Two traumatic events colored Dorothy Richardson’s late teens: the bankruptcy of her father in 1893 and her mother’s suicide in 1895. The first is addressed directly in Pilgrimage — as directly as Richardson ever addresses the facts of her own life, that is — and is the motivation for her taking her first job, as a teacher at Fraulein Pfaff’s school in Hanover in Pointed Roofs. The second is touched on so lightly (in Honeycomb) that readers unaware of Richardson’s own story often miss it completely.
The following account of Richardson’s life and her family’s story up through the events in Honeycomb is taken from “Dorothy M. Richardson: The Personal ‘Pilgrimage'” by Gloria Gilkin, who later wrote the still-best biography of Richardson as Gloria Fromm. It appeared in PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, in 1963.
Dorothy Miller Richardson spent her long life in two distinct landscapes. The first was that of the southern counties, the second the west coast of England. Their topography is of some significance. Miss Richardson herself said that the green and wooded south was a painter’s country, the clean-lined bare west a draughtsman’s. She enjoyed the privilege of moving from one to the other, in alternation; when forced to choose, she remained in the west, in Cornwall. Here on the Atlantic coast, she found what seemed important to her: “perpetual contrast.” This is not to say that human landscape was of less consequence to Dorothy Richardson. In her life three men may be discerned in meaningful relation to her, each an artist in his own way: first her father, later her lover, ultimately her husband.
Until she was eight, from 1873 to 1881, Dorothy Richardson lived in the southern county of Berkshire. She liked to remember this “vast garden”-setting of her early childhood. She did not record, however, the exact place of her birth. It was Abingdon, an old markettown and a small center of trade and industry. It lay in west Berkshire at the junction of the river Ock with the Thames, six miles south of Oxford. Abingdon was her father’s home, his family’s place of business. The Richardsons were “in trade.” For more than forty years Dorothy’s grandfather, Thomas Richardson, had been a grocer living in Ock Street, Abingdon. He seems to have built a substantial door-to-door business by means of horse and buggy. In 1847 he was a grocer and corn dealer, provisions and wine merchant, with a shop in Ock Street. He had a vote by virtue of a freehold elsewhere, in Stert Street. His son Charles reluctantly entered his father’s business. He gave his occupation as grocer when he married Mary Miller Taylor in East Coker, Somerset, on 18 July 1866, and could not escape “the trade” until 1874.
Industry was joined to trade in the person of Dorothy’s maternal grandfather Edward, a manufacturer. The Taylors also brought, as foil to the Richardsons’ stern Lutheranism, a frank, lighthearted, west-country strain, and the faith of the Church of England in which Charles and Mary were wed. The Somerset side contrasted physically as well. Mary Taylor was five feet tall, slight-figured and dark-haired. Charles Richardson stood an angular six feet one, with a blond pointed beard.
When Dorothy Richardson was born on 17 May 1873, her father had become a master grocer and moved from Marcham Road to a large, white- stoned house in Albert Park. So great was his desire to change his status that in spite of his prospering business he embraced the very first chance open to him to shed his heritage. His father died on 13 January 1874, leaving the shop, the freehold, and £8000. Charles rented out the Ock Street premises, retained the Stert Street freehold, and constituted himself a “gentleman.” This was the occupation he recorded when Dorothy’s younger sister, Jessie Abbot, was born on 13 October 1874. And only as such did Dorothy ever refer to him. She was to say that he sold his inheritance and “settled down to a life of leisure”. He joined the British Association for the Advancement of Science, entertained visitors from Oxford, and carried himself as a member of the gentry.
In all, there were four daughters born to Charles and Mary Richardson: the eldest, Frances Kate, on 2 August 1867; Alice Mary on 15 December 1868; then Dorothy and Jessie in 1873 and 1874. Her father’s hope that his third- born would be a boy was so tenacious that he insisted upon giving her a masculine character and referring to her as his son. The four children divided into two groups, as often happens: the older sisters remained aloof; Dorothy and Jessie were playmates.
The Richardson family lived in Albert Park, Abingdon, until 1881. Here Dorothy, a blond, chubby child, attended school and learned to read. She resisted whatever else “education” then entailed: it “went in at one ear and out at the other”, she later said. Awakening to the world around her had been more important. The knowledge gained in garden and wood, in the “child’s way of direct apprehension”, she always prized above any other. Charles Richardson usually took his family in the summer to Dawlish on the south Devon coast, and Dorothy afterward saw her earliest years as alternating between two kinds of landscape—garden and sea, the finite and the infinite.
The first break in the smooth design of home and holiday, garden and sea, occurred in 1881. Charles Richardson had speculated and suffered severe losses. He moved his family to Worthing on the Channel coast, between Bognor and Brighton in Sussex. Here they remained through 1882 at No. 6 Victoria Road, in a “hired house with alien furniture”. Dorothy tolerated the Channel sea; she disliked the village school for its competitive atmosphere; she hated the church of St. Botolph for the sound of its name. The sound of St. Helen’s in Abingdon had attracted her. Now she drew back from the “lonely ugliness” of the new word, rebelled against church attendance as she had resisted school. She described the revolt as a “first assertion” of her “mind.”
Dorothy was ten when the Richardsons left Worthing for Putney, the southwestern suburb of London in the southern county of Surrey. Now there came a turn in the family fortunes. It was apparent that Charles Richardson had found the means to establish himself in luxury. The three- story brick house at No. 4 Northumberland Avenue was brilliantly furnished, well stocked, staffed with servants. Elaborate ceremonies were laid down for every occasion as well as for the routine of daily living. There was a wide front lawn on which his older girls played croquet, a sunken back lawn for tennis—until the clubs grew popular; there were garden parties, dances, and young suitors for the daughters of a gentleman. The Richardson girls henceforth were not permitted to recognize tradespeople on the street. From his point of vantage less than six miles from London, Charles Richardson could pursue his interests freely. He went to the Stock Exchange nearly every day. As a “spectator of the doings of science” he attended lectures and meetings of the Association. As an “amateur of most of the arts”, he was often in theatre and concert hall. According to Dorothy, he might also have been found at the Constitutional Club.
