Grave Stories - Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

It is always galling to be obliged to agree with any timeworn banality; galling but sometimes unavoidable, for it is impossible to deny that the Taj Mahal is the most beautiful mausoleum in the world, surpassing all others, defying hyperbole and meretricious adjectives.

Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan when his wife Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to their fourteenth child in 1631, the Taj has accreted myths, usually with little substance. It is said to be a monument to a great love story, that Shah Jahan was inconsolable after the death of his wife, that he planned to build a Black Taj for himself on the other side of the Yamuna River linking the two mausoleums by a bridge. There are stories of him severing the heads and gouging the eyes of his architects and craftsmen once the building was complete to prevent the creation of a rival structure. Later when deposed by his son, Aurangzeb, and imprisoned in the Agra Fort, it is claimed that Shah Jahan spent his last years gazing intently at the Taj, and when his sight began to fail, he lay in bed contemplating its reflection in a diamond fixed to the wall.

Yet such is the mystique and allure of the Taj Mahal that it has no need of fabricated legends. It stands at the apotheosis of Mughal architecture, drawing on Timurid building styles inspirationally fused with the traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Its roots lie in the mausoleum of Timur (Tamerlane) in Samarkand. Gur-e- Amir, the Tomb of the King, was built in 1403 when Timur’s grandson and chosen heir died. It became the family crypt of the Timurid dynasty, later housing Timur himself, his sons, and other grandsons.

At the Gur-e- Amir complex a traditional Islamic iwan or gateway opens to a courtyard and a symmetrical mausoleum with a fluted azure dome. The gateway comprises a rectangular space walled on three sides and decorated with calligraphy and blue ceramic tiles bearing geometric designs. Within the eight-sided mausoleum blue tiles jostle with onyx and marble stalactites. A dark green jade cenotaph indicates the location of Timur’s tomb which lies in the crypt beneath.

The Gur-e-Amir has attracted its own improbable folktales, for inscriptions on Timur’s cenotaph read:

When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble

Whosoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I.

The Russian anthropologist Gerasimov opened the tomb in 1941… two days later the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin allegedly believed the curse and had Timur’s body reburied with full Islamic burial rites…to be rewarded with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad.

Symmetrical mausoleum seen across the courtyard

Timur’s cenotaph, the tomb is in a crypt beneath

Timur was the progenitor of the Mughal dynasty, for Babur, the first Mughal Emperor (1483-1530) was descended from him on his father’s side. Babur inherited Fergana in eastern Uzbekistan and conquered Kabul and Samarkand, before moving on to India, taking Delhi and Agra. And it was the tomb built for Babur’s son, Humayun, which was the first great Mughal architectural masterpiece.

Humayun’s tomb in New Delhi, commissioned by his Persian wife and designed by Persian architects in 1562, introduced central Asian architecture to India. It was modelled on the Gur-e- Amir with the same traditional gateway, geometrical symmetry, central bulbous dome, arched alcoves, lattice stone screens, and a paradise garden. The enclosed garden, divided into quarters with a main axis of water, was the first garden tomb on the Indian subcontinent. But the mausoleum also drew on Indian devices with decorative chattri, and it was built using indigenous stone, with red sandstone facework, inlaid with bands of white marble. The builders embraced the hierarchical use of sandstone and marble representing the kshatriyas (warrior caste) and Brahmins (priest caste) respectively.

At Sikandra, the mausoleum of Akbar, (1605) the third Mughal ruler, exhibits the same synthesis of styles, combining a traditional Islamic gateway, Arabic calligraphy and lattice work, with the use red sandstone bearing white marble features, and with chattri topped minarets at each corner of the gateway.

Entrance gate to Akbar’s mausoleum. The symmetrical minarets topped with chattri

The tomb of Mizra Ghiyas Beg, the Itmad-ud-Daulah, or Baby Taj, marks the transition between the first monumental phase of Mughal architecture, exemplified in the red sandstone and marble decoration of the Humayun and Akbar tombs, and the second phase of white marble buildings inlaid with delicate pietra dura detailing. Built by Nur Jehan, wife of Jehangir, the fourth Mughal Emperor, for her father in 1622, the Baby Taj is the first Mughal structure built completely of marble. It stands on a red sandstone plinth, its walls inlaid with polychromatic precious and semi-precious stones and perforated by jali screens with ornamental patterns. Octagonal minarets, topped by chattri, rise at each corner, maintaining perfect symmetry. Often described as a jewel box, it is acknowledged as the ultimate prototype and inspiration for the Taj.

