For the Pre-Raphaelites and their heirs, beauty’s pursuit was not indulgence but necessity. Their dreamy art, born out of the Industrial Revolution, was intended to counteract, even arrest, the modern world’s ugliness. For Burne-Jones’s great friend and business partner William Morris, whose Oxford Street store, Morris & Co., was the favoured emporium of the English aesthetic classes, this philosophy led him to political activism and ardent socialism. Burne-Jones was content to improve society by feeding its soul through its eyes. The provision of art to cultivate and inspire the masses was now part of civic responsibility, reflected in the large public art galleries constructed in urban centres of the industrial north.
Mary’s early childhood in Cumberland was like a Pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life. The Wyndhams lived at Cockermouth Castle, a strange, half-ruined property on the River Cocker’s banks, until 1869. Afterwards they rented Isel Hall, an Elizabethan manor a few miles away. Madeline Wyndham took her children out among the heather to draw and paint, and read aloud to them Arthurian tales. At night she sang berceuses, French lullabies learnt from her own mother, and left them to sleep, soothed by the sound of the Cocker’s rushing waters and owls hooting in the dark. She had miniature suits of armour made for George and Guy. The children played at knights and damsels with Mary dressed in her mother’s long flowing skirts.26 A portrait of eight-year-old Mary in Cumberland by the Wyndhams’ friend Val Prinsep, in the flat, chalky style characteristic of their artistic circle, shows a tall, round-eyed beautiful child. In wide straw hat and loose mustard-yellow dress, she gazes directly at the viewer, bundling in her skirts armfuls of flowers.27
One of Mary’s earliest adventures in childhood was scrambling after her father through thick heather up Skiddaw, the mountain dominating the Cumbrian skyline, with a trail of dogs in search of grouse; then sleeping overnight in a little lodge perched on the mountainside.28 In adulthood, Mary wrote lyrically of ‘the club & stag, the moss, the oak & beech fern, bog myrtle, & grass of Parnassus – Skiddaw in his splendid majesty – covered with “purple patches” (of heather) with deep greens & russet reds & swept by the shadows of the clouds – my heart leaps up – when I behold – Skiddaw – against the sky …’.29 Mary considered herself a lifelong ‘pagan’, fearlessly finding freedom in wildness. She attributed these qualities to her Cumberland childhood. She mourned ‘beloved Isel’ when the Wyndhams finally gave it up in 1876. Ever after, Cumberland was a lost Arcadia to her.
When George was born in August 1863, Lady Campbell told Percy he ‘deserved a boy for having so graciously received the girl last year!’30 In 1865 the Wyndhams had another boy, Guy. With two brothers so close to her in age, Mary was practically a boy herself. She learnt to ride on a donkey given to the children by Madeline when they were toddlers,31 was taught to hunt and hawk by her father’s valet Tommy, and was keeping up with the hounds at just nine years old, even if, on that first occasion, she told her mother ruefully, ‘I did not see the fox.’32 She kept pet rooks which she fed on live snails, and begged her mother for permission to be taken down a Cumberland coal mine by her brothers’ tutor.33 Some summers, the Wyndhams visited Madeline’s favourite sister, Emily Ellis, at her home in Hyères, the French town at the westernmost point of the Côte d’Azur, which was becoming increasingly popular with the British. There Mary scrambled willingly along the narrow tunnels of the Grotte des Fées into a cavern of stalagmites and stalactites. While the other members of her party sat and ate oranges, she caught ‘a dear dear little soft downy long eared bat’ which, she informed her mother, in her father’s absence she had installed in his dressing room: ‘all day he sleeps hung up to the ceiling by his two hind legs’.34
High spirited to the point of being uncontrollable, the children exhausted a stream of governesses. At Deal Castle in Kent, home of the Wyndhams’ friend Admiral Clanwilliam, Captain of the Cinque Ports, marine sergeants were deputed to drill the children on the ramparts to tire them out.35 Their arrival in Belgrave Square’s communal garden, clad in fishermen’s jerseys, whooping and hollering on being released from their lessons, prompted celebration among their peers and anxiety among their playmates’ parents. At least one couple instructed their governess not to let her charges play with ‘those wild Wyndham children’.36 In Mary’s stout babyhood Percy nicknamed her ‘Chang’ after a popular sensation, an 8-foot-tall Chinese who entertained visitors – for a fee – at Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall. Mary grew into a ‘strapping lass’. ‘How well and strong I was, never tired,’ she said in later life, now thin and enervated, recalling wistfully her days as a rambunctious, lanky ringleader, strongest and most daring of the three siblings. ‘I was worse than 100 boys.’37
The fairytale had a darker side. Madeline Wyndham concealed beneath her calm, loving exterior a mind seething with dread. She had a paranoid strain capable of rendering her literally insensible from anxiety. A childhood of loss – her father’s death when she was twelve, a beloved elder brother’s five years after that – during the years of the ‘Great Hunger’, the famine that, by death and emigration, diminished Ireland’s population by up to a quarter,38 had a formative effect upon her. She was intensely spiritual, mystical and religious. Her deep foreboding of fate compounded rather than diminished that faith: ‘the memory of death gave to the passing hours their supreme value for her’, said her friend Edith Olivier.39 Olivier had looked through Madeline’s vellum-bound commonplace books to find them crammed with dark thoughts. ‘All strange and terrible things are welcome, but comforts we despise,’ reads one entry.40 ‘God to her is, I think, pre-eminently the “King of Glory”,’ said Madeline’s son George in later years,41 but in Madeline’s mind glory came as much from darkness as from light.
When, during the Wyndhams’ courtship, Madeline had confessed to bleak moods, Percy simply denied them. He did not think she was permanently in ‘low spirits’, he said, advising against articulating such thoughts lest ‘the hearer should think them stronger than they are and permanently there when in reality they are not’. For Percy, anxieties that seemed all consuming at the time dissipated within ‘half an hour’, a day at most, like clouds puffed across the sky.42 In fact, Madeline’s volatile moods and her sporadic nervous collapses suggest that a strain of manic depression ran through the family – what George called the ‘special neurotic phenomena of his family’.43 The impact on her children was intense. She invested in them all her apocalyptic hopes, determined they should succeed and prove her family’s merit, convinced the world conspired to bring them down. It is telling that, despite her undoubted love for her mother, Mary described Percy as ‘one of the people – if not the one that I loved best in the world – who was unfailingly tender & who loved me more than anyone did and without whose sympathy I have never imagined life’.44
The Wyndhams’ tribe naturally split between Mary, George and Guy, the trio born in the