Ellen Melicent Ashburner Cobden was born on August 18, 1848, in Dunford, the family's old farmhouse near the village of Heyshott, in West Sussex.
At the end of May 1860, when Walter was born in Munich, the eleven-year-old Ellen was spending the spring in Paris. She had saved a sparrow that had fallen out of its nest in the garden. "A dear little tame thing it will eat out of my hand and perch upon my finger," she wrote a pen pal. Ellen's mother, Kate, was planning a lovely children's party with fifty or sixty guests, and was planning to take Ellen to the circus and to a picnic in an "enormous tree" with a staircase leading to a table on top. Ellen had just learned a special trick of "putting an egg in a wine bottle," and now and then her father wrote special letters just to her.
Life back in England was not so enchanting. In the most recent letter from Richard Cobden, he told his daughter that a violent storm had slammed the family estate and torn up thirty-six trees by the roots. A severe cold front destroyed most of the shrubbery on the estate, including the evergreens, and the vegetable garden would be barren come summer. The report was like a foreshadowing of the evil that had entered the world through a distant city in Germany. Ellen's future husband would soon enough cross the Channel and settle in London, where he would uproot the lives of many people, including hers.
Numerous biographies have been written about Ellen's father, Richard Cobden. He was one of twelve children, and his childhood was a desolate, harsh one. He was sent away from home at the age of ten after his father's disastrous business sense spiraled the family to ruin. Cobden's growing-up years were spent working for his uncle, a merchant in London, and attending a school in Yorkshire. This period of his life was physical and emotional torture, and in years to come Cobden could scarcely bear to speak of it.
Suffering bears the fruits of unselfishness and love in some people, and it did with him. There was nothing bitter or unkind about Richard Cobden, not even when he was battered by his most derisive detractors during his polarizing political career. His great passion was people, and he was never far from his pained memories of watching farmers, including his own father, lose everything they owned. Cobden's compassion for people gave him the mission of repealing the Corn Laws, a terrible piece of legislation that kept families poor and hungry.
The Corn Laws (corn meant grain) were enacted in 1815 when the Napoleonic Wars had left England almost in a state of famine. Bread was precious, and it was illegal for a baker to sell his loaves until after they had been out of the oven for at least twenty-four hours. If bread was stale, people weren't as likely to overeat and would "waste not and want not." The penalty for defying this law was harsh. Bakers were fined as much as five pounds and court costs. As a small boy, Richard Cobden watched the desperate come to Dunford and beg for alms or food that his own family could not afford.
Only well-off farmers and landlords profited, and they were the ones who would make sure that the price of grain remained as high in good times as it had been in bad. The landlords who wanted to keep prices inflated were the majority in Parliament, and the Corn Laws were not hard to pass. The logic was simple: Place impossibly high duties on imported foreign grains, and the supply in England stays low, the prices artificially high. The enactment of the Corn Laws was disastrous for the common worker, and riots broke out in London and other parts of the country. The laws would remain in effect until 1846, when Cobden won his fight to repeal them.
He was greatly respected at home and abroad. On his first trip to America, he was invited to stay in the White House. He gained the admiration and friendship of author Harriet Beecher Stowe after she came to visit him at Dunford in 1853 and the two of them discussed the importance of "cultivating cotton by free labour." In an essay she wrote a year later, she described him as a slender man of small stature who had "great ease of manner" and "the most frank, fascinating smile." Cobden was a peer to every powerful politician in England, including Sir Robert Peel, the father of the police force that would one day take on Cobden's future son-in-law, Jack the Ripper, and lose.
Richard Cobden was devoted to his family and became the only stability in his daughters' young lives after his only son, Richard Brooks, died at age fifteen in 1856. He was in boarding school near Heidelberg, and was healthy, mischievous, and adored. His mother had turned him into her best friend during her husband's frequent absences.
Ellen adored her big brother, too. "I send you a little curl of my hair, that you may sometimes think of one who loves you very much," she wrote him when he was off at boarding school. "You will write to me very soon and tell me how long it will be before I shall have the pleasure of seeing you." The affection was mutual and unusually sweet. "I shall bring down some presents for you," Richard wrote her in his boyish scrawl. "I will try to get you a little kitten."
Richard's letters hint at the mature, insightful, and witty man he might have become. He was a practical jokester whose April Fools' Day naughtiness included writing "kick me out of the shop" in German and giving the note to a French boy to present as a shopping list at a nearby grocery store. Yet Richard Brooks was tenderhearted enough to be concerned about a family friend's dog, who might need an "extra blanket" during the "east winds."
The boy's letters home were entertaining, and much too full of life to cause anyone to imagine that he would not grow up to be the perfect only son of his famous father. On April 3rd, Richard Brooks wrote a letter to his father from boarding school that would be his last one. He was suddenly stricken with scarlet fever and died on April 6th.