Itmad-ud-Daulah, the Baby Taj, white marble on sandstone plinth

With the Taj Mahal, Indo-Islamic architecture reached its apogee. The Taj retains its Persian roots: the traditional gateway; the symmetry, balance and harmony of the mausoleum, with a white marble minaret at each corner, extending to the identical sandstone mosque and guest house which flank the central structure; the bulbous dome; and lattice windows. Behind a screen the false sarcophagi of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan, who was buried beside his wife three decades later, indicate the position of the burials in the tomb chamber below. In the only asymmetrical element, Shah Jahan’s cenotaph is larger than that of his wife, mounted on a taller base, and with a traditional pen box on top. But the translucent Indian white marble is now the dominant material, used for both the platform and the mausoleum. Both are inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones: jade, crystal, turquoise, lapis lazuli, sapphire, carnelian, coral, onyx. The skill and artistry of the Indian stonecutters, inlayers, and carvers have created exquisite flowers and patterns. Yet withal the complex is set around a Persian garden of paradise completing the perfect synthesis.

The cenotaphs are concealed behind a stone lattice

Dusk, from the opposite bank of the Yamuna River

An Appreciation of John Harington, Alexander Cumming,and Thomas Crapper.

By Gravedigger

On April 27, 2025

In Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators

Were I allowed but one luxury on a desert island, I would not need to think twice: a luxury bathroom of course, with deep tub, power shower, an endlessly renewing pile of soft towels, an exotic range of soaps, oils, and lotions…and a plumbed in flush lavatory. I have always been grateful that I did not live before the invention of the latter.

I suspect that I am not alone in this, for amongst the soot-stained Victorian and Edwardian tombstones at Elmers End Cemetery in South London, only that of Thomas Crapper (1836-1910) has merited a clean and a new plaque confirming the identity its incumbent.

Grave of Thomas Crapper, Elmers End Cemetery.

It has been cleaned, but already dirt and lichen are renewing the attack,

and the inscription is becoming obscured,

but a new plaque leaves no doubt as to the identity of the incumbent.

Urban myth, encouraged by Wallace Reyburn’s fictional biography Flushed with Pride: the Story of Thomas Crapper, avers that Crapper invented the flush lavatory. It further alleges that American servicemen based in England during World War I, seeing his name on sanitary ware, coined the term crapper as a synonym for lavatory, and the vulgar slang for bodily waste followed. In fact, the word is of Middle English origin, originally denoting chaff, weeds, or other rubbish, and the flush lavatory predated Thomas Crapper.

T.C. Crapper and Co. did produce sanitary ware. Moreover the plumber and businessman was responsible for several improvements in flush lavatories including the introduction of the floating ballcock, silencers to cut out the noise of the cistern filling, and the invention of the U-bend plumbing trap, an improvement on the earlier S-bend, preventing sewer gases from entering the water closet. Less successful were his attempts to produce an automatic flush and a self-raising seat.

When he opened the world’s first bath, lavatory, and sink showroom at 120 King’s Road in 1870 Victorian ladies putatively grew faint at the sight of the porcelain displayed behind the huge plate glass windows. His famous “try before you buy” policy probably offended their sensibilities too.

But if Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush lavatory who did? In the 1440s Ralph Cromwell, Treasurer to Henry VI, built a high tower, topped by a cistern to gather rainwater, at Wingfield Manor in Derbyshire. When the sluice holding back the water in the cistern was opened once a week the water came down through a chimney-like structure flushing out the latrine below into the moat. Similarly, cisterns on the roofs of houses in Medieval London had discharged water into lead pipes which flushed the contents of the latrines into the streets.

