulwich. Her father, Ebenezer Dawson, was a brick manufacturer. (Information from censuses). She was given the same name as her mother, which may be the reason she was known as Amy. Her sister, Ellen M. Dawson (known as Nellie), was born about 1868. Henry Dawson Lowry (Cornwall) was her cousin. Catherine Dawson, Any's mother, died in January 1877, when Amy was 11 and Nellie 7. In 1878, her father married another Catherine, who was known as Kate. In 1881, Catherine (Kate) Amy and Ellen were living or staying with Kate's widowed mother, Sarah Ancell, in Camberwell. "Catherine A. Dawson" in the 1871 census is now "Amy Dawson". Amy Dawson was educated at the Anglo German College, Camberwell. She began earning her living at 18 as a secretary. Charades For Home Acting (44 pages) by C.A. Dawson was published by Woodford Fawcett and Co. in 1888 - Sapho an epic poem of 210 pages, was published by Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. in 1889, at Amy Dawson's own expense. I have not traced Amy in the 1891 census. Her Idylls of Womanhood, a collection of poems, was published by William Heinemann in 1892. The marriage of Catharine Amy Dawson to Horatio Francis N. Scott was registered in Lambeth in the April-June quarter of 1896. The birth Marjorie Catharine W. Scott was registered in St George, Hanover Square in the January-March quarter of 1899. Christopher Scott was born in March 1901. His birth (Horatio Christopher L. Scott) was registered in St George, Hanover Square in the April-June quarter of 1901. In the 1901 census, Catherine A. Scott is living with her husband, Horatio F.N. Scott (physician, surgeon, born Australia about 1865) and new born son (Horatio C.L. Scott) at 2 Bennett Street, St George, Hanover Square. The family moved to West Cowes on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1902. They lived there for seven years. Walter Scott, nicknamed Toby, was born in June 1904. Dawson Scott then published novels: The Story of Anna Beames in 1906 - The Burden in 1908 - Treasure Trove in 1909 - The Agony Column in 1909 and Madcap Jane (which Charlotte Mew read) in 1910 - Mrs Noakes, An Ordinary Woman and a guide (with map) called Nooks And Corners of Cornwall in 1911. Mrs Scott met Charlotte Mew in 1912. At the time, she was engaged in, or had just finished, editing the poems of her deceased cousin, and writing her own poems. Charlotte particularly valued her relation with Marjorie, Christopher and Toby Scott, the children. - See also 1913. 1914 - In 1914, Mrs Scott moved to Cornwall for some time with her sick son. Known correspondence with Charlotte was briefly resumed in 1917. See also 1926 - 1927 - October 1929 - 1932 - 1934 - She died 4.11.1934. See also 1982 - 1987

1866

Edward Thomas Browne (1866- 1937) born Hammersmith. He was the husband (not the father) of Margaret Robinson (died 1938), who was called "Maggie" in correspondence. (See external link). "During the session 1891-92 Browne attended a full course of lectures and practical work in Zoology under Prof. W.F.R. Weldon at University College, London. In the autumn of 1892 he began investigations on coelenterates in the old research laboratory... In this narrow space tables were provided for six research workers [including] Miss Margaret Robinson, a former Newnham student, who seventeen years later became Browne's wife". Margaret Robinson (zoologist) was at University College London from 1886 to 1889 and then re-entered 1903-1904 (Address 60 York Terrace, Regents Park, NW). She left in 1908-1909. In 1901, Edward T. Browne, aged 34, "zoologist (student)" was living at 141 Uxbridge Road, Hammersmith, with his father and sister. E.T. Browne and Margaret Robinson married in the Hampstead district in 1909 and set up home at "Anglefield", Berkhamsted [various spellings], Hertfordshire. (map). - Berkhampsted is mentioned in Charlotte Mew's letter to Mrs Hill of 24.7.1913, and again on 4.1.1915. Penelope Fitzgerald identifies "Maggie Browne" as the Zoologist in Charlotte Mew's 1901 story and suggests that she was at school with Charlotte. Professor Browne appears to have supported the Mews in their illnesses in the 1920s. E.T. Browne, Anglefield, Berkhamsted 588, was in the telephone directory 1935-1937

15.10.1866 Laura (Gertrude) Lemon, composer, pianist, born Guelph, Ontario. She came to England in 1890. Laura Lemon wrote the music to go with Charlotte Mew's 1919 Song. She died in Redhill, Surrey, on 18.8.1924. (External link: Encyclopedia of Canadian Music

1866 Fanny Read married Richard Mew at Crewkerne in Somerset. Her mother, Elizabeth Read (born about 1811), was the widow of John Read (born about 1801), a farmer. In 1841, the family consisted of John, Elizabeth, Robert Rendall Read, aged 3 and Mary Ann Read, aged 1. In 1861 (Turlands? Farm, Crewkerne) it was Elizabeth, widow aged 50, Farmer of 270 (? 27?) acres employing eight men and five boys, born Mernott, Somerset - Robert R. Read, aged 22, Farmer's son, born Crewkerne - Fanny Read, aged 27, Farmer's daughter, born Crewkerne - Mary Anna Read, aged 21, Farmer's daughter, born Crewkerne - Louisa Read, aged nine, Farmer's daughter, born Crewkerne, plus a visitor and servant. Elizabeth and Fanny's sisters are probably the Somerset aunts whose garden taught Charlotte her love of flowers. At the 1871 census (when Fanny was 37), Louisa Read aged 19, sister-in-law of Richard Mew, occupation "companion" was staying at South Fairlee Farm, whilst four year old Fanny Mew was staying with Elizabeth Read (aged 59) and her daughter Mary Anna Read (aged 30) in Bath and Wells.

11.11.1866 Fanny Mew of South Fairlee Farm, eldest daughter of Richard and Fanny Mew, born. [I did have the date as "about 1867"] The birth of a Fanny Mew was registered Isle of Wight vol.2b page 567 in the September-December quarter of 1873. In 1901 Fanny Mew, aged 34, born Newport Isle of Wight was living in Whippingham Isle of Wight. The memorial to her in St Pauls Church gives her date of birth and death.

Foundation of an anglican religious community, the Sisters of Bethany, in Lloyd Square, Clerkenwell - (external history website)

Emily Davies held a gathering of 50 governesses in Elizabeth Garrett's house in 1866 that led to the formation of the London Association of Schoolmistresses. (external link). Activities of this Association included the publication of a series of pamphlets on the part that different subjects should play in the curriculum. Lucy Harrison contributed the one on History. Early publications of the Association included a lecture on teaching arithmetic by Joshua Girling Fitch (1869) and discussion on the relation of headmistresses to their assistants (1870). In 1870 a meeting discussed if members should be asked about reducing the time and work pupils spent on various subjects. In 1877 there was a pamphlet on Physical exercises and recreation for girls, followed by one by Emily Davies on Home and the Higher Education (1878). A single sided leaflet on the Association (1878) survives at Cambridge and its 12 page report and rules for 1883 at the University of London. Subject pamphlets included Memory (1878) - Mathematics (J. Westlake, 1879) - Geography (Jane Agnes Chessar, 1879) - School Honour (Sophie Bryant, 1879) - History (Lucy Harrison, 1880) - Translation (L. J. Menzies, 1880) - Latin ( Edwin Abbott Abbott, 1884) - English Literature (Anna Buckland, 1885) - Natural Science (Catherine A. Raisin, 1885). M. H. Sharpe made A plea for the extended study of works of imagination in the school course in 1882, Agnes Ward contributed The principles and practice of thrift among teachers in 1883. The Association was dissolved, and its final meeting held on 21.3.1888. Emily Davies was Secretary throughout. (Emily Davies archives - also)

Lydia Rous became Superintendent of Friends Girls School, York. In 1867 "there were only 43 girls...of which eleven were teacher trainees, girls only a little older than the scholars... who had stayed on after their schooling." Staff and student were all Quakers. The girls came from all over the country (including Ireland). "The duration of school life was much shorter then - three years at the most, and more often just a year or two, with a yearly summer holiday" [Compare 1881]. The curriculum did not include music, singing or dancing. It did include history, arithmetic, geography and English literature.

Elizabeth Goodman's mother (also Elizabeth Goodman) died in Barton?, Lincolnshire in the last quarter of 1866. It may have been shortly after this that Elizabeth (aged about 43) returned to London and became the "cook" in the Mew household. She was a member of the household by September 1867

1867

About 1867 Jessie Murray born in India. See Licentiate 1908 and psychology - Medicine and Surgery 1909 - Women's Parliament 1911 - Psychology 1912 - Co-founder of the Medico-Psychological Clinic in 1913 - Wrote the preface to Married Love in 1918. Died in 1920.

See 1811 - 1863 - 1887
In April, May or June of 1867, Samuel Chick, the father (to be) - (see Newman Street) married Ema Hooley in Macclesfield. (volume 8a page 209). All their children were born at Newman Street. Samuel and Alice were born on 31.3.1868. Edith was born sometime in October 1869, not long before Charlotte Mew. The other Chicks were younger than Charlotte. Margaret Tomlinson's chapter starting with the marriage is Called "Lace and London Property" because, with the decline in the Honiton lace business, Samuel Chick diversified, first into trading foreign laces and then into buying and developing property. It may be that the Chicks became family friends of the Mews (architects) through the property development. It may also be that Charlotte and Anne were involved in producing designs for the Chick lace makers. New designs helped to sell. Designs "after nature" and copies of antique designs were particularly popular. However, art students tended to make too make designs that were too complex and people who could draw but understand the practicalities of the material were difficult to find. It is via the Chicks that Charlotte's needlework and designs were preserved.

16.7.1867 Birth of "Frederick George Webb" [presumably Mew] at 30 Doughty Street. Registered by Frederick Mew, Architect on 23.8.1867 at the Grays Inn Lane sub-district office of Pancras. Mother's name "Anna Maria Mardon Mew, formerly Kendall" (Frederick and Anna's, second? child)

7.9.1867 Death of Frederick Mew (Son of Frederick Mew an architect) aged 7 [not 2] months, at 3 York Place, Broadstairs. Cause of death: "Diarrhoea, 48 hours, Certified" (no name)". [Comment: diarrhoea, probably following on a holiday infection, would be the actual cause of death as it removed body salts] "Death notified (Ramsgate district of Thanet, Kent) by "Elizabeth Goodman: Present at the death" on 9.9.1867. Her address given as 30 Doughty Street, Mecklenburgh Square, London, WC.

["Frederick George Webb Mew": Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.9, "died on an outing to Broadstairs, aged two months". The certificates are typed copies made for Mary Davidow in 1958. The death of a George Frederick Mew, aged 0, was registered "Westminster St. M." vol.1a page 233 in the July-September quarter of 1869.]

1868 The (ex-Bedford College) school that Charlotte Mew would later attend, moved to Gower Street in, or after, 1868. The 1871 census shows, at 78 Gower Street: Caroline Bolton, Unmarried, 30 (could be 39), School Mistress - Mary Dixon Unmarried 23? Governess, born Liverpool - Dora Arthur, Boarder, Unmarried, 20, Scholar - Lucy Harrison, age 27? (very unclear) School Teacher, Birkenhead - Madeleine? Earle, Boarder, Unmarried, 16, Scholar, birth place: N.K. - Ethel Harrison, Boarder, 11, Scholar, born Bayswater (1881 census) - Edith Harrison, Boarder, 13, Scholar - Marianne Mathers, Boarder, 17 (12?), London - Annie Jewell, servant, unmarried, 20, cook, born Clare? North Devon - Kate Gregory, servant, unmarried, 19, House Maid, born London.

The Royal Commission on Education Given in Schools in England, appointed 1864 to discover measures "for the improvement of secondary education", reported in 1868. (21 volumes). Argued that no scheme of education was complete without science: "the study of natural science develops better than any other studies the observing faculties, disciplines the intellect by teaching induction as well as deduction". It "supplies a useful balance to the studies of language and mathematics". It found the study of science more prevalent in girls' schools than in boys'. It argued that English literature should be taught to "kindle a living interest in the learner's mind, to make him feel the force and beauty of which the language is capable, to refine and elevate his taste" rather than "to find material with which to teach English grammar". The mathematics taught should vary, with upper classes being taught Euclidian theory, other classes practical arithmetic. The subject range of the London Association of Schoolmistresses' booklets may give an indication of the range of Charlotte Mew's secondary education.

5.1.1868 Birth of Edward Garnett, who spent most of his life reading manuscripts sent to the publishers he worked for and assisting new authors. James Joyce and Charlotte Mew were two he decided not to help.

31.3.1868 Samuel Chick., the oldest Chick child, born. Edith Chick was born just before Charlotte Mew. The rest of the Chick children were younger than Charlotte

Ethel Oliver, born 12.10.1868 at Kew. Her immediate family are:
Daniel Oliver (father) (6.2.1830-21.12.1916) librarian of the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 1860-1890 and Professor of Botany at University College, London from 1861-1888. Archives - FRS. Although born Newcastle, his father, was not "old Daniel Oliver", who lived with his family in "Paradise, Newcastle", a house by the river as suggested by this external link. He was the son of Andrew and Jane Oliver of Benwell Hills, Quakers. He went to the Society of Friends' School, Brookfield, Wigton. Northumberland. (external link). He began working at Kew Gardens in 1858. In 1861 he is shown as "Professor Botany. Librarian Royal Gardens Kew", and is living alone with a female servant. He married Hannah Wall on 18.4.1861. They are at "10 Kew Gardens Road" in the 1891 and 1901 Census, which appears to have been their retirement home. After his retirement, Daniel Oliver painted and drew landscapes. Some of these were given to the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle in 1919, a larger number in 1947 (catalogue). Daniel Oliver was awarded the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society in 1893.
Hannah Hobson Oliver (mother) (born about 1835). The entry in the online 1881 Census which shows her as also Keeper of the Herbarium is, unfortunately, a transcription error. She was born Hannah Wall, daughter of James and Jane Hall of Sheffield. From August 1844 to June 1851 she attended Friends' School for Girls in York. The death of a Hannah H Oliver, aged 68, was registered in the Hexham district of Northumberland in the October-December quarter of 1911. (Estimated birth year: about 1843)
Francis W. [Wall] Oliver, born 10.5.1864 at Richmond, Surrey. Died 14.9.1951. The family had moved to Kew by the time Winifred was born. About 1873 (aged 9), Francis was sent to the Friend's School at Kendal (See guide to Quaker schools) where he developed his "passion and skill for mountaineering". He was then a scholar at Friend's Boy School, 20 Bootham, St Giles, Bootham, York. He is shown there (aged 16) on the 1881 census. (external link to history). At York he was given charge of their 4 and a half inch telescope. An "enthusiast developed in him a predilection for botany". He studied for a year at University College, London, and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating 1885/1886. "In 1888" (aged about 24) "Oliver took his father's place... first as lecturer, then in 1890 as Quain professor". From "early 1889 until the summer of 1890", Arthur Tansley was one of his students - [before moving on to Cambridge where he was a friend of Frederick Frost Blackman] In 1891, Francis Oliver, "Professor of Botany", was staying on a Westmoreland farm (in Rydal and Loughrigg - Wordsworth country - map) as a "boarder" with Winifred Oliver ("Art Student"), Ethel Oliver (no occupation shown), Frederick E. Weiss ("Demonstrator in a Botany School") and others. Frederick Weiss (in 1901) was a Professor of Botany in Manchester. In 1892, Arthur Tansley became Oliver's assistant - probably on fossil botany, which Edith Chick appears to have been developing an interest in at this time. The marriage of Francis Wall Oliver was registered Sevenoaks, Kent in the September Quarter of 1896. He married Mildred Alice Thompson, born about 1869, died 1932, the daughter of Charles Robert (surgeon) and Emma Thompson, District Visitor. He had met the Thompsons "when climbing in the Alps". "They had one daughter and two sons both of whom attained distinction in the navy". I cannot find them in 1901. He was working with Arthur Tansley in 1904. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society on 11.5.1905 when his botanical knowledge and researches "especially" included "ecology and fossil botany". He may have been know as Frank within the family. Charlotte Mew calls his wife "Mrs Frank" (1909). From 1929 to 1950 he was in Egypt. - (Archives) -
Winifred Oliver, born 3.5.1866 in Kew. She became a scholar at Friends' School for Girls, Driffield Terrace, York in January 1881 (aged 14, almost 15) and is shown on the census (see for more details). She left in December 1883. (aged 17). She was an art student in 1891 (above). She and Ethel were single women in their parents' house in 1901. In Charlotte Mew's 1909 letters to Ethel Oliver there is a reference to Winifred sympathising with an artist who is painting outdoors. The same letters contain a passage suggesting Ethel was also an artist: But one who painted portraits.
Ethel Oliver, born 12.10.1868, was living (age 2) in her parents' house at Kew in 1871. Daniel Oliver sent an 1871 photograph of her to John Ruskin on 4.3.1873. (Ruskin collection). In 1881, Ethel was living at home, but was living with Lucy Harrison (London) soon after. Charlotte Mew may have met her in 1879 or earlier, was living with her about 1884. Ethel went to Friend's School, York, in January 1885 (aged 16. She left in June 1896, aged 17, almost 18). Ethel went to York about the same time that Lucy Harrison left the Gower Street School and went to Yorkshire (although not at first to Friends School). See above for 1891, when Ethel was in the Lake District. She was with her parents at Kew in 1901. Ethel may have gone to France with Charlotte in 1901. Charlotte wrote letters to Ethel Oliver ("My dear") (all from France) in 1902 - 1909 and 1911 and Ethel was Charlotte's executer
Ethel is sometimes called Edith Oliver by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Mary Davidow 1960, page 38 "While their parents were alive Ethel and Winifred lived with them at 10 Kew Gardens where Ruskin was a frequent visitor. Arthur Hughes was a family friend, and some of his paintings hung in their parlour... When Ethel left Miss Harrison's School she travelled with Winifred to Italy where they studied painting and music. Before returning to England they spent some time in France, developing a preference for Brittany. When their tour ended they settled down to a routine of volunteer social work, weekly "At Homes" for their friends when they discussed literature and art, and regular visits to the galleries and occasional attendance at concerts. Winifred and Ethel painted, but not professionally. Ethel, a good musician, was deputy organist for St Mary's (Church of England) in Isleworth for years)" [Presumably St Mary, Spring Grove, built 1856 for the Spring Grove Estate. It is in the evangelical anglican tradition. St Mary the Virgin, Worton Road was built 1952/1954 in the high anglican tradition. (See Isleworth Churches in British History online]
When the burden of grief became close to unbearable, Charlotte Mew turned to her friends at 2 The Grove in Isleworth where Winifred and Ethel lived after the death of their parents. Here, in the "true quiet of a Quaker household," the distraught Charlotte frequently found rest" [The quote is referenced to a letter in the Berg Collection 18.1.1923