The story is made all the more tragic by an almost unforgivable blunder. The headmaster at Richard's school contacted a Cobden family friend, and each man assumed the other had wired Richard Cobden about his son's sudden death. Young Richard Brooks was already buried by the time his father got the news in a most heart-wrenching way. Cobden had just sat down to breakfast in his hotel room on Grosvenor Street in London and was going through his mail. He found the April 3rd letter from his son, and eagerly read it first. Moments later, he opened another letter that consoled him over his terrible loss. Stunned and beside himself with grief, Cobden immediately began the five-hour journey to Dunford, anguishing over how to tell his family, especially Kate. She had already lost two children and was unhealthily attached to Richard.
Cobden appeared at Dunford, ashen and drawn, and broke down as he told them what had happened. The shock was more than Kate could bear, and the loss of her beloved son took on the mythical proportions of Icarus flying into the face of the sun. After several days of denial, she fell into an almost catatonic state, sitting "like a statue, neither speaking nor seeming to hear," Cobden wrote. Hour by hour he watched his wife's hair turn white. Seven-year-old Ellen had lost her brother, and now she had lost her mother, too. Kate Cobden would outlive her husband by twelve years, but she was an emotionally stricken woman who, as her husband put it, "stumbles over [Richard's] corpse as she is passing from room to room." She could not recover from her grief and became addicted to opiates. Ellen found herself in a role too overwhelming for any young girl to play. Just as Richard Brooks had become his mother's best friend, Ellen became a replacement helpmeet for her father.
On September 21, 1864, when Ellen was fifteen, her father wrote her asking her to please look after her younger sisters. "Much will depend on your influence amp; still more on your example," he wrote. "I wished to have told you how much your Mamma amp; I looked to your good example," and he expected her to help "bring [your sisters] into a perfect state of discipline." This was an unrealistic expectation for a fifteen-year-old struggling with her own losses. Ellen was never allowed to grieve, and the burden and pain must have become almost unbearable when her father died a year later.
The very smog that helped cloak the peregrinations and violent crimes of Ellen's future husband robbed her father of his life. For years Cobden had been susceptible to respiratory infections that sent him on voyages or to the seaside or the countryside - wherever there was better air than the sooty soup of London. His last trip to London before his death was in March 1865. Ellen was sixteen and accompanied him. They stayed in a lodging house on Suffolk Street reasonably close to the House of Commons. Cobden was immediately laid up with asthma as black smoke gushed from chimneys of nearby houses, and the east wind blew the noxious air into his room.
A week later, he lay in bed praying that the winds would mercifully shift, but his asthma worsened and he developed bronchitis. Cobden sensed the end had come and made out his will. His wife and Ellen were by his bed when he died on Sunday morning, April 2, 1865, at the age of sixty-one. Ellen was the "one whose attachment to her father seems to have been a passion scarcely equaled among the daughters," said Cob-den's lifelong friend and political ally John Bright. She was the last one to let go of her father's coffin as it was lowered into the earth. She never let go of his memory or forgot what he expected of her.
Bright would later tell Cobden's official biographer, John Morley, that Cobden's "was a life of perpetual self-sacrifice… I never knew how much I loved him until I had lost him." Monday, the day after Cobden's death, Benjamin Disraeli said to members of Parliament in the House of Commons, "There is this consolation… that these great men are not altogether lost to us." Today, in the Heyshott village church there is a plaque on Cobden's family pew that reads, "In this place Richard Cob-den, who loved his fellow men, was accustomed to worship God." Despite Cobden's best intentions, he left an unstable wife to take care of four spirited daughters, and despite the many promises made by influential friends at the funeral, the "daughters of Cobden," as the press called them, were on their own.
In 1898, Jam'e reminded Ellen how "all those who professed such deep admiration and affection for [our] father during his lifetime forgot the existence of his young daughters, the youngest but 3M years old. Do you remember Gladstone at father's funeral telling mother that she might always rely on his friendship amp; her children also - The next time I met him, or spoke to him… was more than 20 years later. Such is the way of the world!"
Ellen held the family together, as she had promised her father she would. She handled the family finances while her mother moved numbly through the last few years of her unhappy life. Had it not been for Ellen's dogged cajoling and firm supervision of the family affairs, it is questionable whether bills would have been paid, young Annie would have gone to school, or that the daughters could leave their mother's house and move into a flat at 14 York Place, on Baker Street, London. Ellen's yearly stipend was 250 pounds, or at least this was what she told her mother she would need. It can be conjectured that each daughter received the same amount, insuring them a comfortable existence, as well as a vulnerability to men whose intentions may not have been sterling.
Richard Fisher was engaged to daughter Katie when Cobden died, and he rushed her into marriage before the family had stopped writing letters on mourning stationery. Over the years Fisher's greedy demands would prove a constant source of irritation to the Cobdens. In 1880, when Walter Sickert entered the lives of the Cobden daughters, Katie was married, Maggie was too spirited and frivolous to serve an ambitious, manipulative man any useful purpose, and Janie was far too savvy for Sickert to go near. He picked Ellen.