Despite these early examples, the credit for inventing the first flush lavatory is usually attributed to John Harington (1560-1612), courtier, author, and translator. Certainly his system was more sophisticated (there was a porcelain bowl, there was a drain) and garnered greater publicity. Harington installed a flush lavatory at his manor house in Kelston, Somerset. A description of this device which used the force of water from a cistern operated by a valve to flush out the bowl into a drain appeared in his book “A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax,” published in 1596. Calling his invention Ajax was a play on “jakes”, a sixteenth century euphemism for outhouses or privies.

But the essay was not a mere description of the invention, it was also a coded attack on the Earl of Leicester whom Harington held responsible for the stercus or excrement that was poisoning society in the form of torture and state sponsored libels – of which Harington’s relatives had fallen victim. The political allegory was none too subtle, and Harington was temporarily banished from court for his attack on the Queen’s favourite.

Despite her disapproval of his politics Elizabeth did have one of his devices installed at her palace in Richmond, Surrey. But the expense combined with the lack of an S or U bend to curb smells prevented the Ajax from achieving wider popularity.

That deficiency was remedied by Alexander Cumming who, in 1775, patented the S-bend which retained water permanently in the waste pipe thus preventing sewer gases from entering buildings. So, the invention was complete almost a century before Thomas Crapper opened his show rooms.

Harington’s gravestone can be found in Kelston churchyard, but while providing a detailed account of his genealogy, disappointingly it makes no reference to his invention.

The Harington family tombs, St.Nicholas churchyard, Kelston

The stone commemorates John Harington, his wife and descendants, and references his ancestors

Cumming was buried in the graveyard of St. James Chapel, Pentonville, north London. The chapel was later demolished and the cemetery turned into Joseph Grimaldi Park. As the name implies, Grimaldi’s gravestone was rescued and is a centre piece of the park, but sadly that of Cumming disappeared.

*************

For photographs of Thomas Crapper’s products, (and another tomb) see At God’s Convenience, February 29, 2024, by the incomparable Gentle Author, https://spitalfieldslife .com>2024/02/29>at-gods-convenience

John Nicholson: Hero of Delhi or Imperial Psychopath?

By Gravedigger

On April 13, 2025

In Colonialists

When I realised that my hotel in New Delhi lay only a few hundred yards from the Nicholson Cemetery, and that I had a couple of hours free time before dinner, I determined to seek out John Nicholson. My street plan had already shown itself to be fallible, so hesitantly I sought precise directions from our guide. I was uncomfortably aware that a scion of the East India Company, convinced of his own superior race and with a reputation for excessive violence even amongst his fellow officers, would be rightly loathed in India. Clumsily I attempted to make clear that my interest in graves was not necessarily at odds with an abhorrence for their occupants. I quoted William Dalrymple’s view that Nicholson was “an imperial psychopath.”

Our guide was at once delighted by my desire to visit Nicholson and incensed by Dalrymple’s description and my perceived ignorance of the courage and manly virtues of the soldier hero. Giving me precise directions to the cemetery, he expressed his dismay that so few English people today have heard of Nicholson and advised me to read Charles Allen’s Soldier Sahibs as a corrective to my nescience.

John Nicholson (1822-57) was an Anglo-Irish military officer with the East India Company. Initially formed as a trading organisation, the Company gained control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent using its own army. When Nicholson arrived in India in 1839 the Company was expanding its political and military influence. Nicholson welcomed military action as an opportunity to advance his career. He took part in the first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-42), and the first and second Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845-46 and 1848-49). During the latter, the Company annexed the Punjab and the North-West Frontier.

After the Second Sikh War Nicholson was appointed as District Commissioner in Rawalpindi in the Punjab. An incident from this time illustrates his approach to maintaining law and order: confronting a recalcitrant robber chieftain, he ran him through with his sword and cut off his head which he displayed on his desk. Then inviting the other headmen in the district to call on him he pointed to the head advising them to ponder their fate if they were tempted to crime.

In 1852 he became Deputy Commissioner of the Bannu area which he ruled like a despot. Persistently he punished and humiliated those whom he perceived as showing disrespect to the colonial government. When one Indian leader in a visiting deputation spat on the ground in front of him, Nicholson had the man forced to the ground, obliged to kneel, and lick up his own spittle. When an imam outside a mosque failed to greet him with a customary salaam Nicholson had the man brought before him to publicly humiliate him by shaving off his beard.