October/December quarter 1868 Birth of Richard Percy Mew registered Isle of Wight. (See New Fairlee) He was sent to Cranleigh School for Farmers' Sons and eventually took over the management of New Fairlee Farm (see 1901). Richard Percy Mew and his wife gave information to Mary Davidow about their cousin (Charlotte) in 1958. From 1927 to 1963 "Mew, R.P. Farmer, New Fairlee" was in the Isle of Wight telephone directory. However, a "Richd. P Mew" appears in the Hillingdon telephone directory from 1963 to 1981 - which would make him impossibly old if it was the same person.

1869

In connection with University College London, the first series of `lectures for ladies' was given, under the auspices of the London Ladies' Educational Association. The courses were given outside the College premises, by Carey Foster, Professor of Physics, and Henry Morley, Professor of English and the prime mover in the extension of university education to women. Later that year, women were allowed to attend classes within the College in the Physics and Chemistry laboratories.

The Graphic, "An illustrated weekly newspaper", was published, London, from 1869 to 1932, when it was absorbed by The Sphere. At some time, before the 1921 Farmer's Bride, it published a poem, or poems, by Charlotte Mew, by I do not know which.

The RIBA archives contain five letters from Charlotte's great grandfather, Henry Edward Kendall senior, written between 1869 and 1873, saying that, as he is now very deaf and semi-retired, he wishes to transfer from being a Fellow of the RIBA to being an Honorary Member. Having taken a prominent part in the foundation of the Institute it pleased him that it had "risen to its present eminent position"

July/September quarter 1869 Birth of Katherine Herberta Righton registered Reading, Berkshire. Her father was a merchant. Her mother died before she was eleven years old. Her sister, Winifred Righton, was two years younger than her. The birth of Winifred Sabin Righton was registered Reading, Berkshire in the October/December quarter of 1871.In 1901, she and her sister were living at 16 John Street, Holborn. Her occupation is shown as "art" something. In the April-June quarter of 1901, the marriage of Winifred Sabin Righton was registered in Holborn. She married (one of) John Michael Kellard or Stanley Fred East. Katherine Righton, as a "figure artist", and a friend of Anne Mew and Charlotte Mew appears in their story in the 1920s. Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 (p.221) says that Charlotte spent the Christmas before she died with her. In 1943 and 1946 a "K. H. Righton" was at 45 Heath Hurst Road, NW3 - Telephone Hampstead 2706. (map)

29.10.1869 Birth at 5 Newman Street of Edith Chick, the oldest Chick daughter to survive infancy,

October 1869 First edition of The Academy: A Monthly Record of Literature, Learning, Science, and Art. In 1902, this merged with a periodical called Literature to form: Academy and Literature. The Academy was the first journal (1899) to publish an essay about literature by Charlotte Mew. [See Lane Library Early British list. It is indexed in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical for 1869-1871]

1869

Charlotte Mew was born 15.11.1869, almost certainly at 30 Doughty Street, near Mecklenburgh Square, London. Her father, Frederick Mew, was an architect. Her mother, Anna Kendall. was the daughter and granddaughter of architects. Frederick Mew worked in the Kendall business. Charlotte's older brother, Henry Herne Mew, was born in the early summer of 1865. Their nursery and their childhood was watched over by the servant Elizabeth Goodman, who Charlotte later described as a second mother.

15.11.1869 Charlotte Mary Mew born Doughty Street. She lived there until about February 1890 when her family moved to 9 Gordon Street, Gordon Square, where Charlotte lived for most of her life.

" Her article [An Old Servant. 1913], about her old nurse, Elizabeth Goodman, gives an account of the Mew nursery..." [Val Warner, 1981, page ix]

The birth of Charlotte Mary Mew was registered in the Pancras district of London in the October/December quarter of 1869

22.2.1869 Birth, Truro, Cornwall, of Henry Dawson Lowry (died London 22.10.1906), cousin of Catherine Amy Dawson Scott. His parents were Thomas and Winifred Lowry - See 1881 Census - 1898 - 1906 - 1912 - 1913 - 1926

1870 Charlotte -1

Autumn: Cousin Ethel born on the Isle of Wight. Six months later, the census shows her youngest Somerset aunt (19) staying with the Isle of Wight family, whilst Ethel's four year old sister, Fanny is cared for in Somerset. Although we cannot ascribe many dates, Charlotte's stories and memories show that her childhood also included staying with her Isle of Wight and Somerset relatives, and that the Isle of Wight children stayed in London.

18.7.1870 The definition of occasions on which pronouncements of the Pope are "infallible". The "infallible architect" may have reference to God, who freemasons speak of as the Great Architect of the Universe. Gladstone, who laid the foundation stone of the church, wrote a pamphlet (1874) against papal infallibility.

The Sisters of the Church (high anglican), commonly called the Kilburn Sisters, were established in 1870 by Miss Emily Ayckbourn, who became mother superior for life. They were associated with Saint Augustine, Kilburn Park Road and had premises (with a chapel) in Randolph Gardens. The chapel is said to have been designed by H.R. Kendall junior Frederick Mew, and to have been disliked by Charlotte Mew.

About 1870 the Mrs (Margaret) Oliphant's St Francis of Assisi was first published

October/December quarter 1870 Birth of Ethel Louisa Mew of South Fairlee Farm registered.
In 1901, "Ethel Mew", aged 30, an "Art Teacher", born Newport Isle of Wight, was staying with Claire Murrell (I think it is rr), an Artist/Painter on her own account, aged 37, born Brixton, at 102 Burwood Park Road, Walton On Thames, Surrey (map). The other person there was Pauline Eliza Peters (?), aged 18, a general servant born Weybridge, Surrey. (Possible 1881 Census entry for Claire/Clara Murrell). Mary Davidow says she met Margaret Chick at Notting Hill High School.
Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 (p.156) says that in 1915 she was working as an art teacher at Notting Hill High School . As an "elderly teacher... "on the verge of retiring" she visited Anne Mew when she was dying (1927). She was concerned that Charlotte might kill herself, and visited her just before her death. (pages 214-215 and 225)

1871 Charlotte 1-2

Late summer: brother Richard born

At University College London, the first mixed classes for men and women were held. Until then, women were always taught separately from men, and used separate entrances to the College. See 1878

2.4.1871/3.4.1871 census:

The inhabitants of 30 Doughty Street were Frederick and Anna M. Mew, their children Henry H. (aged 5) and Charlotte M. (aged 1) and the servants: Elizabeth Goodman (cook) and Sarah A. Basiome? (housemaid aged 21) [So Richard Cobham Mew (below) was born between April and September 1871]

33 Brunswick Square was no longer occupied by Kendalls [or Mews, or architects]. Instead, at 34 Burlington Road, Paddington: Henry E. Kendall (65) Surveyor, Mary Kendall (59), Arthur Kendall (unmarried son) Sailor, Ann Perkins (servant aged 32) and Sarah Mitcham (servant aged 28). In South London, Mary Kendall (unmarried, aged 24, born Bloomsbury) was staying with Robert William Billings [1813-1874], "architect and author of works on architecture" and his wife, "Landowners". Thomas C. Kendall (Architect, born "London", aged 31) was living with "Mrs Kendall" (aged 23, born London) as lodgers in the house of Edwin Baker, housepainter, and his family at 15 Desborough Terrace, Paddington. Thomas died two years later.

70 Dean Street, St Anne, Soho Henry E Kendell, Architect and District Surveyor, aged 91, born London, Middlesex, living with Matilda A. Kendell, his wife, born Hampstead, aged 26. Also a servant, Susannah Nedchld (?), domestic servant, aged 55, born Southwark, Surrey,

Mistakes like Kendell may suggest there are other mistakes: Notably the age [should it be 76?] and name of his wife. The death of an Ann "Matthew" [Matilda?] Kendall, aged 78, was recorded in the Kensington District December 1871, volume 1a, page 141

Isle of Wight

117 High Street (Bugle Hotel)
Henry Mew 46
Mary Mew 40
Caroline Mills 39
Henry Cohen 22
Charles Muck 46
Oliver S Bishopp 22
Ben Mew 28
Edwin M Leal 12
Edward Shaw 22
Ellen Stallard 18
Elizabeth Baker 21
Annie Corke 27
Mary Ann Cooper 24
Edward Blanchard 40

New Fairlee Farm
Richard Mew - age 46 - Farmer
Fanny Mew - age 37 - wife
Richard P? Mew - age 2 - son
Ethel L. Mew - age 6 months - daughter
Louisa Read, Sister in Law - age 19 - occupation "companion"
[Five servants

70 Crocker Street, Newport
William Baron Mew age 50, Brewer Master employing 65 hands.
Henrietta B. Mew, daughter, age 12
Amy B. Mew, daughter, age 10
Servants

68 Sea Street, Newport
Joseph Parker Mew, age 41, Brewer's Manager
Euphemia Mew, age 34, wife, born Kent
Marion E. Mew, daughter, age 9, scholar, born Newport
Agnes M. Mew, daughter, age 7, scholar, born Newport
Joseph M.P. Mew, son, age 5, scholar, born Newport
Leonard Mew, son, age 3, born Newport
Servants

Medham Farm, near Cowes
Thomas Parker Mew, age 51, Brewer etc..
Mary Julia Mew, age 48
Benjamin T.P. Mew, son, age 26. Brewer
Agnes Alice Mew, daughter, age 23
Ellen Mew, daughter, age 20
Three servants

Royal Pier Hotel, Ryde
Daniel Barnes 49
Frances Barnes 42

No 9 Barfield - Ryde
Persis Friend 28 unmarried Governess born Kidderminster.
Bracketed note to following three entries "Children of Daniel Barnes of Ryde Pier Hotel. This house is a nursery expressly for his children"
Marian Barnes 9
Edward Daniel Barnes 7
George Frederick Barnes 4
Martha Williams 28 servant
Ellen Brell 21 servant

75 Union Street
Anne Mew, Lodger, widow, age 75, no occupation, born Lymington
Maria Anne Norris, Lodger, unmarried, age 29, no occupation, born Lymington

Millbrook, Hampshire

1 Moselle Villa, Millbrook Road
William Norris, age 72, Retired Hotel Keeper, born Lymington
Herrietta Norris, age 55, wife, born Exbury

I cannot trace William and Henrietta Norris in the Census for 1881, but the deaths of both Henrietta Norris, age 71 and William Bay Norris, age 86, were registered in Upton, Worcestershire in the January March quarter of 1885

Bath and Wells
Elizabeth Read - age 59
Mary Anna Read - age 30
Fanny Mew - age four

The birth of Richard Cobham Mew was registered Pancras vol.1b page 62 in the July-September quarter of 1871. Frederick and Anna's fourth? child. He died in December 1876. Age on death certificate indicates his birth was before 9.12.1871.

Occasional help

"To outsiders she was simply an unusually incompetent little needle-woman. Twice a week and on occasions of domestic pressure or festivity, she used to mount the creaky stairs... I see her now, seated within the charmed circle of a white drugget, in our low nursery, filling up the gaps in our pinafores and budding intelligences... (Miss Bolt)

"Servants of the House - Part 13: Occasional Help: Charwomen, Needlewomen, Sweeps, Dustmen, etc. The greater the amount of work that can be done at home without occasional assistance... the better... Superior to the charwoman in social position... is that large class of women who go out for a day's work at the needle. The blessed invention of the sewing- machine has reduced this class of workers considerably... The best have sewing-machines of their own, and have plenty of employment at full pay at home... The chief economy in having dresses made up at home lies in making use of old materials.." Cassell's Household Guide (about 1880), volume 3, page 27.
In 1814, Mary Lamb, a professional needlewoman who had escaped her work, wrote an article that argued women should never needle-work unless paid

July/September quarter 1871 Birth of Elsie Maud Millard registered Lewisham. Her parents were Emily Millard (born Holborn about 1849) and John Millard, a teacher of elocution (at the Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music) born Clerkenwell about 1833. Her older sister, Evelyn Millard, was born in Kensington on 18.9.1869. (external link). Her younger sister, Vera, was born about 1874. In 1881, they lived in Hammersmith, where the children were born. She met Anne Mew at Art School. Evelyn also studied at the Female School of Art, 43 Queen Square, Bloomsbury. In 1891, Evelyn (21 years. Student of elocution) and Elsie (19 years. Student of drawing) were living with both parents at 63 Lancaster Road, Kensington. In February 1895, Evelyn played the part of Cecily Cardew in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Evelyn Mary Millard (by now a famous actress) married Robert Porter Coulter in the July/September quarter of 1900 (St George Hanover Square district). In 1901 he (merchant woollens) and Evelyn were living with a cook and three maids at 33 Park Lane. In 1901, Elsie Millard, aged 29, "Miniature Painter and Teacher" working on her own account "at home", was living with their widowed mother and a servant at 25 Edwards Square, Kensington. Their neighbour was the artist William Clarke Wontner (1857-1930). Elsie Millard married in 1902 (becoming Elsie O'Keefe, and may have gone to Brittany with Charlotte in 1909. The death (aged 52) of Robert Porter Coulter, Evelyn Coulter's husband, was registered in the Hanover Square district in the April/June quarter of 1915. Evelyn's stage career finished about the same time. Elsie's husband was one of Charlotte Mew's executers. He died in 1937. Mrs Evelyn M. Coulter 67a West Cromwell Road, SW5 Frobisher 1314 was in the telephone book from 1926 to 1928. Mrs E.M. Coulter, 17 Crestway, SW15 Putney 3367 in 1937. Evelyn Coulter (Millard) died 9.3.1941. I do not know when Elsie died. Margaret Jarman (1959) mentions Elsie O'Keefe as a friend of the Mews, and links her (indirectly) to T.S. Eliot.

1872 Charlotte 2-3

Governess in fact and fiction
"A very cursory glance into the advertisement columns of the daily press will prove to any one that if there be one branch more overstocked than another, it is that of daily governesses in London. The prices asked and paid are so small as to render it astonishing how body and soul can be kept together on such a pittance. Instruction in music, French, or German - in fact, in any foreign language - can be obtained in London at the cost of one shilling per lesson; in some cases from natives of the various respective countries, as well as from English women." Cassell's Household Guide (about 1880), volume 1, page 206. The article goes on to recommend young women to train as elementary school teachers instead of becoming resident or daily governesses.
Education outside the home did not begin for the Mew children when they were five, [See under Gower Street School] and no resident governess is shown on census returns. It seems reasonable to suppose some teachers came in on an arranged basis.
In her essay The Governess in Fiction (1899), Charlotte wrote
"Mr Kenneth Grahame, in his Golden Age, in the few pages headed 'Exit Tyrannus', has portrayed in his own delicate fashion the mixture of regret and bravado with which his children watch their governess depart. And it is chiefly in such slight sketches that for us our governess reappears. In fact, perhaps she has become our tyrant; in fancy assuredly she has been our friend. Is she in both, in life as in literature, becoming obsolete with the three-volume novel? If so be, so be it."