One of the consequences of wealth for the younger Richardson girls was a governess during their first year in Putney. Dorothy said later that she had wanted no part of the “female education” offered: there was little knowledge in it, she felt, and nothing of value. The governess was released. In the second year Dorothy and Jessie began to attend Southwest London College, a private school for the daughters of gentlemen. It was located in Southborough House or No. 17 Putney Hill and run by Miss Harriet Sandell. Here Dorothy was given the only formal learning she was ever to esteem.
The curricula at Miss Sandell’s “ladies’ school” were, in general, standard for the period. During the next six years, Dorothy studied literature, science, mathematics, history, French, German, and scripture. Geography she did not like because it was taught without relation to anything else. She was placed instead in a newly-introduced sixth form class to learn logic and psychology, a class she “delightedly” entered twice a week. A long-lasting pleasure in music and a gift for playing the piano also developed at the College. Her instructor, Herr Froude, discovered that this blonde-haired girl with pince-nez and very large hands could read and render the music of Chopin extremely well. He was able to feature her in the annual school concerts, recognizing that she would always perform proficiently and never betray nervousness.
Dorothy grew accustomed as well to an audience in her home. Charles Richardson regularly scheduled “musical evenings” of Chopin and Wagner among the “moderns”, and Bach for a select group of friends who added their string instruments to his own violin. When she was not required to be present, Dorothy spent much of her time exercising a talent for mimicry. There did not exist a speech sound, she would later say, that she was unable to imitate. In her adolescent years she entertained ambitions for the theatrical or the concert stage. She remembered only two serious concerns in this otherwise carefree period: her mother’s “fluctuating health” and “the problem of free-will”. In most respects, suburban life was idyllic.
The idyll did not endure. The financial crisis which ruined Charles Richardson was neither sudden nor unexpected. After the first few recklessly lavish years in Putney, his position became precarious. Dorothy may have been still too young to recognize the signs which were familiar to her mother and the older girls: the short bursts of household economy, and the suspension by Charles of all London outings. In 1888, nevertheless, he journeyed to America with the British Association. The trip appears to have been his last fling. During the next two years, which ended Dorothy’s term at the College, nearly all the servants were dismissed and the already infrequent formal dinner parties ceased. The question of what the girls might do to help arose with a literal urgency. Dorothy reached a shadowed and distressing seventeenth year. This was the year with which she would choose to begin the account of her heroine’s life in Part 1 of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs.
She replied secretly to a Times advertisement for a pupil-teacher at a school in the Prussian city and province of Hanover. She was given the position and then made her announcement to the family. Under the circumstances, they were forced to consent. Escorted by her father, like her heroine, she left home and England at the beginning of 1891. She was seventeen-and-a-half, five feet four and full-figured, with long light curled hair and very fair skin. She had a single purpose: to earn her own way.
She remained for six months at the school directed by Fraulein Lily Pabst, in a natural setting of heath and mountain, woods and valleys which might have recalled that of Berkshire. Abingdon itself might have been brought to mind by the sharp contrast of Hanover’s high- gabled, peaked and red-roofed houses with its new buildings in a growing commercial section. Dorothy would always remember Germany with nostalgia. The teaching experience she would characterize as “brief and fascinating and horrible”.
When Dorothy returned home in the summer of 1891, she found the financial situation unchanged. Her sister Jessie had finished school and become engaged to a wealthy young man named Robert “Jack” Hale. Her older sister Alice was living as governess in the opulent Wiltshire home of Mr. and Mrs. John Harris. The eldest girl, Kate, had assumed the responsibility of caring for her mother, who suffered frequent periods of mental illness. Kate would also engage herself, within the next few months, to a forty-two-year-old cotton broker, John Arthur Batchelor.
Dorothy did not remain at home for long. The magic of Putney was gone, and the lure of experience strong. By October of 1891, she had been drawn to North London. During the next year and a half, she taught at Miss Ayre’s school in Finsbury Park, coming home during holidays in a state of exhaustion. The depleted household at No. 4 Northumberland Avenue matched her own drained and dragging self.
Charles Richardson managed to hold up outwardly to the end of 1893. The death of his broker at this time seemed to require an effort he could not make, and he was declared a bankrupt. There was a public auction which Dorothy did not attend, followed by an exodus from the big house to a small one in Chiswick. This had been the home of the man who was to marry Kate. He left it now expressly to provide the family with an interim rent-free residence so that Charles Richardson might have a chance to collect himself. It was situated at No. 15 Burnaby Gardens, Chiswick. The following year, in April 1895, Batchelor and Kate were married and settled nearby in Bedford Park.
Dorothy had left North London for her third and final teaching position, this time as governess to the children of an upper-class family. In June 1895 she was a bridesmaid at Jessie’s elaborate wedding. Soon after, it became evident that Mrs. Richardson’s mental state was deteriorating and that she needed close attention. The task fell on Dorothy. She left her post as governess and took her mother to Hastings in Sussex. Funds for the holiday were provided by both the sons-in-law. On the morning of 30 November 1895 Dorothy left the lodgings for an hour and returned to find her mother dead. Mary Richardson had cut her throat with a kitchen-knife. The coroner’s inquest was held on 2 December, and the suicide registered on 3 December, listing Mary as the wife of Charles— “gentleman of no occupation.” The body was brought to Chiswick for burial. She had been fifty-two. Dorothy was twenty-two.