The First Indian War of Independence, 1857, still referred to in some English texts as The Indian Mutiny, was far more than a rebellion by the sepoys in response to the introduction of beef and pig fat to grease the cartridges of the new Enfield rifles. The war had deeper underlying causes: the relentless annexation of territory, specifically the recent conquest of Awadh, by the British; the increasing Imperial arrogance and the harsh treatment of Indians by comparison with the eighteenth century integration; British proposals to abolish the Mughal court and impose British law and control in Delhi; the decline in sepoys’ pay and promotion opportunities; the General Enlistment Act obliging Indian soldiers to serve abroad; Christian proselytising by missionaries which was undermining the Muslim and Hindu way of life with an evangelical drive for conversions witnessing the forced closure of madrassas; harsh taxes and profiteering from native resources while the bulk of the Indian population lived in poverty.

For the British however this was a mutiny, and the East India Company army was full of violent, racist officers outraged that British rule was being challenged. There was a general contempt for India and Indians, the British were on a god given mission to rescue a backward, inferior country via evangelical Christianity and Imperialism. The atrocities committed by the sepoys, killing not just British officers, but women and children, provided an excuse for reprisals and brutal vengeance. Sepoys were bayonetted and fired from cannon; old people, women and children were burned to death in their houses. The right to revenge was after all enshrined in the bible.

For Nicholson more than anyone it was obvious that the mutiny should be crushed at once before it “spread like smallpox.” There is little doubt that Nicholson enjoyed the war. God, he was confident, was on the side of the British. As commander of a Moveable Column, he swept across the Punjab, terrorising rebels into submission, hanging their leaders without court martials. Convinced that hanging was insufficient punishment he made clear that he would have preferred to flay alive, impale, or burn his victims. He gave his troops a free hand with prisoners, unconcerned when they engaged in vicious torture.

In Jalandhar he entered the British mess tent to announce dramatically, “I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks.” He had been told that the soup prepared by the regimental cooks was poisoned, and when they refused to taste it, he force fed it to a monkey who expired. All the cooks were hanged without trial.

For Nicholson, the end came at the siege of Delhi. The sepoys had captured Delhi, declared the aged Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II their leader, and massacred the Christian population. The assault on the city was under the command of Nicholson. His troops breached the walls of the Red Fort, but as he moved along the inside of the wall between the Kabul Gate and the Burn Bastion a sepoy shot him from the roof of a nearby house. A week later however Delhi was taken by the British. The Muslim population was massacred. Nicholson died nine days later in hospital. Zafar died in exile. The marble structures in the Red Fort were demolished and a British barracks erected.

Distant view of the walls surrounding the Red Fort from the minaret of the Jama Masjid

One of the gates in the walls of the Red Fort

Few of the marble structures in the Red Fort remain today,

but those which still exist are exquisite,

unlike the British barracks which replaced them.

A new graveyard had been prepared, and a white marble slab plundered from Zafar’s Moonlight Garden in the Red Fort was placed over Nicholson’s grave. The inscription reads:

The Grave

Of

Brigadier-General

John Nicholson

Who

Led the Assault at Delhi

But fell

In the Hour of Victory

Mortally wounded

And died September 23, 1857

Aged 35

Grave of John Nicholson, Nicholson Cemetery, Delhi

The white marble slab was appropriated from the Red Fort

For the most part the Victorian public were in thrall to the ruthless, seemingly invincible men who had taken Delhi. There was hysterical adulation of them, but especially of Nicholson, “The hero of Delhi” and “The Lion of the Punjab.” Eulogies described him as the bravest and the best, noble, tender, modest, heroic, honourable, just, patriotic, steadfast.

“As long as an Englishman survives in India, the name of John Nicholson will not be forgotten” wrote Viceroy John Lawrence. Henry Newbolt wrote the vile Ballad of John Nicholson; one verse will suffice to give the flavour:

Have ye served us for a hundred years
And yet ye know not why?
We brook no doubt of our mastery,
We rule until we die.”