October/December quarter 1872 Birth of Florence Kate Kingsford (died 1949) registered Lewisham. Family in 1881 Census. She was trained as an artist at Royal Academy Schools (only girl student in her day). She married Sydney Cockerell at Headington on 4.11.1907. They had three children: Margaret Kate Cockerell's birth was registered (Chesterton, Cambridge) in the October-December quarter of 1908 - Christopher Sydney Cockerell was born Wayside, Cavendish Avenue, Cambridge, on 4.6.1910, and died 1.6.1999 - Katharine O Kingsford Cockerell's birth was registered (Chesterton, Cambridge) in the July-September quarter of 1911. (External pdf) - Letters in the Berg collection - The Adams collection also has letters. There is a letter to Katharine (aged 13) 3.1.1924.

1873 Charlotte 3-4

Autumn: sister Anne born

The death Thomas Cobham J. Kendall (aged 33) was recorded Kensington vol.1a page 7 in the January March quarter of 1873. This is Charlotte Mew's architect uncle who was living as a lodger with a "Mrs Kendall" in working class lodgings in April 1871. Perhaps there were secret shadows other than insanity over the lives of the Mews?

Caroline Frances Anne Mew, younger sister of Charlotte (see family), born. The birth of Caroline Frances A. Mew was registered Pancras vol.1b page 89 in the September-December quarter of 1873. Her age on the death certificate (died 18.6.1927) is 53 years, which means that she was born after 18.6.1873. (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.9 says she was born 1872). See Art School and Henry, Anne and Freda - The first of Anne's names (Caroline) may have been connected to a potential inheritance. Frances (Fanny) was the name of several Isle of Wight relatives. Anne, Ann, Anna were names on both sides of the family.

Hampstead Cemetery established 1873 by Hampstead Burial Board on land at Fortune Green. Opened 1876.

Notting Hill High School opened in 1873. (external link to history). This was in Norland Square, Kensington (map), until 1931. - 1881 census - In 1881 it is at 17 Norland Square and there may be a boys school next door. A few roads east is Lansdowne Road where Amy Greener taught. Stephanie Spencer (2000) gives information about the Girls Public Day School Company that established the school. Its website says that the first headmistress "began with one assistant and ten children", but "retired in 1900 leaving a school of 400 girls and 20 teachers and a steady stream of Cambridge, Oxford and London University entrants". Hugh Sinclair (1986) says that the (seven) Chick "daughters" were sent to this school "which provided an excellent education (including science) for girls. Consequently five of them became university graduates in botany [Edith and Harriette?], physics [Edith?] and chemistry, English [Elsie] and medicine [Dorothy?]". Related weblinks: Emily Shirreff - archive of webpage with history - Royal Society of Arts -

October 1873: Girton College opened on its Cambridge site. There was an arrangement with the University that the Girton students could use the examination papers (first year and final) set for the men which could be marked privately by sympathetic examiners. Cambridge opened the triposes to women in 1881. The first scholar from Friends Girls School, York to win a scholarship to Girton College was Sussanah E. Wells, who did so in 1879 - just before Winifred Oliver became a scholar. Her portrait was later hung in the hall of the school.

1874 Charlotte 4-5

Spring: cousin Florence born. Florence and Gertrude (born 1875) contributed memories to the 1960 reconstruction of Charlotte's life.

Florence Elen Mew of South Fairlee Farm born [Penelope Fitzgerald gives her name as Florence Ellen Mary Mew. I think she adds the name Mary because she thinks Florence is Sister Mary Magdalen] The birth of Florence Ellen Mew was registered in the January-March quarter of 1874, Isle of Wight volume 2b, page 552. Florence and Gertrude Mary were the two female cousins whose memories Mary Davidow (1960) drew on. There was just over one year between their ages.

In 1901, "Florence Mew", aged 27, born "Whippenham" Isle of Wight, was living at 13 Templeton Place, Kensington, London. Occupation "Independent". This is a boarding house run by Emma Hawkins (aged 42, husband Amos) with eleven boarders, predominantly women, and mostly "Independent" (One secretary and one artist). Florence Elen was interviewed, in the 1950s, by Mary Davidow.

Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 says that Florence Elen "joined an Anglo-Catholic community as Sister Mary Magdalen" (see pages 15 and 270). However, Mary Davidow acknowledges help from Sister Mary Magdalen and Florence Elen Mew (two separate people) and identifies Sister Mary as "Mary Mew"]

Marriages of older sisters of Lucy Harrison, taking place in Bromley, Kent (where their parents lived):
In the July-September Quarter of 1871, Anna Jemima Harrison, born Birkenhead about 1840, married James Macdonell. Possibly James Macdonell (1841-1879) Journalist. In the 1881 Census, Anna is a widow living with her mother and her three children (all born after 1871).
In the July-September Quarter of 1873, Agnes Harrison ( born about 1841 in Liverpool) married John Macdonell (born about 1845 in Scotland)
The birth of Amice Anna B Macdonell was registered Bromley, Kent vol.2a page 348 in the October-December quarter of 1874. Her mother was Agnes T. Macdonell, a novelist, who wrote For the King's Dues (1874) and Quaker Cousins (1879). Amice's father, John Macdonell, was a barrister who had become a Master of the Supreme Court by 1891. His youngest sister, Anne (or Ann) Macdonell (born about 1861 in Aberdeen) (who knew Charlotte), was also a writer. Amice and younger sister, Margaret R. B. Macdonell, were both born in Beckenham Kent. Margaret was born about a year after Amice. See the 1881 Census, when the family are living in Surrey. The birth of Margaret Rachel B. Macdonell, was registered Bromley, Kent vol.2a page 363 in the June-August quarter of 1876. In the 1891 Census the family are shown at 24 Stanley Gardens, Belsize, St John, Hampstead. In the 1901 Census they are at 28 Belsize, St Peter, Hampstead. Amice said that she was ten years old [1884/ 1885 - not 1882] when she went to school with Charlotte Mew. The two letters from her to Mary Davidow in 1959 are a major source of information on Charlotte Mew's childhood. Amice Macdonell became Amice Lee (Name on books indicates this was possibly about 1909). She wrote a series of historical plays for children (1908-1913) including the story of Alfred the Great, Robin Hood and The Armada, and The enterprise of the Mayflower (first series) and Saxon and Norman, Magna Carta, Edward 3rd, Caedmon, The Burghers of Calais, The Good Queen and The Crusaders. The Way of the Heart, Saint George, and Beowulf. These were published in London by George Allen & Sons and included illustrations by the author. After the war, she wrote The Sacred Fire. A Morality Play for the League of Nations (Basil Blackwell, 1924), The Name on the Rock (1933) and then a book about The Production of School Plays (1934). In 1955, Oxford University Press published her Laurels and Rosemary: the life of William and Mary Howitt. [Her relatives, William (1792-1879) and Mary, previously Botham (1799- 1888). Her final exercise in family history, In Their Several Generations, was published privately in the United States. It gave a family history from 1640 to 1930. The index was constructed by one of her american cousins.

Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 (37 & 38 Vict, c 85) .
rubbing salt in Victorian wounds

Save the Children: A Temperance Sermon, Preached in the Wesleyan Chapel, Great Queen Street, London by Charles L. Garrett. "20th thousand". In An Old Servant Charlotte Mew wrote: "Her Place of Worship... was a Wesleyan Chapel in Great Queen Street, and this was to, I believe, her favourite place of entertainment". The Great Queen Street Chapel, Lincoln's Inn Fields may have been established in 1639 and lasted until 1925. It became the Methodist head quarters in West London in 1798. It was the central church of the "Great Queen Street, Wesleyan Circuit". On 3.6.1898, Charles Booth interviewed Reverend Josiah Banham, its superintendent, and sister Sister Sara, deaconess.

Thomas Hill Green's critical Introduction to Hume's Treatise in which (volume 2, page 71) he appealed to "Englishmen under five-and-twenty" to leave "the anachronistic systems hitherto prevalent amongst us" and take up "the study of Kant and Hegel" (See William Ritchie Sorley 1904). - Later elaborated on (by others) as a call to close Mill and Spencer and open Kant and Hegel. - See May Sinclair, who wrote about Green. Debates between idealism and materialism echo in much that Charlotte Mew wrote.

1875 Charlotte 5-6

Spring/summer: Cousin Gertrude, Charlotte's favourite cousin, born Newport, Isle of Wight - Autumn: Baby Daniel, renamed Christopher, born - name links with family at Ryde, Isle of Wight

upstairs: "not much higher than her knee, I remember climbing upstairs to bed in front of her" - (See nursery) - downstairs: At fifty she had not outgrown the absorbing conversion of lumps of sugar into 'pig's blood' over the kitchen gas. out in the Square: the player caught cheating at croquet.

4.1.1875 Henry Edward Kendall (senior), Charlotte's architect great-grandfather died. His death (aged 98) was recorded Westminster vol.1a page 402 in the January March quarter of 1875

5.1.1875 Harriette Chick born

Gertrude Mary Mew of South Fairlee Farm born. The birth of Gertrude Mary Mew was registered in the April-June quarter of 1875, Isle of Wight volume 2b, page 523. She would have been five in the summer of 1880.
In 1901, "Gertrude Mew" aged 25, born Whippingham, Isle of Wight" was living in London and working as a "Hospital Nurse" at St Bartholomews Hospital, West Smithfield. She became Sister Mary Magdalen (See August 1958).

Charlotte Mew's "favourite cousin" was thinking of entering a convent in 1919. (Mary Davidow appears to accept the identification of "favourite cousin" and Sister Mary Magdalen]. I cannot find any reference in Mary Davidow to the convent being Anglo-Catholic or belonging to any Anglican order (as Penelope Fitzgerald says). It is possible that the cousin converted to the Roman church. Mary Davidow says that Ann Mew "died an Anglo Catholic" - [But, as an anglican with high church leanings, so did Charlotte].

Birth of Ethel Robinson registered Carlisle, Cumbria, Cumberland in the April-June quarter of 1875. She became Ethel Robinson Inglis in 1899. Letters to Mrs Inglis from Charlotte Mew begin in 1922.

Daniel Kendall Frederick and Anna's sixth? child, born in 1875, was renamed Christopher Barnes a few months after his birth. He died in 1876 "shortly after receiving his new name" (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.9) The birth of Daniel Kendall Mew was registered Pancras vol.1b page 78 in the October-December quarter of 1875.

Daniel and Barnes: See Ryde, 1871

6.12.1875 Birth of Evelyn Underhill. From about 1903 to 1905, she was a member of the occult Golden Dawn group. She published a novel, The Grey World in 1904 and another, The Lost Word in 1907 (Both Heinemann). She married (Hubert) Stuart Moore 3.7.1907, becoming "Mrs Moore" to friends and acquaintances. See November 1907 - Summer 1908 - July 1909 - She published under the names Evelyn Underhill and John Cordelier. An agnostic who became a Christian, her best known work is Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, published in 1911. See May 1913 - 17.1.1914 - 10.3.1914 - 16.3.1914 - 4.4.1914 - 19.5.1914 - She died 15.6.1941.

Mew businesses in 1875 Trade Directory:
Henry Mew, Bugle family and commercial hotel and posting house High Street
Richard Mew, wine, spirit and ale merchant, 16 Lower St James Street

Isle of Wight Holidays
"In late May or June every year the Mew children went to the Isle of Wight". Their mother "it seems" preferred to stay with her family in Brighton. "but the children went on by the Mid-Sussex Railway to catch the boat at Southampton for the Island, in the care of Elizabeth Goodman.".. "During the holidays the children had the chance to tour the Island from Newfairlee" (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988, pages 14-15). Clicking on the map below will take you to a map of a larger area.

The Road east from Newport through Barton Village is, today, called Staplers Road. It leads eventually to Ryde. The road north, beside the (now disused) railway track is called Fairlee Road. It leads to East Cowes. The farm track going from opposite Fairlee Villa, on Fairlee Road, to New Fairlee and then to Staplers Road, was called (by 1901) "Mews Lane". New Fairlee Farm is shown hugging the south of Mews Lane opposite the words New Fairlee. It is shown in closeup on an 1866 map, where one can see the tracks into the farmyard and to the cow sheds passing what appears to be a farmyard pond. Perhaps this is the drive that this memory in The Trees are Down harks back to:
I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.
The Mew children presumably walked down Mew Lane to and then west along Staplers Road to St Paul's Church, which is close to "Polars" (where William Baron Mew lived) in Barton Village.

The Mew family at the farm are shown on the 1881 and 1901 census

See Whippingham Parish

weblink to St Paul's Barton "The church is situated on the corner of Staplers Road and Cross Lane (opposite School Lane where the Parish Centre is) and about a quarter of a mile up from the main Coppins Bridge roundabout in Newport town centre."
Kevin McCoy, the St Paul's Barton webmaster,
has helped me with Mew family history.

Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 pages 15-16 identifies this with the church of Charlotte's childhood described in The Country Sunday . Above the Sanctuary "is a cupola of stars set in a deep blue sky surmounting three beautiful stained glass windows depicting Faith, Hope and Charity these are in memory of Benjamin Mew who died in 1850, aged 65". The church also contains "a stone tablet in memory of Rev William Henry Nutter; and Fanny Mew, daughter of Richard and Fanny Mew". The first vicar of the parish was Rev. W.D. Parker (1844-1853). If the story is taken literally, the vicar in The Country Sunday would be Rev William L. Sharpe (1854-1890 - See 1881 Census). He was followed by Rev. William Henry Nutter (1891-1909 - See 1881 Census)
Somerset Garden
I expect I get my affection for flowers from spending some time in Somerset when I was a child with ancient aunts who didn't like me... their garden - when I was allowed into it - being, then, my only pleasure...

The Nursery: The following passage from Mary Davidow (1960 page 23) may be based on the memories of Gertrude Mary Mew and Florence Elen Mew. Charlotte was already five when Gertrude Mary was born. Perhaps the first passage draws on memories from when Charlotte was about ten 1880, and Freda just born. The second passage relates to when Freda Mew was a small child, and Charlotte a teenager. Perhaps about 1884?

"The Mew nursery... was located in the attic or top floor. The night nursery contained the essential beds and cupboards, and the day nursery was fitted with bookshelves, a toy-chest, a Noah's ark, a rocking horse, a doll's house with a bay window built by the architect father, and the indispensable round table at which the children ate their meals, and, in the intervals, at which they learned from Nurse their first lessons in reading and writing... The Mew nursery followed a fairly standard routine; breakfast at eight, dinner at noon, and tea at six. In the evening the children were allowed to go downstairs for dessert and for the privilege of spending a little time with their parents"

"An Isle of Wight cousin recalls that on one of her visits to London she played in the Square with Freda where they spent a delightful and, for the over-disciplined and repressed Freda, an intoxicatingly joyous afternoon. When they returned to the house, looking as happy children ought to look -- hot and sweaty and dirty - Nurse spanked them for getting into such a state." (page 29)

"One of Frederick Mew's Isle of Wight nieces recalls that when she visited the London Mew's, Uncle Fred took his children and the visiting relative to the Foundling for Sunday services to hear the music. During the short walk he recited the salient historical facts concerning the institution, and cautioned the children to be attentive to the music and the sermon. After the services the visitors were permitted to walk about the dining room and talk with 'the dear little children' while they ate their dinner." (page 28)

1876 Charlotte 6-7

March: Baby Christopher and then, in December, Richard (5) die
The needlewoman may have explained death to Charlotte as like a candle going out.
Cousin Gilbert born in the Autumn

In 1876, elementary education became compulsory for all children in England and Wales. It was also the year that Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Letters and Social Aims published, containg the essay Immortality

"Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or, shall I say, only an energy, there being no passive ? He has it, and he alone, who gives life to all names, persons, things, where he comes. No religion, not the wildest mythology, dies for him ; no art is lost. He vivifies what he touches. Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does : when we are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time. The spiritual world takes place ;- that which is always the same"

In 1876 two of Frederick and Anna's chidren died

21.3.1876: Christopher Barnes Mew, son of Frederick Mew Architect, died, aged "4 months" at 30 Doughty Street. Cause of death: "Convulsions, Certified by J. Whicker, MRCSE" [Comment: The convulsions probably came at the end of an infection, but could have been the result of a congenital defect. The violent shaking damages the brain etc, and can bring about death in a matter of minutes]. Informant: "E. Goodman. Present at the death", registered it at Grays Inn Lane, Pancras on 24.3.1876. The death of Christopher Barnes Mew, aged 0, was registered Pancras vol.1b page 63 in the January-March quarter of 1876.

