From Dorothy Richardson: A Biography, by Gloria Fromm. Champaign-Urbana, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1977.
The house on Northumberland Avenue was frankly luxurious. It was brilliantly furnished and stocked, fully staffed with servants, and supervised down to the smallest detail by the great magician who had waved his wand and made it all appear. Not even the most trusted maid could touch a bottle of wine in Charles Richardson’s cellar. On dinner-party days, he alone “tenderly” carried the choicest of his store upstairs. On other days he would serve the vin ordinaire from his “cellaret” in the dining-room sideboard. And in the breakfast-room sideboard—“for emergencies, including spells of frost,” as Dorothy remembered—he kept decanters of spirits, each with a silver label hung by a chain round its neck. Dorothy remembered all these as religiously as her father had arranged them. After sixty years she would claim she could still see his “sacred bottle of green Chartreuse warming itself on the pale-blue-tile hearth in front of the polished brass bars of the drawing-room fire.” Nor did she ever forget the other enormous fire, the one that always burned—even in the stifling heat of summer—to roast their meat. And, of course, there were the heavy trays the servants carried up the stone stairs, trays filled with hot plates, dish cover, huge joint, everything the meticulous master required.
Everything indeed was just as it should have been in the home of a gentleman. The Richardson girls grew up with all the privileges of a cultivated family life and a wealthy (some thought it a vulgar) suburb. Their father soon established a fixed pattern of “musical evenings” for a select group of friends, who added their various stringed instruments to his own violin. The music included Bach, of course, and, as the only moderns he accepted, Chopin and Wagner. His older daughters managed to prevail upon him, and he allowed some sentimental ballads and even a bit of light instrumental music as well; but he absolutely refused to admit either popular songs or dance music. These, in addition to Gilbert and Sullivan, were relegated to the schoolroom. Occasionally he took the girls to concerts in London, and every Sunday, as he was proud to point out, they had the music of the service in their new, splendid All Saints’ Church on Putney Lower Common. Dorothy approved of both the music and the church without a single qualification. She loved its “opulent” name and looked forward all through the week to the litany intoned by old Mr. Booker and to the organ playing by young Harry Dansey. Putney was truly a magical place.
… Dorothy would remember herself as perfectly ordinary in a typical suburban world. She was short-tempered and brusque at home, even with Jessie, but among her peers she was a little less pugnacious. She arrived at the age of sixteen with only two serious concerns: her mother’s “fluctuating health,” as she put it, and “the problem of free-will.” Otherwise her thoughts were centered on the tall and handsome son of a neighboring family, on an approaching dance, or on the annual tennis tournament. On occasion, to be sure, the unexpected might occur, such as the purchase of the house next door by a family that owned a shop in Putney. The Richardson girls, who had been instructed by their father long before not to recognize tradespeople in the street, shared his sense of outrage. What were they to do now, with tradespeople actually living next door? But before the problem could be solved, a genuine crisis arose.
Dorothy and Jessie began to notice signs of change. Their older sisters looked troubled, not to speak of their mother, and their father gave fewer and fewer dinner parties. He continued to go into London nearly every day. (As they understood it, he went to the Stock Exchange to keep an eye on his investments and to confer with his broker, to drop in at the Junior Constitutional, or to stop off for a game at the chess club.) But he began coming home for the evening instead of staying in town for the theater or a concert. He still attended all the lectures and meetings of the Association, but he gave up the outings and the trips. In 1888, when Dorothy was fifteen, he had gone with the Association to America. That trip might well have been his last fling. During the two years that followed, the signs of trouble grew more and more pronounced, until finally, in 1890, during Dorothy’s last term at school, they were impossible to ignore. Nearly all the servants were gone, and the four Richardson girls conferred gravely. But what, in 1890, could a mere young female do?
In private Dorothy looked through the work advertisements in the Times. She found one that seemed plausible and answered it without telling even Jessie what she had done. The advertisement called for a pupil-teacher in a school in Prussian Hanover (now a part of northern Germany). Dorothy thought that, if she were expected to study as well as teach, her youth would act in her favor. She had reasoned cogently; she was offered the job. She mailed off her letter of acceptance at once. Only then did she make her announcement to the family. No one was pleased, least of all her father, but under the circumstances there was nothing anyone could say or do—as Dorothy had known. Having gotten her way, she set about preparing to leave her home and family. She was seventeen and a half, five feet four inches tall, and full-figured, with long, light, curled hair and very fair skin. She wanted, above everything, to direct her own life.