Field Marshall Roberts asserted that Nicholson was a military genius who gave up his life in defence of his country, an odd claim given that Nicholson was trying to prevent Indians from defending their country.

Yet some of Nicholson’s superiors regarded him as dangerously out of control. For even by the standards of his times Nicholson’s actions and attitudes were extreme. He ignored orders, forced his men beyond their capabilities, and extended punishment to those outside his jurisdiction. John Lawrence, later the Viceroy of India, suggested that he was too keen on confronting and humiliating Indian leaders, flogging them on any pretext even when he lacked authority.

Recent writers have been distinctly less adulatory describing Nicholson as a violent bully, a racist, a religious bigot, arrogant, boorish, a man who loathed India and its inhabitants – whom he thought ignorant and barbarous, a gloomy Calvinist, a brute, a war monger, a torturer, a man convinced that he belonged to a superior race, … an Imperial psychopath.

Today Dalrymple’s pithy epithet resonates true. And if this is so in England, why was my guide in India so defensive of his memory? Surely no Indian could do other than loathe the man?

The historian, Thomas Macaulay, (1800-1859), wrote of the divine mission of the officers of the East India Company to expand their territory along the North-West Frontier. He further urged them to create between themselves and “the swarming millions”:

A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

My guide had attended Mayo College, the so-called Eton of the East, established in 1873, with precisely that intention. Had its powerful propaganda had been so depressingly successful, in shaping the views of this otherwise highly intelligent, educated, knowledgeable man? Like all Imperialist organisations the British Empire has much to answer for and its evil influence is not easily eradicated, still lingering on where we might least expect it.

*************

For a superb telling of the events of 1857 see:

William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857. Bloomsbury, 2006.

And for a gripping but more defensive account:

Charles Allen, Soldier Sahibs: The Men who made the North-West Frontier. John Murray, 2012, first published 2000.

Perdita, Mary Robinson, the Life of a Georgian Lady.

By Gravedigger

On March 30, 2025

In Actors, Influencers, Writers

The village of Chawton in Hampshire is best known today for its association with Jane Austen. Her brother inherited a sixteenth century manor house in the village. He stayed there only occasionally, but his mother and sisters became permanent residents in the former bailiff’s cottage and visited Chawton House whenever he was in residence.

Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra, and her elder sister, Cassandra Elizabeth, are both buried in the churchyard of St. Nicholas in the village.

Graves of Jane Austen’s mother and sister, St. Nicholas churchyard, Chawton

But I did not visit Chawton in search of the Austens. In 1992 Chawton House, by then in poor condition, was sold to an American businesswoman, Sandra Lerner. She restored the house and established a research library and study centre with the rather cumbrous title The Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing 1600-1830.

The contents of the library include Sandra Lerner’s own extensive collection of early and rare editions of women’s writing. Regular exhibitions highlight different writers: the centre is currently presenting Mary Robinson, more commonly known as Perdita.

Mary was born to a well-heeled family in Bristol in 1758, but her father lost his money following an ill-advised investment in a whale fishery in Labrador. When he returned from Canada, he left his wife and children to live with the mistress whom he had brought back to England. Mary’s mother moved to London with her children and set up her own school. There, Mary, who had received a better education than most girls of her generation, started teaching at the age of fourteen. Her father, however, despite deserting his family, resented this public acknowledgement of their poverty and forced the closure of the school.

Mary had always been attracted by the theatre and through connections of her mother secured an introduction to David Garrick. Impressed by her abilities, he began to train her: she was to play Cordelia to his Lear. Meanwhile however she had met Thomas Robinson, an articled clerk purportedly expecting an inheritance. She agreed to marry him, possibly under pressure from her mother, who was acutely aware of the dangers of a stage career at a time when “actress” was often a euphemism for prostitute.

The marriage was not a success. The inheritance did not materialise. Married at fifteen, Mary had a child at sixteen, and at seventeen, along with her husband and child, was housed in the Fleet prison for debt.