April 1876: Competition for the design of the new Vestry Hall for Hampstead

6.5.1876: Hampstead and Highgate Express "Sir... while inspecting the drawings for the above, prior to the decision of the Vestry, my attention was called to a gentleman with a foot-rule, pointing out the merits (?) of the design marked 'Cavendo tutus' to all comers. Upon speaking to him, I discovered he was a vestryman, and he stated to me that he knew whose design it was, and had seen it prior to its being sent in... 'Cavendo tutus' appears to have ignored all the conditions - the large hall showing to hold about 400 people (if I mistake not) instead of the 800 required." Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 pages 33-34)

2.10.1876 Margaret Chick born. If she started at the Gower Street School when she was five, that would be about 1881. However, Gower Street pupils may have started when they were about seven (1883).

October/December quarter 1876: Birth of Gilbert Mew of South Fairlee Farm registered.
In 1901, Gilbert Mew, aged 25, a farmer, born Newport, was a visitor at 15 Bouverie Road (East?), Folkestone, Kent. This was the house of Arthur M. Riddall (aged 29, born Poplar) a Hotel Proprietor - although I do not think this was the hotel. In the absence of any other information, I have assumed Gilbert farmed the home farm with his father and brother.

9.12.1876: Richard Cobham Mew (Son of Frederick Mew, Architect), five years old, died at 30 Doughty Street. Cause of death: "Scarlet fever, Congestion of kidneys, Uraemia. Certified by T. Robinson, LRCP. [Comment: It looks as if scarlet fever triggered Bright's Disease (of the kidneys) leading to poisoning of the blood by the urine. The child would have become mentally disturbed as an effect of the urea on the brain. Possibly severe slowing down of mental faculties.] Informant: "Elizabeth Goodman, Present at the death", who registered it at the Grays Inn Lane sub-district, Pancras on 12.12.1875 [The death of Richard Cobham Mew, aged 5, was registered Pancras vol.1b page 51 in the October-December quarter of 1876].

"The last time we saw her" [the little needlewoman] "was one autumn evening, not long after my brother Charlie died" . His little sister, sitting on the older sister's knee, asked "What is 'dead'?". The needlewoman answered "It jest means as you go out like the candle or the fire or a noo piece at the theatre wot 'asn't took. It don't matter much to anybody but them as wants the fire to warm 'em and 'im wot perduced the play" (Miss Bolt)

See also An Ending (possibly Charlotte's earliest surviving poem) "my soul goes out 'Most like a candle in the everlasting dark"

Alida Monro (1953), page xii, says that "Charlotte Mew was educated at the Lucy Harrison School for Girls in Gower Street and for many years helped with Miss Paget's Girl's Club, work which she enjoyed enormously". Following up this lead brought Mary Davidow in contact with Amice Lee, who provided memories of Charlotte when (by about 1882), she and Ethel Oliver [a Quaker] were both living with Lucy Harrison. Amice's letters show that Charlotte lived with Ethel Oliver when Charlotte was about fourteen, and that she knew the other Oliver children. There is a suggested age difference that does not appear to be true. Margaret Chick's recollections suggest that all of the (four?) oldest Chick girls attended the Gower Street School. The strong scientific bent of some of the Olivers and Chicks may indicate that science was a component of the school's education. Mary Davidow says that Anne Mew was a pupil at the Gower Street School under Amy Greener , and went from there to the School of Art. Penelope Fitzgerald says that Charlotte also met "Maggie Browne" at the school - But I cannot find a basis for this.
Mary Davidow (1960), page 31, says "Formal education began for Charlotte Mew at the Lucy Harrison School for Girls in Gower Street when she was six or seven" [1876/1877]. She does not give a source. The census for 1881 has Henry H. Mew at 15 and Charlotte M. Mew at 11 as "Scholar" - But not Caroline F.A. Mew [Ann] at 7. Henry was not shown as a scholar when he was 5 (1871 census), Freda (aged 12) and Caroline (aged 17) was not shown as a scholar on the 1891 census. No Governess is shown living in on any census - But professional home tuition could have been provided by someone not living in.
Penelope Fitzgerald (page 22) says Charlotte "was entered as a pupil" at "the Gower Street School" in 1879 (not referenced). [See also 1881 and 1882].

Lucy Harrison (1844-1915), born in Liverpool (census) came from a "Quaker family with a Yorkshire background". She was one of eight children of Daniel (tea merchant born about 1795) and Anna (born about 1798). The other children included Mary (born about 1826. The oldest. An invalid) - probably Charles Harrison, tea merchant, born about 1830 - Samuel (born about 1837) - Agnes, born about 1841 - Anna Jemima, born about 1842 - Annie, born about 1842 - Lucy (whose full name may have been Emma Lucy Harrison) born 17.1.1844. Charles Harrison married Mary (born about 1833) and they had (at least) four children: Charles W.D. Harrison (born about 1854?) - Edith M.W. Harrison (born about 1858) - Ethel M.J. Harrison (born about 1859) and Arthur J.U. Harrison (born about 1860). In 1871, Edith and Ethel were pupils at the school where Lucy taught.
In 1861 and 1862, Lucy (and Annie) attended Bedford College, studying Latin, History and English literature. In 1865 or 1866 she started to teach the Bedford College School, which moved to Gower Street about 1868. She became headmistres in 1875. Lucy Harrison left the Gower Street School in 1885/1886, because her health broke down. Amy Greener took over the Gower Street School, and she and Lucy became close friends. Lucy Harrioson spent some years of recuperation in Wensleydale [North Yorkshire]. She became headmistress of Friends Girls School, York (Mount School) in January 1890.
In 1881, Lucy Harrison, aged 37, born "Edge Hill, Cheshire" [Edge Hill is a district of Liverpool] Governess (Private) was living at 80 Gower Street with Ellen Mathews, aged 25, born Shrewsbury, Teacher (Private) - Mary Newcome, Housekeeper, (married) aged 48, born Devon - Lucy Newcome, assistant, aged 23, born St Pancras - and Ann Ayliffe, Housemaid, aged 17, born Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire.
Lucy Harrison is "superintendent of school" at 6 Driffield Terrace, York in the 1891 Census - headmistress of Mount School, Dalton Terrace (by Driffield Terrace), York in the 1901 census. In the 1881 census (when Winifred Oliver was a "scholar" there) this is entered as "Friends' School". [Friends Girl's School, York (Mount School)]
Amy Greener (born 1860) was a daughter of a coal agent in West Auckland. In 1871 the family were in Aston Hall, Cheshire. In 1881, Amy Greener was a "Governess" (one of two) assisting the headmistress in a school at 3 Lansdowne Road, in Notting Hill (near Notting Hill High School). She was 21 years old, born Etherley, Durham. She first met Lucy Harrison in 1885. In 1891 she was in charge of the Gower Street School in its new premises . In 1901 she was a teacher at Mount School, where Lucy Harrison was headmistress. She published Lucy's life and papers in 1916.
There were educational publications by (a) Lucy Harrison in 1880 - 1883. But not 1903.

1877 Charlotte 7-8

Frederick Mew, Charlotte's father, engaged in the construction of Hampstead Vestry Hall: Design: 1876 - Opening August 1878?

Algernon Charles Swinburne's (1837-1909) essay on Charlotte and Emily Brontë, A Note on Charlotte Brontë suggests that Emily wrote essentially as a poet.

Clerkenwell House of Detention closed . It was demolished. A school opened on the site in 1893, so the prison was probably being demolished at about the time Passed was written. Click on the image for the EC1 local history trail leaflet

a London footprints walk - maplink to Clerkenwell Close (modern) 1862

Spring 1877: The elite, modern, Grosvenor Gallery opened. "It included many famous pictures; Watts Love and Death and Portrait of Mrs Percy Wyndham ... Edward Burne-Jones (who was first introduced to the general public)... Three by Albert Moore, four by Holman Hunt, and seven Whistlers" (The Times Friday 9.5.1913). Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience opened 23.4.1881. It included the lyric "A pallid and thin young man - A haggard and lank young man - A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery - Foot-in-the-grave young man!" (external link). The sunflower, depicted on Mrs Percy Wyndham's dress, became the symbol of the new against the passed (passée). A point of Charlotte Mew's story may be similar to Gilbert and Sullivan: a detection of superficiality in the new. See also use of passed by Mademoiselle

8.6.1877 Hampstead and Highgate Express "though the work had not been proceeded with so rapidly as it might have been, the architect was of the opinion that his was all the better for the building" Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.35)

1878 Charlotte 8-9

October: Death of grandma Mew on the Isle of Wight

Women were admitted for the first time as full degree students to the Faculties of Science and of Arts and Laws at University College London in 1878 (See 1871). The first women graduates were in 1882. Cambridge University opened its examinations to women in 1881, and Oxford in 1884 - See Bedford College and London University and Edith Chick

"Although mixed classes were held at University College from 1878, women still had a separate Common Room there (in fact, the Common Rooms were not desegregated until 1969 [Harte and North 144]), and many in those days still considered women-only establishments more appropriate" (external source). See also 1979 - 1986 - 2004

Gold Medal for Botany initiated for women by The Society of Apothecaries. See Harriette Chick

July/September quarter 1878 Birth of Catherine Dawson Giles registered Lewisham. The 1881 Census shows the family in Lancashire. Catherine Dawson Giles and Catherine Dawson Scott are first cousins. Miss Giles was known as Kathie Giles. She died in 1955

"The [Hampstead] vestry met at the board room of the guardians in the workhouse until 1878 when a vestry hall and offices were built on the Belsize estate at Haverstock Hill. The red-brick and stone Italianate building, designed by H. E. Kendall, the district surveyor, and Frederick Mew, was extended in 1896." (From British History Online. Source: Hampstead: Local Government. A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume IX, T.F.T. Baker (Editor) (1989). - (external link with picture)

This drawing of the "Vestry-Hall - Hampstead" is dated "August 1878" and has the name "Kendall and Mew, Architects".

Hampstead Town Hall today,
213 Haverstock Hill,
Hampstead
London NW3 4QP
from the website of the London School of Yoga, who meet there.
map - Interchange Studios map

17.10.1878 Death of Ann Mew, Charlotte Mew's paternal grandmother. She was buried at Newport, Isle of Wight.

1879 Charlotte 9-10

Spring: Freda born

1.10.1879 First issue of The Theosophist - "Theosophy is ... the archaic Wisdom-Religion, the esoteric doctrine once known in every ancient country having claims to civilization". (Online copy). The Theosophist published a story by Charlotte Mew and, later, stories by her friend Mrs Scott. The Theosophist is the journal of the Theosophical Society. See objects - history - An index to The Theosophist

There is another summary of what is known of Freda under Henry, Anne and Freda .
After 1.3.1879?, but before 3.4.1879: Freda Kendall Mew, Frederick and Anna's seventh? child and Charlotte's youngest sibling, born. Her birth was registered at St Pancras in the April-June quarter of 1879. She was entered as two years old on the 3.4.1881 census and 19 years old on admission to an asylum on 4.2.1899. She was 78 years old when she died on 1.3.1958.
There is ambiguity about Anna Mew's age, but she was probably about forty two when Freda was born. (See birth defects in children born to women over 40).
Before 1886(?), when she was five, Freda attended dancing classes (at the Gower Street School?) with her mother. Her mother is described (by Amice Lee, recalling childhood memories) as "certainly silly". In an earlier letter, Amice mentions Freda followed by reference to a shadow on Charlotte's life. One interpretation is that Freda had a problem that could not be disguised from children who knew her.
Freda (aged 12) was living at home in June 1891. She is not entered as "scholar" (as Charlotte was when she was 11). [The legal school-leaving age was ten for all children, however poor]
We do not know where she was between 1891 and 1898. At the end of 1898 she was on the Isle of Wight. There is a strong association with the Isle of Wight, and with Richard Mew, her uncle, in her hospital records (See case book - census - and death certificate). This may indicate that she had been living there for some time. The (male) subject of Charlotte Mew's poem, Ken, has features similar to Freda's when she was institutionalised. Before that, he is described as living in a town similar to Carisbrooke and spending time in the country with animals.
Freda was admitted to institutional care on the Isle of Wight soon after her father died. She was admitted to the Isle of Wight County Lunatic Asylum on 4.2.1899. In 1901 she appears as "F.K.M." in the Isle of Wight Asylum. On the 1901 census her place of birth is given as the Isle of Wight and her death certificate gives "Richard Mew" (her Isle of Wight uncle and cousin's name) instead of "Frederick Mew" as her father -

17.2.1879 Death of Sophia Cubitt at Talbot Square, Westminster. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery

14.3.1879 Harold Monro born St Gilles near Brussels (He died 16.3.1932)
Biography at The Knitting Circle
I have not been able to find him in the 1901 census
Representative poetry online
See Poetry Bookshop 1913

12.1.1879 Florence Emily Dugdale born at 4 Hampton Villas, Sydney Road, Enfield. (external link) Her father, Edward Dugdale, was the Headmaster of St Andrews National School for Boys, Enfield. The 1881 Census shows her family.

Her sisters were
Ethel (born May 1877. Also shown as a "School Teacher" in 1901); "Ethel Dugdale- Richardson"?
Constance (born 1884. Also shown as a "School Teacher" in 1901); Married Tom Soundy?
Eva (born 1887. Aged 14 in 1901) - note in book - nurse? - nursed Thomas Hardy in his final illness. - Present at Florence's death;
Margaret (born 1893. Aged 7 in 1901) Present at Florence's death.

Florence attended St Andrew's Girls School, Enfield, and began teacher training at the same school on 10.5.1895. She began teaching at her father's school (for boys) on 10.1.1897. From 1903 (possibly earlier) she published children's stories: Little Lie-a-bed; and other stories (1903). Florence met Thomas Hardy in 1905, when she was 26 years old. She published Old Time Tales - Tim's Sister and Nurse Jane! in 1907 and Country Life in 1908. Florence left teaching in 1908. The Book of Baby Beasts, pictures in colour by E. J. Detmold and descriptions by F. E. Dugdale, with contributions by Thomas Hardy, was published in 1911. The Book of Baby Birds followed in 1912, The Book of Baby Pets in 1914. She also published In Lucy's Garden, illustrated by John Campbell, in 1912. Emma Hardy (Thomas's first wife) died 27.11.1912. Florence became his secretary in 1912 and moved into his home at Max Gate in 1913. They were married at St Andrew's Church, Enfield on 10.2.1914. He was --. She was --. Correspondence with Charlotte Mew began 24.9.1918 - The Hardy's met Charlotte Mew in December 1918. - See letters 1918 - Spring 1919 - Autumn 1919 - Spring 1921 - Autumn 1921 - Letters from Charlotte to the Hardys' friend Mrs Inglis begin in 1922 - letter 1923 - 1923 meal with De la Mare - letters 1925 -

August 1879 Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Sheffield. Sir Edwin Ray Lankester gave a talk on Degeneration. This was published, in 1880, as Degeneration : a chapter in Darwinism. Alfred Russel Wallace reviewed this in Nature 17.6.1880 (External link to review). Wallace speaks of the "little-known phenomena of 'Degeneration'... which causes an organism to become more simple in structure".

Dicken's Directory of London, by Charles Dickens junior (1879) includes:
Bedford College for Ladies York Place, Portman-square, is under the management of a council, and undertakes to give a thorough education to girls and young women. Students are not admitted under 14 years of age, and may either pursue a systematic course of study as regular students, or select any number of separate classes as occasional students. The work is intended to prepare ladies desirous of matriculating and graduating at the University of London. All information may be obtained of the hon. secretary at the college.
Since moving to York Place in 1874, the college had added extensions for science laboratories. The degree examinations of the University of London were opened to women in 1878. Bedford students gained BA, BSc and Masters degrees from the early 1880s.
[See Harriette Chick. Helen Wigginton, Archives Assistant, Royal Holloway, inspected and helped interpret Hariette Chick's record. The Bedford College calendar for 1899 (AR/243) contains a list of all Bedford graduates, from which the information was taken. No Student Record File has been found for Harriette in the Bedford College or London University records/archives. File reference AR/285/1, obituaries and newspaper cuttings for former students, contains a small news cutting from The Times in July 1977 announcing Harriette Chick's death and an accompanying hand written note "student 1893 - 96; DSc 1904 from UCL"]. Link to Royal Holloway (including Bedford College) Archives

Lydia Rous retired as Superintendent of Friends School for Girls, York, in 1879, due to ill health. She continued to live in York until 1887, and to advise the school. She helped Lucy Harrison when she became headmistress. Lydia Rous's immediate successor was Susanna Elizabeth Scott, who was superintendent in 1881, when Winifred Oliver (aged 14) was a pupil. Winifred started at York shortly after the first scholar went to Girton College, Cambridge.