The debts had piled up as both Thomas and Mary had pursued a recklessly extravagant lifestyle. There was an expensive address, an open top carriage, clothes, jewellery, evenings at Ranelagh and Vauxhall gardens, and for Thomas the races, gaming houses and brothels. Quintessential Georgians, in stark contrast to their gloomy Victorian successors, they had an infinite capacity for living in the moment, ever hopeful that their fortunes would turn tomorrow, combined with an unattractive habit of tapping other people for “loans.” Detention in a debtors’ prison was an experience so widespread that it often seems to have served as little more than a rite of passage for large numbers of Georgians.

When it came to survival in the Fleet, however, Mary proved herself to be of superior mettle to Thomas. She accepted work, which he had refused, copying legal documents, and she published her first volume of poetry.

After Thomas was discharged from the Fleet, the playwright and theatre manager Sheridan encouraged Mary to return to the theatre. With characteristic generosity Garrick came out of retirement to tutor her again, and Mary made her stage debut as Juliet at Sheridan’s Drury Lane theatre.

Her subsequent stage career was an enormous success; particularly popular were her performances in the “breeches roles,” cross dressing as Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It. At the same time, she published her second volume of poetry.

In 1779 Sheridan revived Florizel and Perdita. This was Garrick’s adaptation of the final two acts of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the story of Prince Florizel and his love for the shepherd’s daughter Perdita, who of course turns out to be a princess.

The Prince of Wales, later George IV, came to see the play and promptly declared himself “head over heels in love” and “blinded by passion.”* One of his most unappealing characteristics was his capacity for self-deception. For the previous six months he had been declaring his love for his sisters’ governess, Mary Hamilton, threatening to commit suicide if she rejected him. Before he left for the theatre that night, he had sent her a letter declaring his undying love. When he returned, a second letter abruptly reduced Mary Hamilton to the status of a friend to whom he confided his new passion. In his letters to Mary Hamilton, he had called her Miranda and signed himself Palemon, now he began to write love letters to Mary Robinson calling her Perdita and signing them Florizel. Originality was alien to him.

Though Mary Robinson was flattered, she was not a fool. She held out against his blandishments and a welter of letters (her biographer notes that Palemon had penned a letter every three days to Mary Hamilton, “establishing a pattern he would far surpass when taking the name of Florizel.”**) reminding him that if they were to have a “public attachment” she would have to abandon her career and be financially dependent on him. After six months he sent a bond promising to pay her twenty thousand pounds when he came of age, and she retired from the stage to become his mistress.

As Perdita, Mary enjoyed her fame although it was tinged with notoriety, and she was frequently caricatured in the press. She spent lavishly and conducted a simultaneous affair with Lord Malden. When predictably the prince moved on, as he soon did, first to Elizabeth Armistead, then via Grace Dalrymple Eliot to Maria Fitzherbert, she was left seriously in debt. But she had held on to that slew of letters, which she now threatened to publish, and while denying that her motive was mercenary, negotiated a payment of five thousand pounds for their return. Moreover, she still held the bond.

It is hard to see her as a complete victim, though she did try to present herself as such, for in many respects she and the prince were cut from the same cloth, notwithstanding his greater advantages. Her capacity for self-dramatisation was congruent with his. Once she had secured the money, she sat for her portrait with Gainsborough who portrayed her as a pensive, abandoned beauty, clutching a miniature of the prince. Then she purchased a new carriage and headed for Paris.

In Paris she was welcomed as a celebrity, found new lovers, made the acquaintance of Marie-Antoinette, and returned to London bearing the latest fashions. Perdita introduced the white muslin shift dress, high-waisted and tied with a silk sash, which became known as the Perdita chemise, and which quickly replaced the paraphernalia of hoops and stays. All those Jane Austen heroines who appeared a few years later in their muslin frocks were, like everyone else, following the trend set by Perdita. No modern-day influencer can compare with Perdita as a leader of fashion: there were Perdita hats, gowns, handkerchiefs, stockings. Where Perdita led, society followed.

The prince may have wearied of her, but Perdita was at the height of her fame and popularity. She was painted by Hoppner, Reynolds, and Romney. There was an expensive new address, carriages, appearances at the theatre, opera, pleasure gardens and parks. Everywhere she met with admiration and emulation. Though there was always salacious gossip about her, she had learned to orchestrate the press to her advantage.