1880 Charlotte 10-11

Summer 1880? Charlotte (Lotti) breaks nurse's parasole on the Isle of Wight - Christmas: Charlotte (Lotti) and Anne write a poem for Freda

Henry Herne Mew in 1880, when he was fifteen years old

The place of history in the school curriculum by Lucy Harrison.
London Association of Schoolmistresses . 8 pages.

"A cousin remembers vividly an incident which occurred in Newport one summer when she, accompanying her mother in the fly," [one horse covered carriage] "rode to the Newport railroad station" [Ryde-Newport linked by rail in 1875] "to meet Lotti, then about ten, and Nurse, who had arrived to spend a part of the summer holidays at the farm." [So, where were Henry and Anne? Freda was just born] "After the little ceremony of greeting was over, they all walked toward the fly. As they were about to mount, Lotti, who moved in sudden burst of energy, scrambled into the driver's seat so that she might enjoy an unobstructed view of the gently rolling farmlands as they rode home. Nurse, in utter exasperation, gave the wayward child a smart whack with her folded parasol, commanding her at the same time to get down and take her 'proper' place. The irate Lottie seized the parasol and, with a gesture expressing and exasperation equal to Nurses's, snapped the shaft of it in two across the edge of the seat, then, with an air of complete defiance, tossed the parasol aside. More than that, she refused to budge from her chosen place. She was severely punished for her poor conduct when the group reached the farm.
As a child, Lottie was a 'determined little thing who knew what she wanted and generally got it' (Told by Mary Mew, Sister Mary Magdalen)" (Mary Davidow 1960 page 30)

15.10.1880: Birth in Edinburgh of Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes. See B.Sc. 1902 - New Phytologist May 1903 - Munich Autumn 1903 - missed the Chicks 1904 - Married Love March 1918 - death 2.10.1958

Christmas 1880: "When Charlotte was ten years old Freda... was born. In this sister's honour" a poem called "Christmas 1880" was written and signed "Lotti" and [Anne]. It was owned by Alida Monro when Mary Davidow (1960 page 3) wrote about it, but has not been found.

1881 Charlotte 11-12

"Scholar" by Charlotte's name in the 1881 census probably indicates that she was a pupil at the Gower Street School

Sunday 3.4.1881/Monday 4.4.1881 Census:

London and Surrey
30 Doughty Street, London, (See census) recorded Frederick Mew aged 49, born Newport, Isle of Wight: Architect and his wife Anna M.M. Mew, aged 44, born St Pancras, with their children (all born St Pancras): Henry H. Mew, aged 15, Scholar. Charlotte M. Mew, aged 11, Scholar, Caroline F.A. Mew, aged 7 and Freda K. Mew aged two, together with the live-in servants: Elizabeth Goodman, aged 56, "Nurse Domestic", and Lucy Best, aged 18, "Cook Domestic"
Charlotte's maternal grandparents, Henry Edward Kendall and Mary Kendall, with her aunt, Mary (Leonora) Kendall were living at 34 Burlington Road. (See Census). Neighbouring streets show that this was in Westbourne Park. [Ledbury Road and Artesian Road are near]. Ann Perkin, cook aged 40, remained with the family: See 1891, 1901, 1902.
(80) Gower Street School
Lucy Harrison Head. At 80 Gower Street See census, which shows the residents as: Lucy Harrison (37) Governess (Private), Ellen Mathews 25 (boarding with Lucy Harrison), 25 year old unmarried teacher (private) born Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Mary Newcome (48, married), housekeeper, born Bishops Nympton, Devon, her assistant, Lucy Newcome (23) born St Pancras, and Ann Ayliffe (17), the housemaid, born Bishops Stortford, Hertford. In an 1882 Directory, the only relevant entry I could find is "80 Gower St: Miss Harrison". The school was not entered in the classified section under public or private schools. Amice Macdonell said that the school later moved to 96 Gower Street. In 1891, Amy Greener is shown at 98 Gower Street, as "Principal of School".
See also 79 Gower Street in 1881

Amy Greener See census

Links to Lucy Harrison's family Anna Harrison (her mother). Her father died in 1873. [Maidernley is Macdonell in the original] Anna M. and Anna Jemima (Anna H.) living at home. Agnes T. Macdonell, mother of Amice.
The Oliver family at Kew: See census
Family of Arthur Hughes (1832-1915), Painter, friend of Daniel Oliver See census. It does not, at this time (or in 1891 or 1901), include a Florence Hughes
The Chick family at 5 Newman St (Holborn - (map link) See census - Except for Samuel Chick (father): (See census) and Samuel Chick (son): (See census). All the Chick children were born at 5 Newman Street After 1887 (when Dorothy Chick's was born) the family moved to Ealing. Margaret Tomlinson says that they moved "soon after" 1886. 5 Newman Street continued to be used by Samuel Chick the father as his business premises. Margaret Chick was the last of the Chick family (girls) to attend Miss Harrison's School. It is, therefore, probable that Charlotte Mew was there with Edith (her own age), Mary, Harriette and Margaret [When Penelope Fitzgerald says Elsie, Margaret and Harriet were pupils, she presumably means Edith rather than Elsie]. [See also Chicks at Notting Hill]. At the time of the 1891 census, Charlotte Mew was staying with the family in Ealing.

Family of Elsie Millard: See census
George Robert Sims (1847-1922) See census

Isle of Wight and Hampshire 1881 -
Compare 1891 and 1901

Charlotte's paternal uncle and aunt, Richard Mew and Fanny Mew lived at South Fairlee Farm, Naider Road, Whippingham (outside Newport) on the Isle of Wight (See Census). Richard (aged 55, born Lymington) was a farmer of 400 Acres, employing 5 Men and 2 Boys. Fanny is shown as aged 47 and born in Somerset. They lived with their children (one was at boarding school), all born on the Isle of Wight: Fanny, aged 14, Ethel Louisa, aged 10, Florence Elen, aged 7, Gertrude Mary, aged 5 and Gilbert Mew, aged 4. They had a "Governess Teacher (Private)", Anna Maria Wigmore aged 24, unmarried, born Isle of Wight, who boarded in the house. There was also Jane Osborne, a domestic servant, unmarried, aged 36, born Isle of Wight. Living in the house were George Kennington, aged 59, a "Farm Servant (Indoor)", Jane Kennington, aged 57, "Dairy Woman", (married, presumably to George), and Sarah Kennington unmarried aged 30, the "Cook". The Kenningtons had all been born in Sussex. Other farm workers lived in nearby cottages.
Richard Percy Mew, aged 12, born Newfairley, Isle of Wight, was a scholar at Surrey County School Cranleigh - A boys public school opened in 1865 "for parents of the middle class or moderate incomes" whose fees were initially set at £30 a year. Elsewhere it is descriced as a "school for farmers' sons". See 1881 census and 1901 census
My best guess is that, in the 1881 census, South Fairlee Farm is the same as New Fairlee Farm in other places. There is an online walk that includes this. It includes the directions "Cross the stile on the left and work your way around the derelict barn to reach the gravel track known as Mews Lane" (Compare modern map of Mews Lane to 19th century map. Naider Road could have become Mews Lane. See 1901 Census).

The Polars William Baron Mew: Widower, aged 60, born Newport. "Two Partners. Brewer Employs 50 60 Men Malsters 15 Men Farmers 8 Men 3 Boys", living with two nieces, Ethel Muriel Mew, aged 16, born Arreton (Standew), Isle of Wight, and Louisa Agnes Mew, aged 26, born Carisbrooke, plus three female domestic servants. (census)
William Baron Mew, Joseph Parker Mew and Charles Edward Templeman Mew of Newport, brewers, maltsters and spirit merchants, traded in partnership as W. B. Mew, Langton & Co.

70 Crocker Street
Joseph Parker Mew, age 52, Brewer, Malster, Wine and Spirit Merchant
Euphemia Mew, age 44, wife, born Woolwich, Kent
Mabel F.M. Mew, daughter, age 9, scholar, born Newport
Ella E. Mew, daughter, age 7, scholar, born Newport
Elsie, K. Mew, daughter, age 5, scholar, born Newport
Servants
121 St James Street, Newport
Charles Mew, unmarried, age 24, Brewer, born Neport
Herbert, B. Mew, cousin, unmarried, age 22, Brewer, born Cowes
[Herbert is the eldest son of Joseph Parker Mew and Euphemia]
At 9 Barfield, Ryde, (Isle of Wight), Frances Barnes a widowed annuitant aged 52, born in Lymington, Hampshire, was living with Walter M. Barnes, her unmarried son, aged 24, born Ryde, a Barrister At Law and BA Oxon (Not Practising), Marian Barnes, her unmarried daughter, aged 19, born Ryde and Edward W. Barnes, another unmarried son, aged 17, born Ryde, an Articled Solicitors Clerk [The death of Daniel Barnes, age 59, was registered on the Isle of Wight in the January/March quarter of 1881]
Ventnor
Wallington House, Belgrave Road
Henry Mew - 56 - Hotel Keeper
Mary Mew - 50
One visitor, age 19
Wallhampton Cottage, Wallhampton, Lymington
Thomas Parker Mew, age 61, Brewer retired
Mary Julia Mew, age 58, wife
Ellen Mew, daughter, widow, age 30
Rose Maria Parker, granddaughter, age 10
Servants
Birth of Rose Maria Parker registered Tendring October/December 1871
Ellen Mew married Alfred Pearson Mew October/December 1872
Death of Alfred Pearson Mew registered Ashborne January/March quarter 1874

Brighton and Sussex

In 1881, 6 Codrington Place, Brighton, was occupied by The honorable Anne Massey and her daughter, Catherine Lippincott. Anne Massey was also there in 1867. A Mr Martin lived there in 1858. Charlotte Mew was born in 1869 - Penelope Fitzgerald says that her mother stayed with her mother at 6 Coddrington Place whilst Charlotte and the other children went to the Isle of Wight. Mrs Kendall is living there in the 1891 Kelly's Directory.
5 Lewes Crescent: Lewis Cubitt - Sussex Square to the right, but numbers between about 10 and 40 seem to be missing

York

Friends' School for Girls, Driffield Terrace, York (See census) There are 51 scholars of whom only one is 13 years old - three (including Winifred Oliver are 14 years old - four are 15 years old - fifteen are 16 years old - twenty two are 17 years old - four are 18 years old - two are 19 years old. See school in 1867
Lydia Rouus: (census)

1881 The novel Joseph's Coat by David Christie Murray, published by Chatto & Windus, illustrations by Frederick Barnard, includes a passage where two men are blinded to the ugliness of a Norman Church by their love for the lady who is playing the organ inside. "They yearned a little over the wheezy voluntary, which, after all, was played by Love's own hands."

1882 Charlotte 12-13

Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901): Unknown to History: A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland Macmillan and Co. 1882 (First of many editions). Two volumes. Published London and New York. Charlotte Mew wrote:

"Miss Yonge, in Unknown to History, carries us back to the schoolroom of the eighties, and the tinkle of its overworked piano. Basing her story on the tradition of the seventeenth century that Mary, during her imprisonment at Lockleven, gave birth to a daughter who was conveyed to France and became a nun at Notre Dame do Soissons, she adapts the legend, essentially romantic, as it stands, to meet the requirements of a tame domestic tale. A tale of James Hepburn and Mary Stewart pacing a convent garden, shut in with her passions and her ghosts; here, for the poet or the novelist is the finest stuff of dreams. We are, at least, indebted to Miss Yonge for having made practically no use of it" (Mary Stuart in Fiction)

Not 1882 Penelope Fitzgerald (pages 26-17) says that, in 1882, Lucy Harrison ceased to be the headmistress of the Gower Street School, where she was succeeded by Amy Greener (page 28). However, Amy Greener says that she first met Lucy Harrison in 1885, which is when she took over the school. Penelope Fitzgerald also says that Lucy Harrison took lodgings "half-way up Haversock Hill", and studied at the British Museum during the day. She took some of the students from Gower Street as boarders, teaching them English literature in the evenings. However, Mary Davidow 1960 (page 35) says Lucy Harrison was headmistress from 1875 to 1885 and that it was the year preceding her retirement that she took the house on Haverstock Hill. The internal evidence of the letters from Amice Lee, on which Penelope Fitzgerald partly bases her story, also suggest 1884

1882 Electric light installed in the Royal Academy, the British Museum and the Mansion House. D'Oyle Carte introduced electric lighting for the Savoy Operas, with 824 lamps on stage and 370 in other parts of the theatre. Street lighting, in Holborn, first in 1883. The first photographic studio lit by electric light was opened in Regent Street in 1877 by Van der Weyde. It was powered by a gas-driven dynamo. The light was sufficient to permit exposures of some 2 to 3 seconds for a carte-de- visite. Soon a number of studios started using arc lighting. (external link) The electric carbon arc was demonstrated by Humphy Davy in 1809, but its general use followed the development of the electric generator: especially after 1878. Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Goodman had their photograph taken together artistically in the "new electric light".

Society for Psychical Research founded in London - External link to history on its website - Wikipedia - Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) was the leading founder. Myers was a Theosophist until 1886 External link to Wikipedia - See Science - Freud - May Sinclair - James Strachey and absence

1883 Charlotte 13-14

Margaret Chick's school memories of Charlotte?

Emily Brontë by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857- 1944) published by W. H. Allen in its Eminent women series - (External link to review - pdf) - See Charlotte Mew 1904 paragraphs 5 and 9

The Story of My Heart. My Autobiography by Richard Jefferies, Longmans, 1883. In A Country Book, Charlotte Mew described The Story of My Heart as "a wild, wearisome, awful chronicle of a heart too large to find a home on earth, which yet never reached as far as heaven, and so wandered on, with widely-opened but sun-blinded eyes upon its endless way" Field and Hedgerow was, she thought, "a better story, with much in it also of this strange man's heart".

17.4.1883 Will of Mary Kendall, Charlotte's maternal grandmother [She died 1892]

to dispose of her legacy from her own family, the Cobhams. One-third was to go to Anna Maria "for her sole use and benefit separate and apart from and exclusive of her said husband Frederick Mew, and that she may hold and enjoy and dispose of such share in the same manner as if she were unmarried" (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.35)

See 1870 Married Woman's Property Act

Spenser for home and school Poems of Edmund Spenser, selected and arranged, with notes, by Lucy Harrison. London: R. Bentley and Son. (over 320 pages).

Amy Greener (1916) says that "After nearly twenty years connection with the Gower Street School, Miss Harrison's health broke down and at length she determined to give up her work and carry out the plan she had for years had in her mind, to build a little house and live in the country. Her ambition from girlhood had been to own a piece of land and build. Hence in the summer of 1883 she went with her widowed sister, Mrs Macdonell," [Anna Jemima. Agnes was not widowed - She is living with John in 1881, 1891 and 1901] "to Bainbridge for several weeks. .. and at length she found Cupples field. The building was not actually begun until 1885". [A booklet says 1883 was the year Lucy Harrison moved from London to Wensleydale -
Amice Lee's recollections fit in with the later year (1886) given by Amy Greener - Who is, in any case, the source the booklet cites.

Margaret Chick's school recollections

Mary Davidow says (page 40) " Margaret Chick was the last of the family to attend Miss Harrison's School. She was a few years" [Seven years: 1869 - 1876] "younger than Lotti" [Charlotte Mew] " Anne Mew and Amice Macdonell were nearer her age". [Margaret was seven in October 1883 - Anne eleven - Amice nine]

In Margaret Chick's opinion Lucy Harrison was an exceptional teacher who possessed a philosophy of education which was for the times 'progressive' in that she believed that girls should be as well educated as boys; she, therefore, offered a broader curriculum than that which was to be had at most girls' schools of the period. Miss Chick recalls that Lotti was a bright, spirited, gay little person who had a way with children, and who told amusing stories because she loved to make people laugh. Her letters to Margaret Chick, then a mere child, were filed with delightful illustrations, many of them highly comical. Charlotte and Anne were both clever with their hands. Charlotte could turn out exquisite pieces of embroidery executed to her own designs."

1884 Charlotte 14-15

Freda in the square with visiting cousin/s? - school memories of Amice Lee? - November: photograph of the sisters

"To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it." These are the last words of "The Pageant of Summer", an article by Richard Jefferies, first published in Longman's Magazine in June 1883 and republished in The Life of the Fields (a collection of his essays) in 1884. Charlotte Mew used "to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature (R.J.)" as the subheading to her essay The Minnow Fishers. Other quotations from Jefferies that I have traced are in the posthumous Field and Hedgerow (1890), which she wrote a review of.

It is possibly about here that the memories of Freda in the Square belong. Gertrude Mary would have been nine in the summer of 1884, Freda five. I would have thought the Sunday visits to the Foundling Hospital were earlier.

A bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow unveiled in Westminster Abbey. Longfellow was the first USA poet to be given a memorial in Poets Corner. Charlotte Mew's first published work, Passed, appears to allude to the theologian's tales in Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, in one of which, Longfellow wrote:
"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."
Charlotte wrote about "Like souls that meeting pass, And passing never meet again" because, in her story she only meets the other at a deep level once. She is repulsed, and her second meeting is a seeing, not a meeting of souls.

The back of this (early 20th century) postcard says "chromographed in Berlin". I think this is post-lithography.
Breasts: London's waxworks moved from Baker Street to Marylebone Road in 1884. In Passed, Charlotte wrote about the attraction of waxwork breasts. In Paris, John Singer Sargent lifted the fallen shoulder strap on Madam X to appease public opinion. George Frederic Watts' Clytie (Sunflower as breasts) was painted about 1868. Charlotte Mew's Antoine de St Perre says that Watt's use of colour was but "a clever copy" of Paolo Veronese - who also used breasts in his allegories. See also Grosvenor Gallery. By the 1880s chromolithography was becoming widely used for magazines and advertising. This involved several stones being used to lay on the separate colours. High quality chromolithography to reproduce realistic flesh was expensive, but increasingly more affordable. Charlotte's Clerkenwell art shop sells a "chromo" of a girl with "elaborately bared breasts" - presented praying to make her colourful bosoms falsely respectable. ( Erotica versus pornography; An expose, by Cameron Kippen, contains some history of the media).

In 1884, Alphonse Laveran relates in "Treatise on Marsh Fevers" that Louis Pasteur's discovery that microbial germs cause most infectious diseases (the "germ theory") led to the hypothesis of a bacterial origin of malaria being popular. However, in 1880, Laveran identified (correctly, as it turned out) a protozoan parasite as the cause of malaria. The protozoa being single cell "animal" organisms, whereas bacteria are a range of microorganisms that appear to have properties plant-like and animal-like. Failing to find the protozoa in soil, water or air, Laveran suggested, in "Treatise On Marsh Fevers", that it could be carried by the mosquitoes. The theory of the protozoan cause was not liked by most followers of Pasteur, who favoured bacteria as the cause of disease, but Pasteur accepted it quickly. It only became "indisputable" after staining of the microscopic samples was developed (1899) to make it clearer what one was looking at. Before the development of pigments, the microscope search for malaria signs began with looking for black granules that Lavaran had identified as present in all malaria victims. (external link - Nobel speech). In Notes in a Brittany Convent (1901), the bacteriologist approached Catholicism in a scientific spirit, comparing its fascinations to the study of malaria whilst Charlotte uses the "metaphor" of the "black rotundity" to link that to the ubiquitous presence of the priest who seeks their conversion.

Gram stains - external link

Mary Davidow (1960 page 37) says that "In the year preceding her retirement Miss Harrison and one of the other teachers from the school took a house in Hampstead on Haverstock Hill between Chalk Farm and Belsize Park where they accommodated three boarding pupils. Charlotte was one of these..."

Internal evidence suggests that the following letters from Amice Lee (previously Macdonell) in Mary Davidow 1960, and the preceding recollection of MargaretChick relate to about 1884/1885.

11 Gray's Inn Square
February 6, 1959

Dear Miss Davidow,

Your letter Interests me much, and I am trying at once to make a contact with someone who may yet be alive and who knew Charlotte M. Mew. I am now aged 84 but I can remember C. M. Mew, or "Lottie" as we called her, clearly and can fancy I hear her very voice and laugh.

I was then aged 10 [that would be 1884/1885], and Lottie would be about 14. We were at school together when Aunt Lucy had the school in Gower Street, London. That would be some time in the 1880ties

I have already written to someone of a Quaker family, care of Friends' House, the Quaker H.Q. in London, to see if this person, Ethel Oliver, daughter of Prof. Daniel Oliver, Quaker keeper of the Herbarium at Kew, a known botanist, is alive.

I know C. M. Mew's father was an architect and they lived in Doughty Street near here where at one time C. Dickens lived.

Lottie lived at Aunt Lucy's; she had taken a house at Hampstead and had three girls boarding there and I joined them daily and we drove down together and then walked a long way back, partly through noisy roads and dreary, but I walked with C. M. Mew and her talk made the way seem pleasant

She was about 14, short, with curly short hair. On week days she wore a black and white check frock; on Sundays, her best, a brown one. She was in a High Church phase then and wore a small silver cross on weekdays and a gold for best.

We walked in procession: my aunt and one of the teachers, the elder two together.

1. Edith Scull whose father was a professor at Harvard, I think. She was dark with deep-set brown eyes and rather stout. She did clever drawings.

Gideon Delaplaine Scull , born - 13.8.1824, Sculltown, Auburn, New Jersey; "noted scholar, historian, genealogist", died 22.4.1889, Yorkshire, England. Married Anna Holder 7.4.1862, born about 1834 in Warwickshire, dued 235.1907. They had a daughter, Edith Maria Lydia Scull, born about 1868, who died, unmarried, 15.5.1915, in Sussex, Effects £11802 9s 1d. (external link). [See also Scull wills] In 1881 the family were living in Rugby (census) - Gideon Scull published in 1876 - 1879 - 1881 - 1882 - 1883 -1885

2. Ethel Oliver, daughter of Professor Daniel Oliver of Kew, a stiff, silent girl of 16. Edith Scull was 17. So to CM they seemed grown-up.

Ethel Oliver was one year and one month older than Charlotte Mew. Amice Macdonell was about five years younger than Charlotte. Ethel left for Friend's School Yorkshire in January 1885 (still sixteen years old). Given the description in Amice's letters, one wonders when Charlotte and Ethel became friends.

Lottie and I brought up the rear.

Aunt Lucy had the school and later it moved from 80 to 96 Gower Street, taken over by Miss Greener who after lived with Aunt Lucy in Wenslydale, Yorkshire, where she had built a house.

I loved, as we all did, Aunt Lucy, mother's youngest sister, born 1844, died, after being Head of the Quaker School, The Mount, York, 1915.

Edith Gray Hill taught me (with small success) sums! She married a Mr. Hill who was in some business. I well recall the Chicks: Edith, Harty (presumably Harriet), and then I can't recall the name of the youngest Chick. One of them made quite a name in Gov't service.

[In 1881 an Edith B. Gray, born Middlesex, was a teacher, aged 18, at a school run by Elizabeth Haddow in Dover. By 1891, she had moved back to her family home in Hornsey, Middlesex. I could not find her in the 1901 census. The closest person called Edith Hill I found (1901) was three years older, born in Hendon, not Bayswater as Edith B. Gray was. There is a Mrs Hill (Ivy Bank) in the following letter - But I cannot see how she could be Edith Gray Hill. Biographers appear to have combined the two, however, and identified the combination with Mrs Hill who corresponded with Charlotte. It seems (to me) possible that this was Edith Gray Hill, but unlikely that it would be Mrs Hill of Ivy Bank.]

The Olivers kept up with Charlotte M. Mew when grown up, I know, and knew of her cares and sorrows. She had one brother of whom I don't know, a younger sister, Anne, and a little sister. You probably know of the shadow on poor Lottie's life.

I was so sorry I did not keep up with her in later times. She was very bright, musical, excitable. When my sister told her that Aunt Lucy was going to retire from the school, Lottie, who was practising, jumped up in wild grief and started to bang her head on the wall. My sister, aged about 8, was taken aback and wondered if she ought in loyalty to Aunt Lucy to bang her head too!

As Margaret Macdonell was born in 1876,
this fixes the head-banging incident about 1884/1885.

The kind American cousin of mine who did the index of the book left out Aunt Lucy. He had never known her. I am planning on being able to visit my cousins in N.Y. in May this year....

Yours sincerely, Amice Lee

11 Gray's Inn Square
February 13, 1959

My dear Miss Davidow,

Your letter has just come....I think the father of Charlotte must have been a fairly successful architect. I always heard he designed the Town Hall (threatened for destruction), and also a large red brick house, for a Mrs Hill, called Ivy Bank. I feel such regret that I did not continue friendship with Lottie....I remember the Mother as certainly "silly" all decked out in blue boas; she used to bring Freda to the dancing class. I wrote to the Quaker Head Office; they had old Daniel Oliver's name and dates and birth of his three children. Their subsequent dates not there.

[In all probability, this means that the three children left the Religious Society of Friends - But that should be recorded.]

Lottie I can see now when she was about fifteen. There was something piquante about her; she had bright eyes, was light and small-boned; had a way of turning round as she talked, sort of pirouetting on her feet; hands and feet were small. I recall often laughing with her. As for Aunt Lucy's influence, I can't say. Lottie at that time would be more like a child, though I recall some tale of Mr Mew going on his knees to Aunt Lucy to beg her to keep Lottie in the school. Her literary sense was very good. I had hoped to contact Ethel Oliver who knew Lottie in adult life, and was a kind friend, but she is dead, and was older than Lottie; and her elder sister is dead.

Yes, by the "shadow" I meant the shade of insanity. Aunt Lucy did not worry; she was loving and gentle, but rather aloof then and would have had no sex interest; might have been without sympathy a bit to Lottie's ardent nature - I don't know. As for Edith Scull and Ethel Oliver they kept together and they rather ignored Lottie who was younger and very excitable. We walked miles. I was about ten, down Gower Street, through dull grey squares, through dreary Camden Town with crowded pavements and a horrible canal, and then up Haverstock Hill to Hampstead; but Charlotte M. Mew was good company, I feel.

Lottie wrote for the Yellow Book - Bohemian oftentimes -. Her poems give me sorrow now when I think of her sad life and its ending which must have a bitterness of fate in it. I did not know her late enough to even guess at some lover (likely from her poems), or at her literary friends. She probably knew Hardy. He was well known to my father's youngest sister Anne Macdonell who knew Lottie, and artists and actresses. Aunt Anne was in that set, but also an authority on St Francis of Assisi! She has gone hence years ago.

I hoped for a personal touch from Ethel Oliver. Edith, Ethel, and Lottie, all three boarded for about a year in Aunt L's house in Hampstead. Mary Howitt was my great-aunt....

I hope we may meet....

Amice Lee

19.11.1884 Birth of Dorothy Webster Hawksley (died 1.7.1970) in Kensington, London. Parents: Thomas P Hawksley and Maria Groves Walters. Dorothy Hawksley became an artist. She entered the Royal Academy Schools in January 1906. She met Sydney Cockerell in June 1917. She was a friend of Kate Cockerell and acted as secretary to Sydney. In December 1922, Sydney Cockerell asked her to keep him informed about how the Mews were getting on after Mrs Mew's accident. She was at a lunch with Siegfried Sassoon and Charlotte on 11.12.1924. In 1926? she made a portrait of Charlotte Mew. At this time, it is clear from a letter from Charlotte, that Dorothy was a "cherished" friend. Charlotte wanted her to meet Elsie O'Keefe. She was one of the informants for Mary Davidow's biography of Charlotte Mew. - See also 1937 - 1957 telephone - Christian, J. 2005

November 1884 Charlotte (aged just 15) in the centre, with Caroline Frances Anne (Anne) (aged eleven) and Freda (aged 5 and half).
Photocopy of a photograph ("courtesy Peter, John and Richard Mew") in Davidow, M. 1978 page 442

1885 Charlotte 15-16

January: Ethel Oliver leaves Gower Street and goes to York - June: Grandfather Kendall dies - Kendall and Mew becomes just Frederick Mew, architect - Amy Greener comes to Gower Street

Miss Paget's Girls Club The Girl's Guild for a Good Life, at Hoxton Hall in Shoreditch, started in November 1885. At this time "Miss Maud Stanley's Girls' Club was the only other one in London". Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 (pages 91 and 272) refers to a Federation of Working Girls' Clubs, founded under the auspices of The Young Women's Christian Association. She quotes a report of 1914-1915 and says the club's address was 26 Cartwright Gardens. The "Miss Paget" might be Mary Rosalind Paget, (14.1.1855-19.8.1948) "social reformer, nurse and midwife", who became a Dame. Her main relevant interest appears to be District Nursing. See also (external link) Maude Stanley . The New York City Federation of Women's Clubs awarded its first Medal of Honor, in 1917, to Dame Leila Paget "whose leadership of a Serbian Relief Fund in WWI made her a world figure. She caught typhus in Serbia, and was given up for dead, but recovered and still managed to save thousands of Bulgars, Serbs, etc." (external link). There is a photograph of Leila Paget in nurses uniform on this link. Leila Paget was Louise Margaret Leila Wemyss Paget (1839-1929) (also Paget before she was married), wife of Sir Ralph Spencer Paget. She wrote "With Our Serbian Allies" for the Serbian Relief Fund in 1915. (See also Dorothy Chick)

An Open Door is about the missionary spirit of the upper classes.

January 1885 Ethel Oliver, aged sixteen, became a pupil at the Friends' School York. She was there until June 1886

27.1.1885. Sir James Cantlie gave a lecture at the Parkes Museum of Hygiene on "Degeneration amongst Londoners" - external link to text

9.6.1885 Henry Edward Kendall (junior), Charlotte's architect grandfather, died at Burlington Road, Westbourne Park, London. (See 1887) Buried Kensal Green Cemetery. His obituary published Builder volume 48, 20.6.1885, pages 883-884 Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.35 says that his wife and unmarried daughter "went to live permanently in Brighton"

The list of Architects in an 1884 London Trade Directory includes "Kendall, Henry E. 34 Burlington Road, Bayswater, W.". There are six architects listed in Doughty Street, but Frederick Mew is not listed anywhere. (See 1895 Trade Directory. Also "Kendall and Mew, Architects" in 1878 and letter 24.2.1890)

Gower Street School "The school was passed over in 1885 to Miss Amy Greener, a total stranger." Lucy Harrison helped Miss Greener connect. "In this way, the two came much in contact, and their acquaintance ripened into a close and lasting friendship". Building at Cupples field began in 1885. Lucy Harrison moved there in 1886. Amy Greener spent summers there. (Amy Greener 1916)

1886 Charlotte 16-17

Lucy Harrison leaves the Gower Street School, which has passed to Amy Greener. Anne Mew (13 in the autumn) remained at the school. Edith Chick (16 in October), unwilling to join the family business, started at Notting Hill High School. In 1913, aged 43, Charlotte composed The Fête about the feelings of a sixteen year old boy in France. This refers, twice, to young ladies in a boarding school (demoiselles of the pensionnat). There are other indications that Charlotte may have gone to France to study when she left Gower Street.

July 1886 Letters from Lucy Harrison from Cupples Field, Bainbridge, Askrigg, Yorkshire, to Amy Greener in London. After 1901, Amy Greener joined Lucy Harrison at Cupples Field, which was still her (Amy's) address in 1917.

If Charlotte Mew went to school in Paris, as Laurence Armitage, the central figure of An Open Door, does, I expect it was to develop her French after leaving the Gower Street School. Edith Chick, the oldest daughter, was sixteen on October 1886. "Samuel thought that the time had come for her to join him as an assistant in the lace business. All his daughters, he said, would have to contribute to their own support". Edith loved school and "in desperation, declared she wanted to be a teacher". Samuel made enquiries and, in 1886, Edith entered Notting Hill High School. "She particularly enjoyed her first introduction to algebra and science" (Margaret Tomlinson p.67)

Courses in bacteriology started at King's College Hospital, London.

8.9.1886 Birth of Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon bibliography - biography at Counter-Attach - biography at Knitting Circle - See 1905 - 1912 - April 1917 (Old Huntsman) - June 1918 (Counter- Attack) - July 1918 - November 1918 - 20.11.1918 - 2.4.1919 - June 1919 (Picture Show) - 24.8.1919 - 7.9.1919 - October 1919 (War Poems) - November 1919 - 5.11.1919 - January 1920 - August 1920 - April 1921 - 22.7.1921 - 1923 - 3.1.1924 - 7.1.1924 - 30.11.1924 - 11.12.1924 - 4.4.1925 - 29.4.1925 - 1961 - 1966 - 1967 - diaries

In the October-December quarter of 1886, the death of Jane Cobham, aged 89, was registered Chorley vol.8e page 382 and that of Thomas James Cobham, aged 23, Chorley vol.8e page 381 [Chorley - Lancashire] This seems to be the Thomas James Cobham entry on the 1881 Census [Mawdesley is in Chorley]. Although his name is the closest to T.A. Cobham that I can find, I do not think he has anything to do with Charlotte Mew's family.