She continued her long running affair with Lord Malden and began new affairs with Banastre Tarleton, recently returned from fighting for the British in the American War of independence, and with Charles James Fox, the Whig MP. When the affair with Malden ended, she secured another annuity. Tarleton meanwhile ran up gambling debts and she “borrowed” money from Fox on his behalf.

But then things began to go badly for Perdita. Hearing a rumour that Tarleton had fled for the continent to escape his creditors, she set out in pursuit of him. While travelling she contracted rheumatic fever resulting in severe arthritis which gradually deprived her of the use of her legs. She was only twenty five years old. When the prince came of age Perdita should have been able to cash the twenty-thousand-pound bond, but Florizel prevaricated, eventually agreeing to an annuity of £500 in lieu – it was seldom paid. As she ran into financial difficulties, combined with lameness and some loss of her looks, the press increasingly pilloried and denigrated her.

With considerable fortitude, she reinvented herself as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Her early poems were influenced by the effusive, flowery, writings of the Della Cruscans and her early novels were gothic money spinners, but Mary was writing for money, and she was successful.

Later she moved to narrative poetry much admired by Coleridge, and the Monthly Review dubbed her “The English Sappho.” Her novels ridiculed the hypocrisy of fashionable society and incorporated political themes of inequality and discrimination. Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed them with enthusiasm.

By the time Tarleton left her, Mary had become an independent woman of letters. She corresponded with William Godwin discussing liberty and reason. Under Wollstonecraft’s influence she adopted feminist causes, critiquing women’s exclusion from parliament, double sexual standards, and prohibitions on physical exercise for women. She condemned domestic drudgery, advocating a university for women and their right to own their own property.

After her death Mary’s writing fell from fashion, yet while the early work was sentimental, the analysis of misogyny in her later work anticipates both the first and second waves of feminism. In “A Letter to the Women of England, on the injustice of mental insubordination” she elucidated the male disdain for intellectual women:

There are but three classes of women desirable associates in the eyes of men: handsome women: licentious women: and good sort of women. The first for his vanity; the second for his amusement; and the last for the arrangement of his domestic drudgery. A thinking woman does not entertain him; a learned woman does not flatter his self-love by confessing inferiority***

In her memoirs Mary presented herself as a victim of male deceit and contempt. There was some truth in this, but Garrick and Sheridan both recognised her talent, while Coleridge and Godwin accorded her respect and praise. Mary was far more than a victim: she was clever, talented, shrewd, and as capable of self-deluding sophistry as the more unattractive men in her life. And if she is remembered today more as an actress, fashion icon, and mistress, than for her writing, she herself played a key role in the spinning and promoting of her early celebrity.

Mary Robinson was only forty-three when she died of heart failure and was buried in the churchyard at Old Windsor. Only two people attended her funeral. Yet when I visited the tomb the flowers beside it indicated that, two hundred and twenty five years after her death, Perdita, Mary Robinson, still has her admirers.

Tomb of Perdita, Mary Robinson, Churchyard of SS Peter and Andrew, Old Windsor

The lettering here is clear but that on the sides of the tomb is very worn. One side bears a sonnet by her friend Samuel Jackson Pratt, and the other an epitaph which she wrote herself.

*Quoted in Paula Byrne, Perdita, the Life of Mary Robinson, Harper Collins, 2005, p.110, p.113.

**ibid. p.116

***ibid. p.170

For details of Chawton House and the exhibition on Mary Robinson see https://chawtonhouse.org

Hoppner portrait of Mary Robinson at Chawton House, the more famous Gainsborough is in the Wallace Collection.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and 164,440 other members of the GMC

By Gravedigger

On March 16, 2025

In Medics

Just in time for International Women’s Day on 8th March an article in The Guardian newspaper cited figures produced by the General Medical Council revealing that, with 164,440 women licensed to practise medicine in the United Kingdom, the number of female doctors had for the first time exceeded the number of males. Women now make up 50.04% of the nation’s doctors.

In 1865 there was only one female doctor on the medical register of the GMC: Elizabeth Garrett.

Born in 1836, Elizabeth Garrett had been educated at home and at a private boarding school for girls. She recorded her dissatisfaction with both her governess and her teachers, complaining particularly of the absence of science and maths teaching, although her sisters remembered that they received a sound grounding in literature and languages. After school and a tour abroad, Elizabeth returned home where for nine years she pursued her own studies alongside her domestic duties.