Henry, Anne and Freda and Charlotte

As far as her 20th century friends knew, Charlotte Mew had one sister (Anne), who she lived with. The family was the mother and two sisters. Alida Monro (1953), page ix, wrote about the family after 1915: and before 1923:

"Ma" was a tiny woman, scarcely more than four feet, very shrivelled and with tiny claw-like hands. There was a portrait of her painted in oils hanging on the walls, which showed that in her youth she had been very pretty and bright, like a little bird. She was the mother of four children, a son and three daughters. Charlotte was the eldest girl, then came Anne, her inseparable companion. I never met the youngest sister or brother, and only after Charlotte's death did I hear from an intimate friend that they had gone out of their minds many years before and were both in asylums. The friend who spoke of them, told me that the third sister, Freda, was as remarkable as the other two and was "like a flame". Their sad condition was a constant torment to Charlotte.

Freda being an asylum patient is confirmed by a number of primary sources. The evidence for her brother, Henry Herne, is confirmed by his death certificate. The intimate friend may be Ethel Oliver. Alida does not say what (if anything) Charlotte and Anne did say about the rest of their family. I assume they kept as quiet as they could about Henry (who had died in 1901) and their living sister, Freda, - which was not unusual. However, Charlotte did not keep quiet about having insanity in the family and the fear that Anne and she had of it. Alida says (page xiii)
She and her sister had both made up their minds early in life that they would never marry for fear of passing on the mental taint that was in their heredity

See race improvement

Henry Herne Mew is recorded as a "scholar" aged 15 in 1881. Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.11 says he was apprenticed to his father as soon as he became 16, but became a patient in his early twenties (therefore not before 1885). His death certificate has Doughty Street as his home address, which may mean he was admitted to the asylum before 1890. I have been unable to trace him in the 1891 census. Penelope Fitzgerald says he was diagnosed with dementia praecox - which is possible, but it seems early for the term in England. He died in Peckham House Lunatic Asylum in 1901.
Freda Kendall Mew was admitted to the Isle of Wight County Lunatic Asylum on 4.2.1899. "F.K.M." (aged 21) is shown as a patient in the private wing of the Isle of Wight County Asylum in 1901. This wing opened about 1897. A letter of 1921 confirms that Freda had been "confined in the Isle of Wight County Hospital" at an annual expense of "roughly 130 pounds a year". She died in 1958 at Whitecroft. [The hospital name is Whitecroft, not Whitelands.]
Mania
Penelope Fitzgerald says Freda "began to show recognizable symptoms of schizophrenia (in the early 1890s - before the term was used), then, like Henry, broke down beyond recall. "Her father insisted that she be sent back to the Island", within reach of family. (Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.38). We can be certain that Freda was not diagnosed "schizophrenic" by anyone in the 1890s.

On admission to the Isle of Wight Asylum, Freda's "form of mental disorder" was diagnosed as "acute mania". [Case notes]. Before seeing this record, I suggested that:

" Using the 1844 list of conditions as a guide, the possibilities appear to be one of the manias (these would include conditions later diagnosed as "early dementia" - dementia - schizophrenia). Her length of life rules out congenital syphilis as a cause (leading to G.P.I.). Melancholia seems an unlikely cause for institutionalisation in one's teenage years. I believe moral insanity was a rare (and unlikely) diagnosis."

As there is no mention of syphilis related diseases on Henry Herne Mew's death certificate, and he was also institutionalised young, I suggest mania was the most likely diagonosis for him as well.

We do not know if Charlotte visited Henry and Freda. However, when we read the descriptions of children's games in her writing we assume she watched children: So when we read her descriptions of mental disability, should we not assume that she observed that closely?

As far as her friends knew, Charlotte had one sister, who she lived with, Caroline Frances Anne Mew, known as Anne. Anne's death, in 1927, precipitated Charlotte's, and they are buried together. Anne was an artist who, Penelope Fitzgerald (1988 p.44) says, specialised in bird and flower painting. I do not know if any of her work survives, but it would be good to consider it in relation to Charlotte's writing, where bird's and flowers are as essential as people.
Alida Monro (1953), pages ix-x, says:

"Anne was a little taller than Charlotte, much gayer and much less weighed down by the sorrows of their lives. These lay heavily on Charlotte, whose temperament was naturally keyed very low. Anne bore a striking resemblance to Marie Antoinette. She had the most brilliant violet-blue eyes that I have ever seen, and although she was very fragile and delicate, she always managed to be bright and witty. She was an accomplished artist in redecorating seventeenth century furniture. She worked all her life painting flowers and fire-screens and renovating English painted furniture for a firm of antique dealers, who, according to Charlotte, paid her only a sweated wage."

Painting on satinwood as employment to support greater visions is described by Charlotte in a studio that may have been Anne's. But perhaps we should not separate the greater visions from the craft? Charlotte in her needlework and Anne in her painting may have shared the ideal of uniting craft and art.

Charlotte Mew's queer uncertain mind See above and madness

Charlotte Mew wrote to Ethel Oliver, in 1902,

"Physically I have been really better here but mentally tired, but if I wished to get my nerves under control up to now, thanks to being better, I have done it, and hope that it will last. I can't transport my thoughts to England and the things left behind with any sense of reality, and perhaps it is better so, but it makes me seem very egotistic - which I'm not really. It is a queer uncertain mind this of mine - and claims are being made upon it at the moment which I find difficult to meet."

In February 1899, Freda Mew's case file states that there is a family history of "Madness" in her "Brother and Sister", no family history of "Consumption", and that it is unknown if there is a family history of "Drink". Consumption of the Lungs (Phthisis Pulmonalis) was the disease that Freda's only brother Henry died of in March 1901. The disease is now known as tuberculosis. Henry died in a lunatic asylum and had probably been in one for many years, but was not, presumably, consumptive in February 1899. But which of Freda's two sisters suffers from madness? I do not know of any suggestion that Anne had a nervous temperament, whereas incidents throughout Charlotte's life, including, of course, her suicide, spring to mind.
Anne appears to have worked regularly from the time she left Art College to the time she retired. Charlotte's income from writing must have been negligible. It is probably, therefore, Anne who was described in December 1921 as doing some "occasional light work which brings her in a very trifling income". I am unclear which of the sisters (in the same letter) is described as "very delicate" and a "great expense" to her mother. Alida Monro (1953 page xi) says Anne "had always been very delicate and suffered with backache to a terrible degree". On the other hand, Charlotte, eight months after the 1921 letter, wrote about her (Charlotte's) heart having gone wrong again.
A letter from Arthur Tansley to Sydney Cockerell on 27.6.1944 compares the mental stability of the Mew sisters. He writes:
"Anne, as you say, was the most stable (and, my wife says, the most human) of the family. It was Freda's tragedy, confirmiing the fear of insanity in herself that probably determined Charlotte's end. Charlotte herself was never insane (as I am sure you will agree) though she had the mental instability that goes with certain types of genius. Her fear began with her brother's death - he had the same trouble as Freda. As you suggested, Charlotte's end may have been 'for the best', as they say, for she was profoundly unhappy for several years."

1887 Charlotte 17-18

Sometime in 1887, William Ewart Gladstone (recently evicted from office as the Prime Minister) laid the foundation stone of Our Most Holy Redeemer, in Clerkenwell. The church was not completed until 1906.

Henry Harland (1861-1905) and his wife moved from New York to Paris in 1887. Soon after, they settled in London. Their experiences he parodied in a play, "The Light Sovereign" (1889). (Catholic Encyclopedia)

To the glory of God and in loving memory of William Barron Mew who died on February 14th 1887. The alter rails and tressecated pavement were placed in this church by his children.

20.6.1887 and 21.6.1887: London celebrations of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. [external link] - See china teapot

August 1887 First edition of Annals of Botany (88 pages) Quarterly. - Archive of all online editions since 1.8.1887

7.9.1887 Dorothy Chick, the youngest Chick, born at 5 Newman Street. Shortly after, the Chick family moved "to a commodious modern house in the growing suburb of Ealing." [Chesterfield", 177 Mount Park, Ealing] "On high ground and standing in half an ecre of garden, the house then commanded fine views over cornfields towards central London" (Margaret Tomlinson p.62)

December 1887 In Passed, Charlotte wrote My prayers were requested for the "repose of the soul of the Architect of that church, who passed away in the True Faith - December - 1887". (See 1885, when her grandfather died, and 1891, when the architect of Holy Redeemer died)

The Female School of Art
Anne Mew would have been 14 in the autumn of 1887. Elsie Millard would have been about the same age. Amy Greener went to Yorkshire after June 1891. Mary Davidow (1960, page 43, source not stated) says:

"Upon the completion of her studies at the Gower Street School, then under the direction of Miss Amy Greener, Anne Mew attended the Female School of Art in Queen's Square, London. While there she met Elsie Millard, a student"

Elsie Millard (19) is shown as a student of drawing in the 1891 Census, but Anne Mew (17) does not have an occupation shown.
The Female School of Design was founded in 1842. It changed its name to the Metropolitan School of Ornament for Females in 1852. From 1842 its Principal was Fanny McIan. Louisa Gann (1824-1912) became headmistress in January 1858. The school became the (Royal) Female School of Art in 1862. The Female School of Art is mentioned in the Illustrated London News in July 1864. In an 1884 Directory it is "Female School of Art, 43 Queen Sq. WC" (Under Schools - Public). In an 1899 Directory it is "Bloomsbury Royal Female School of Art, 43 Queen Square". In 1907, the Committee of Management tried to dismiss Louisa Gann (aged 83) without any pension. Louisa Gann sued for wrongful dismissal. London County Council agreed to pay her £150 pounds in settlement on condition it take over the "debt-ridden and deteriorating Queen Square building. 58 The school was renamed the Day School of Art for Women, and moved to the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Southampton Row." "The Royal Female School of Art (established 1842) was transferred to the London County Council and incorporated into the Central School in 1908". See (external link) and F. Graeme Chalmers 1998

See 1811 - 1863 - 1867
In 1887, Alan Cole interviewed (grandma) Harriet Chick in Sidmouth. "She had, he says, almost quite retired from the business with which she had been connected for over forty-five years... she had once 'spent a ten-pound note' at the School of Design at Somerset House but 'no good really came of it, the students did not understand the technical requirements of designing for the lace-maker and the delicately painted white patterns were of no use to the worker'" (Margaret Tomlinson p.60). The School of Design was established at Somerset House in 1837. See external link to Victoria and Albert Museum

1887 John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) exhibited Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. In Mademoiselle Charlotte Mew linked Sargent with George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) as contenders who might claim equality with French painters. But Antoine dismisses them.

Richard Quain (1800-1887) left £75,000 to promote education in modern languages (especially English) and in natural science at London University. This was used to fund professorships, studentships and prizes. - See Edith Chick

Petrie dishes: external link

Sometime in 1887, William Robertson Smith was invited to lecture (1888 to 1891) on "primitive religion" and its relation to the judaism and christianity of the bible. The first series of lectures was published as Lectures on the Religion of the Semites in 1889. Robertson Smith had become famous as the advocate of a scientific analysis of sacred texts due to his public academic trial and acquittal (1878- 1880), in effect for heresy, following an Encyclopedia article on the Bible in 1875 and his dismissal as professor following articles in 1880 that included the application of anthropological thought to the interpretation of the bible. He had published an Encyclopedia article on Sacrifice in 1886 and, at Robertson Smith's instigation, James Frazer published Encyclopedia articles on taboo and totem in 1888 that developed earlier work by Robertson Smith. Working on these led Frazer to concentrate on the anthropological interpretation of classical (Greek and Roman) and other mythologies and to the publication of the first edition of The Golden Bough: a study in comparative religion in 1890 - A work he dedicated to Robertson Smith. The climax to this anthropological analysis of orthodox religious beliefs came in 1900, when Frazer's second edition of The Golden Bough included an analysis of the crucifixion of Christ.

Charlotte Mew's Men and Trees in 1913 is written within the framework of the anthropological analysis of religion that was developed by Tyler, Robertson Smith and Frazer. She is critical, however, of the progressive thesis and sees civilised values in primitive religion and barbaric elements in present day beliefs.

1888 Charlotte 18-19

Sous l'oil des barbares, the first volume of Maurice Barrès' autobiographical novel called (collectively) Le culte du moi (The worship of the ego, or self) was published in Paris in 1888. He divided the world into moi and the barbarians. Un Homme libre was published in 1889 and Le Jardin de Bérénice in 1891. It was republished 1910-1912

October 1888 Consecration of The Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer, Exmouth Street, Clerkenwell. The architect was John Dando Sedding, who died in 1891, about three years before Passed was published. "The church interior was modelled upon Brunelleschi's famous church of Santo Spirito in Florence and the exterior given the feel of an Italian basillica, with its gabled front, generous eaves and deep cornice as well as the Latin inscription, 'Christo Liberatori' (To Christ The Redeemer)" (church website). - "If, by some misfortune, heaven turns out to be baroque rather than gothic, then I think it may be rather like this church" (Mystery Worshipper 2002)

1888 Frank Bramley: The Hopeless Dawn first exhibited
map: Newlyn, Cornwall
Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 (chapter six) suggests that this picture of grief, with a china bowl catching the light, is part of the background to Charlotte Mew's "The China Bowl". - Where the grief is much darker and the bowl is sold. By 1913, Charlotte knew Newlyn Harboour [Charlotte's handwritten letter does say Newlyn, not Newlight as in the typed transcript] - But The China Bowl is more likely set in Devon. The main characters are Methodists called Rachel and David Parris. There was no one called Parris in the 1881 Cornwall Census, whereas there were several Parris families in Cornwall, including families in the part of South Devon the Chicks came from. The dialect of The China Bowl is the same as that in the poem that Charlotte gave to one of the Chicks

1888 First of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn founded. Members of this occult (magic) group, at different times, included Maud Gonne, William Butler Yeats, Aleister Crowley and Evelyn Underhill. Evelyn Underhill was a member for "a little more than two years, probably leaving in 1905"

1889 Charlotte 19-20

1889 Julia Turner B.A. from London University. (Date from Elizabeth Valentine by email).

Toy balloons (air-balls) arrived about this time. They were all round, made of rubber, and possibly imported from Belgium. In Passed, Charlotte Mew, writing about the calendar of children's toys in the streets of Clerkenwell says "Easter is heralded by the advent in some squalid mart of air-balls on Good Friday"

See external link on the history of balloons. See this passage in Barclay's The Rosary by Florence Louisa Barclay (1909) "Did you ever buy air-balls at Brighton? Do you remember the wild excitement of seeing the man coming along the parade, with a huge bunch of them--blue, green, red, white, and yellow, all shining in the sun? And one used to wonder how he ever contrived to pick them all up--I don't know how!- -and what would happen if he put them all down. I always knew exactly which one I wanted, and it was generally on a very inside string and took a long time to disentangle. And how maddening it was if the grown-ups grew tired of waiting, and walked on with the penny. Only I would rather have had none, than not have the one on which I had fixed my heart. Wouldn't you?"

The first steam tram - tramway à vapeur - ran in Paris in 1876. The Paris Exposition of 1889 was served by a "steam tram Decauville... on the Champ de Mars". Sydney (Australia) imported its first steam tram from America for its International Exhibition of 1879. By the end of the century it had over 100 steam tram motors (little locomotves that pulled the carriages) and only Paris had a steam tram system to rival it. The Paris tram system had ten companies, hundreds of lines, and horses, steam and electric trams almost up 1914 (when it was all electrified). The Paris Metro (the first part of which opened 19.7.1901) competed with the tram and offered more peaceful streets to Paris than Charlotte Mew described 1902. [See external link with photo of steam tram drowning in 1910]

Autumn 1889 Edith Chick began her studies at University College London with physics and mathematics.

1890 Charlotte 20-21

February 1890: Mews move from Doughty Street to 9 Gordon Square
Before the Mews moved house, Henry Herne Mew (probably) admitted to an asylum
Early 1890s: An Ending and other poems. Relation with Chicks

Michaelmas Day 1890: Consecration of St James - Spanish Place (partially completed) (map). Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 p.54 says this seems to be the church in Passed. However, this does not fit either direction (north or south) and is in fashionable Marylebone rather than a poor district. The architect was Edward Goldie (1856-1921)

Richard Jefferies, (1848-14.8.1887) Field and Hedgerow: being the last essays of Richard Jefferies; collected by his widow (Mrs J. Baden Jefferies): London and New York : Longmans, Green and Co. 1890. Also published 1895, 1900, 1910, 1926 (and other dates). Charlotte Mew quotes from three essays in Field and Hedgerow in her Men and Trees (1913), and from an earlier essay in The Minnow Fishers (1890s/1903). Charlotte Mew's ("apparently unpublished" until 1981) essay A Country Book is a review of this in which she says "When first I read it many years ago, it set my own heart beating, for I felt I discovered in it an undreamed universe". Reflecting back, in 1919, Charlotte linked this excitement to her excitement on discovering
Henry Vaughan. - External link on Richard Jefferies

1890: First edition of The Literary Digest (New York) "A weekly compendium of the contemporaneous thought of the world." Published: New York : Funk and Wagnalls, 1890-1937. This republished poems by Charlotte Mew in 1920 and 1922.

The Mew family moved from 30 Doughty Street to 9 Gordon Street, Gordon Square, WC in February 1890. They lived there until March 1922.
Mrs Anne Powell, the previous leaseholder of 9 Gordon Street, died sometime in the last three months of 1899 - Probably in December. Frederick Mew bought the lease of the house from Mrs Powell's son, before the end of February 1890.
A letter dated 24.2.1890 states:

" 86 St. George's House
Eastchap, London E.C.
Dear Sir:
In consequence of my Mother's decease as I informed you last December the house, 9 Gordon Street, had to be disposed of under my late Father's will. I have sold the lease to Mr. F. Mew, architect, of 30 Doughty Street for his own occupation exactly on the original terms and the same covenants. Will you kindly note the same and forward the notices for the Ground Rent to him? & oblige Yours obediently, Ellison Powell" [In the records of the Bedford Estate, London]

(1881 Census for 9 Gordon Street)
The death of Anne Powell, aged 88, was registered in St Pancras in the December quarter of 1889.

Alida Monro (1953), pages viii-ix, gives a description of the house as it was sometime after 1915:
" When I met her, Charlotte Mew lived in a tall, typically Bloomsbury house, No. 9, Gordon Street, Gordon Square (destroyed by bombs in 1940-41). It was tall and narrow, dark and gaunt inside... They moved to Gordon Street when she was still a child and here she lived for almost her entire life. Her father had been an architect, and the rooms and passages were lined with drawings and plans of his work... When I first knew Charlotte, the top half of their house was let to some people, but it was a long time before this was disclosed to me in confidence, as it was felt that such a circumstance was a matter of which to be deeply ashamed..."

Gordon Street: Street Map See letter head 1913

This mid-1950s map shows Gordon Square. Gordon Street is north (see other map). Friends House is the crime scene for the destruction of the plane trees. Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 suggests (page 31, no reference) that Anna Maria Kendall, Charlotte and Anne were attending Christ Church, Woburn Square from sometime after about 1884. Gower Street, where Charlotte is said to have attended school is to the west. Numbers 74-80 Gower Street, WC1E 7HU is a terrace of four, five storey, grade two listed Georgian houses, fronting Gower Street and back onto College Hall. Exeter Market, where Holy Redeemer (below) is can be seen on the north east of the map.
The Mew's house in Gordon Street
Gordon Street links the west side of Gordon Square and Euston Road. At the Gordon Square end of Gordon Street, on the west side, was All Saints Church, built in 1843. Between this and Euston Road there were 18 terraced houses. The Mew's house was the sixth from the church. In the 1895 Trade Directory, Frederick Mew, architect, shared the street with gentlemen, and some ladies, most of whom have no trade or occupation shown. There is the occasional vicar, solicitor or physician. In the 1910 and 1915 Trade Directory, the church has closed, and many of the houses have been taken over by ladies running boarding houses, and there is a University hotel.
The Squares: Until the second world war, these squares were private, protected areas. Mecklenburgh Square, at the end of Doughty Street, is still a private square.

The 1950s map below shows how Gordon Street backed on to University College in Gower Street. It shows Charlotte Street in the south west and Boswell Street (previously Devonshire Street) in the south east.

London University and Charlotte Mew

Alida Monro (1937) says that Charlotte Mew attended lectures at London University. Several of her friends were students there at one time or another - See Chick family - Edith Chick - Mary Chick - Harriette Chick - Margaret Chick - Elsie Chick - Frances Chick - Margaret Robinson - Charlotte's house in Gordon Street backed on to University College in Gower Street.

Charlotte attended a musical at University College in March 1914 and May 1914 - at this time she was helping Elsie Chick with her MA. Gower Street is mentioned again in 1920

Very early poems? (See Alida Monro's list of "early poems"). Mary Davidow reproduces a group of poems "From Frederick B. Adams' typecript" that had not been published before. An Ending is thought to date from the early 1890s. The others may also be early poems: A Question - Left Behind - A Farewell - There shall be no night there.
An Ending and Charlotte's short story The China Bowl are both written in a dialect that I argue is based on South Devon. (Mary Davidow (1960 page 78) identifies the following poems as also written in "English West Country dialect": The Farmer's Bride - Sea Love - Arracombe Wood and Old Shepherd's Prayer. Two of the poems - The Farmer's Bride and Arracombe Wood - use "the Fall" for autumn, which I think persisted in south west England at the time.
Charlotte's dialect writing, although not extensive, appears to have spanned her writing career rather than being located at one period

1890 May Sinclair living with her brother Reginald and their mother in Sidmouth, Devon. Reginald died 31.1.1891, and was buried at Salcombe Regis. [This is west of Sidmouth - The Chicks were located to the east, at Branscombe, and in Sidmouth High Street] May and her mother remained in Sidmouth until (July?) 1895. ( Suzanne Raitt 2000 pages 65-44). Although it seems likely that Charlotte Mew visited Sidmouth during this period, it seems unlikely to me that she and May met.

Mary Davidow says (page 40) "It has been said that there was a romance between Charlotte Mew and Sam Chick, the elder son of Samuel and Emma Chick. This may account for the close tie which existed in the early nineties between the Chicks and Charlotte Mew. Each Christmas she sent gifts to the family. Many of these the Chicks still possess. Among them are a dainty, pocket-sized, hand executed calendar for the year 1891 which, Margaret Chick pointed out, was sent to her father, and is one of several; linen handkerchiefs, hem-stitched and initialled by hand; and pieces of embroidery, designed and worked by Charlotte, which are still in use. Also in their possession are some of the unpublished writings, early pieces. A holograph" [A document wholly written in the hand of the author who has sigmed it] of the poem An Ending, written in the early nineties, was sent by Charlotte Mew to one of them; a typescript of a short story, The Minnow Fishers, believed to be unpublished, bears a notation in the upper right hand corner in Charlotte Mew's hand reading, "The property of The Outlook".
...
Margaret Chick recalls that Charlotte Mew was "advanced for the time". She smoked, and went about visiting very much as she pleased, most often unescorted. This, from the point of view of the standard behaviour of the period, was daring indeed. She wore her hair in a short bob, much like a boy's. Her attire was invariably the tartan skirt, black velvet jacket, white blouse and soft silk tie. She moved in and out of a circle of friends who were for the most part writers, artists, and actors and actresses.

The families we know most about in relation to Charlotte from 1890 to 1912 included the Chicks, Olivers and Robinson/Browne, with strong (but not exclusive) scientific interests. It is a reasonable supposition that she was friends (in the 1890s) with the writer Ella D'Arcy and with the painter Elsie Millard and her sister Evelyn in the theatre. Apart from that, speculation about her literary associations centres around The Yellow Book, and about her artistic associations around Anne

William Platt Ball Are the effects of use and disuse inherited? : an examination of the view held by Spencer and Darwin published 1890 - In the library of Arthur Tansley - See 1893 Gold Medal - Tansley Book Plate 1896 and Darwin's water treatment in 1857

17.6.1890 Birth of Gladys Bertha (later Bronwyn) Stern, Mrs Holdsworth, also known as Peter Stern. A novelist and short story writer, she is the source of the story of Charlotte Mew's sexual assault on May Sinclair. She was staying near the Dawson Scotts in Cornwall in 1918 and wrote to May Sinclair on 15.6.1919. She died 19.9.1973

Summer? 1890 Publication of the first edition of James Frazer's The Golden Bough. A Study of Magic and Religion. Frazer perceived a cruel core to religion in human sacrifice, particularly the murder and replacement of a human king-god, who originally represented the waning power of the sun. The core was revealed in the analysis of survivals of primitive thought in modern belief. Where Darwin was interpreted as revealing nature as red in tooth and claw, Frazer was seen as revealing that the human cultural sub-conscious is organsied around savage customs of bloody sacrifice.

Autumn 1890 Edith Chick's second year of studies at University College. She included a substantial amount of botany with her physics and preliminary science (repeat). [Presumably bringing her into contact with the professor, Francis Wall Oliver]

1891 Charlotte 21-22

Charlotte started using the British Museum Reading Room - June: Charlotte with the Chicks

In 1891, Charlotte Mew obtained a ticket for the British Museum Reading Room - A ticket which she last renewed in July 1927 (Val Warner's Mew 1997, pages ix and xviii). Her first published work was Passed in 1894. The China Bowl was unsuccessfully submitted for publication in January 1895. A Wedding Day is dated 1895. An Open Door was rejected by Blackwood's in 1898. - (Val Warner's Mew 1997, page x, who adds "On stylistic grounds, most of her prose unpublished till the Collected edition of 1981 may be ascribed to this period". [That is, before 1899]

Rudyard Kipling The English Flag - which was quoted by Charlotte Mew in Men and Trees (1913)

7.4.1891 John Dando Sedding (born Eton, Berkshire 13.4.1838), architect of The Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer, died at Winsford Vicarage, Somerset. Suggests this was the year that Charlotte Mew visited the church and saw the memorial card asking for prayers for the architect's soul.

5.6.1891/6.6.1891 Census.
The inhabitants of 9 Gordon Street were Frederick and Anna M. M. Mew, their children Caroline F.A. Mew (aged 17) and Freda "Wendall" (aged 12), and the "domestic servants": Elizabeth Goodman (65), Emma J. Barker (20) and Emily Sanger (17) I could not find Henry Herne Mew (or H.H.M.) in the census. He did not appear to be a patient in either of the Peckham asylums.
Charlotte Mew (aged 21) was staying in the Chick family home at "Chesterfield", 177 Mount Park, Ealing:. [By 1901 the family had moved to "Chestergate", 30 Park Hill, Ealing - "5 Chestergate" was the family home of Emma Chick (born Hooley) in Macclesfield.
Samuel Chick, the father, was a lace manufacturer, born Weymouth, Dorset on 7.6.1841, died London 1925. His father, Samuel Chick (1811-1880) the grandfather, married Harriet Staple (1812- 1892), possibly mis-recorded as Harriet Stubb, marriage at Radipole, Dorset, on 8.7.1833. (map). Their eldest child, Harriet (married James Cooper), was born in 1836. Samuel Chick "Honiton Lace Dealer" is shown at 91 St Mary Street (the main street of Melcombe Regis and Weymouth) in the 1859 Melcombe Regis Post Office Directory. In 1861 Samuel and Harriet Chick, both "lace manufacturers", with children over a year old born in Weymouth, are in the High Street of Sidmouth, Devon. At the 1861 census a Wesleyan (Methodist) Minister was also staying with the Chick grandparents. Samuel Chick, their grandson, was at a Wesleyan Boarding School in 1881. Samuel Chick, the father, was not at home in 1891, but staying with the Hooley family in Macclesfield, where he had been at the time of the 1881 census. He was at home (Chestergate) in 1901. Charlotte Mew gave hand made calendars to Samuel Chick the father for 1891 and other years. He (and Mary Chick) was a witness to Anna Maria Mew's will in 1899 and he left a bequest to Charlotte and Anne Mew in his own will in 1924
Emma Chick, his wife, was born Emma Hooley in Macclesfield on 8.4.1844. She married Samuel Chick at Macclesfield (Park Street Chapel) on 26.6.1867. She died in 1931. She was also not at home, but staying in the High Street, Sidmouth, Devon, with her husband's widowed mother (Harriette, aged 78, born Somerset, "Retired lacemaker". Recent disability not clear) and brother (Edwin aged 47? No occupation shown). The death of Harriet Chick, aged 79, was registered in Honiton, Devon in the March Quarter of 1892, volume 5b, page 26. Emma Chick was at home in 1881 and 1901.
Hugh Sinclair (1986) says that Samuel and Emma Chick were "both Methodists" (see above) who brought up their children "with family prayers twice daily and a ban on such worldly pleasures as theatres and dancing". Dorothy Lumb says "the Chick family were Methodists. It may be because of being Methodists that the daughters received a good education, I have heard this is part of Methodist tradition. I do not recognise in my family background the often repeated idea that women have only recently been educated or had careers!". Samuel's brother, Elijah Chick of Sidbury Devon entered his occupation as "Miller (Corn) Local Methodist Preacher" in the 1881 census. Margaret Tomlinson (pages 52, 56, 77, 80-82) says that Samuel Chick, although brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist, became a Baptist. Her account suggests that he may have been active in the Baptists in London and in the Methodists in Devon. Charlotte Mew's describes Elizabeth Goodman as a Methodist and makes the main characters in The China Bowl Methodists
There were twelve Chick children: four boys and eight girls, but one boy and one girl died when they were about three months old. All the Chick children were born at 5 Newman Street. The date and (usually) time of birth were recorded in a family Bible (Watts boxes). According to Hugh Sinclair (1986), all the Chick daughters went to Notting Hill High School. Perhaps they went to the Gower Street School when they were living in Holborn and then Notting Hill when they moved to Ealing? [See also Chicks at Gower Street]
1) Samuel Chick Born 31.3.1868 at 9.30pm. Died December 1917. Eldest son, who would be age 23, was not at home in 1891. He was at home (Chestergate) in 1901 (age 33) when he is shown as a printer and an employer. It is Samuel Chick who was said to have had a romantic attachment to Charlotte Mew. His niece Margaret Tomlinson could not get her relatives to say much about him, because a "black sheep in the family" was not something they "of all people, found easy to accept". He had ability, but was irresponsible about women and money. "A small printing business, set up for him by his father, ended in failure, so, predictably, did a brief marriage. When things at home reached breaking-point he was provided with an annual allowance and a flat in London." (page 80)
2) Alice Chick, Samuel Chick's twin. Born Newman Street 31.3.1868 at 10.10pm. Died, aged three months, 19.7.1868. Buried at Kensal Green
Information below on the Chick sisters draws on an analysis of some student index cards at University College, London, and photocopies of some previous work on the what the University records show of Harriette Chick and her sisters. (See 3.10.2005)
Those at home in 1891 were:
3) Edith Chick (born 29.10.1869 at 10am, died 1970). [B.Sc. on family tree]. Eldest daughter, almost the same age as Charlotte Mew. She was at home in 1881. She went to the Gower Street School, with Charlotte, and then, in 1886, to Notting Hill High School. As a child, the first entertainment she went to was the circus. She told her own daughter (page 71) that "she thought the most glorious sight in the world was the beautiful lady who rode round and round the ring, throwing of one drab garment after another, until at last she stood upright on her horse, radiant in tights and a dress which glittered with sequins". Edith went to University College London in the autumn of 1889, where she studied, first physics and mathematics, combining this, from 1890, with botany. On 31.3.1891, when Charlotte Mew was staying, Edith was the oldest Chick in the house. Single, aged 21 (the same age as Charlotte), she is entered as "scholar".. In the early 1890s, Charlotte gave Edith the poem An Ending (see August 1958). In 1892 she obtained a two year grant for experimental work in biology.

Edith was still an undergraduate. It seems likely that her experimental work was with Francis Wall Oliver, in fossil botany. She may have done this with Arthur George Tansley (15.8.1871-25.11.1955). (external links: 1 - 2) Tansley was Demonstrator and later Assistant Professor of Botany at University College London from 1893 to 1906. He was an admirer of Herbert Spencer's scientific philosophy and oversaw the sections on plant morphology and physiology in the 1899 revised edition of Spencer's Principles of Biology. Spencer's emphasis on the adaptation of organisms to their environment presumably contributed to Tansley's ecological frame of thinking, which developed after reading Johannes Warming in the 1896 German edition.

Edith is shown as obtaining her BSc in 1894. She paid for further classes in botany in 1895 and 1898. From 1896 to 1898, Edith was active in University debates. From 1899 to 1904, Edith was the first female Quain Student (paid £100 a year). She had "some demonstrating duties as well as time for research". Arthur Tansley "supervised her work".