In 1859 she met Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to qualify as a medical doctor in the USA. Blackwell was in London to give a series of lectures on “Medicine as a Profession for Ladies.” In a biography of her mother Louisa Garrett Anderson describes a conversation a year later between her mother, her mother’s younger sister, Millicent Garrett, and their friend Emily Davies. She quotes Davies:

It is clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to higher education, while you (Elizabeth) open the medical profession to women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote. You are younger than we are Millie, so you must attend to that.*

The conversation may be apocryphal, but Emily Davies went on to establish and become Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge for women students, while Millicent Garrett Fawcett led the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies between 1897 and 1919.

Elizabeth Garrett faced implacable opposition from the British medical establishment, but she had several advantages on her side: she was clever and determined, she came from a wealthy family, and her father, a successful businessman in Suffolk, was unusually supportive of his daughters’ education and of their aspirations.

Unable, as a female, to enrol at a British medical school Elizabeth took up a position as a surgery nurse at Middlesex hospital. Despite protests from the male students, she was permitted to use the dissecting room and to attend chemistry lectures. With financial support from her father, she employed a tutor to mentor her in anatomy and physiology, securing certificates in those subjects along with chemistry and pharmacy.

Despite this evidence of her commitment and ability, the medical schools continued to reject her applications.

Undeterred, Garrett continued to study with private tutors and professors, and applied to the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries seeking to exploit a loophole in their charter preventing them from excluding students from their examinations on the grounds of sex. Nonetheless they did attempt to reject her application, backing down only when her father threatened to sue them. In 1865 Elizabeth Garrett obtained her licence from the Company. Though not a medical degree, the licence did qualify her to practise medicine, and her name appeared on the register of the GMC. The Worshipful Company took immediate steps to amend their regulations, disallowing anyone privately educated from sitting their examinations in the future.

Yet though she was now qualified Garrett could still not, as a woman, hold a post in any hospital. This time her father’s backing enabled her to open her own practice and a dispensary for women and children which became The New Hospital for Women and Children.

In 1870 she finally obtained a full medical degree from the faculty of medicine in Paris which was beginning to admit women.

Members of the medical patriarchy did their best to discourage other women from following her example. In 1874 the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley claimed that education for women led to over exertion which would reduce their reproductive capacity and render them liable to nervous and mental disorders.** Edward Hammond Clarke asserted that:

Higher education in women produces monstrous brains and puny bodies, abnormally active cerebration and abnormally weak digestion, flowing thought and constipated bowels.***

According to these physicians the trinity of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause rendered women frail, unstable and unsuitable for public life.

Garrett responded that the danger for women came not from education but from boredom in the home.

In 1874 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (she had married in 1871) cofounded the London School of Medicine for Women (later the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine) where she lectured. Here women were prepared for the medical degree of London University whose examinations were opened to them from 1877.

Garrett Anderson retired to her old family home Alde House, in Aldeburgh in 1902. She is buried in the family grave in the churchyard of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

Family grave of the Anderson family, SS Peter and Paul, Aldeburgh

Newton and Louisa Anderson, Elizabeth’s parents, and some of her eleven siblings are buried here

While lauding the achievements of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the other early pioneers, I had reservations about the triumphalist tone of the newspaper article: it seemed an old and long settled battle to be reviving. But days later a letter appeared in the same newspaper from an emeritus professor at St. George’s Hospital Medical School describing a study he had published with a colleague in 1985 showing that secret quotas still existed in all the London medical schools limiting the number of women admitted to study medicine. The use of discriminatory practices only ceased in the UK in 1988 as a result of this study. **** Not such an old battle then, and as Professor Collier points out, it still took forty years to achieve today’s gender balance.

*Louisa Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson:1836-1917, Faber and Faber, 1939

**Henry Maudsley, Sex in Mind and Education, Fortnightly Review, Volume 15, April 1874

***Edward Hammond Clarke, Sex and Education, 1875

****Joe Collier, Guardian letters page, 10 March 2025

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