Both her parents were dead. She had no one to advise her or raise objections. I doubt that Sickert would have gained Richard Cobden's approval. Cobden was a wise and insightful man and would not have been 'fooled by Sickert's acts or enchanted by his charm. Cobden would have detested the absence of compassion in the handsome young man.
"Mrs. Sickert and all her sons were such pagans," Janie would write Ellen some twenty years later. "How sad that fate has ever brought you into their midst."
The differences between the character of Ellen's father and that of the man she would marry should have been blatantly obvious, but in Ellen's eyes the two men might have appeared to have much in common. Richard Cobden did not have an Oxford or Cambridge education and was in many ways self-taught. He loved Shakespeare, Byron, Irving, and Cooper. He was fluent in French, and as a young man he had fantasized about being a playwright. His love of the visual arts would be a lifelong affair, even if his attempts at writing for the stage were a failure. Cobden too was not adept at handling finances. He might have been savvy in business, but he had no interest in money unless he had none.
At one point in his life, his friends had to raise sufficient funds to save the family home. His financial failings were not the result of irresponsibility but were a symptom of his driving sense of mission and idealism. Cobden was not a spendthrift. He simply had loftier matters on his mind, and this may have impressed his daughter Ellen as a noble flaw rather than a blameworthy one. Perhaps it was fortuitous that in 1880, the year Sickert first met Ellen, John Morley's long-awaited two-volume biography of Cobden was published.
If Sickert read Morley's work, he could have known enough about Cobden to script a very persuasive role for himself and easily convince Ellen that he and the famous politician shared some of the same traits: a love of the theater and literature, an attachment to all things French, and a higher calling that was not about money. Sickert might even have convinced Ellen that he was an advocate of women's suffrage.
"I shall reluctantly have to support a bitches suffrage bill," Sickert would complain some thirty-five years later. "But you are to understand I shall not by this become a 'feminist.' "
Richard Cobden believed in the equality of the sexes. He treated his daughters with respect and affection - and never as witless brood mares good for nothing but marriage and childbearing. He would have applauded the political activism of his daughters as they matured. The 1880s were a time of foment for females as they formed purity and political leagues that lobbied for contraception, reforms to help the poor, and the right to vote and to have representation in Parliament. Feminists such as the Cobden daughters wanted to enjoy the same human dignity as men, and that meant quashing entertainment and vices that promoted the enslavement of women, such as prostitution and the lasciviousness of London's many music halls.
Sickert must have sensed that Ellen's life belonged to her father. There was nothing she would do to smear his name. When she and Sickert divorced, Janie's prominent publisher husband, Fisher Unwin, contacted the chief editors of London's major newspapers and requested that they print "nothing of a personal nature" in their papers. "Certainly," he insisted, "the family name should not appear." Any secret that might have hurt Richard Cobden was safe with Ellen, and we will never know how many secrets she took to her grave. For Richard Cobden, the great protector of the poor, to have a son-in-law who slaughtered the poor was inconceivable. The question may always be whether Ellen knew that Walter had a dark side "From Hell," to quote a phrase the Ripper used in several of his letters.
It is possible that at some point and on some level Ellen suspected the truth about her husband. Despite her liberal stance in regard to women's suffrage, Ellen was weak in body and spirit. Her increasingly friable fabric may have been the result of a genetic trait she shared with her mother, but Ellen might also have been damaged by the torment her well-meaning father put her through because of his own desperate needs. She could not live up to his expectations. In her own eyes, she was a failure long before she and Walter Sickert met.
It was her nature to blame herself for whatever went wrong in the Cobden family or her marriage. No matter how often Sickert betrayed her, lied to her, abandoned her, made her feel unloved or invisible, she was loyal and would do anything she could for him. His happiness and health mattered to her, even after they were divorced and he married somebody else. Emotionally and financially, Sickert bled Ellen Cobden to death.
Not long before Ellen died, she wrote Janie, "If only you knew how much I long to go to sleep for good amp; all. I have been a troublesome sister in many ways. There is a strain of waywardness in my character which has neutralized other qualities which should have helped me thru life."
Janie didn't blame Ellen. She blamed Sickert. She had formed her own silent opinion of him early on, and began to encourage Ellen to go on trips and stay at the family estate in Sussex or at the Unwins' apartment at 10 Hereford Square, in London. Janie's biting observations about Sickert would not become blatant until Ellen had finally decided to separate from him in September 1896. Then Janie forcefully spoke her mind. She was infuriated by Sickert's ability to fool other people, particularly his artist friends. They "have quite an exalted idea of his character," she wrote to Ellen on July 24, 1899, days before Ellen and Sickert's divorce was final. "They cannot know what he really is as you do."
The ever-sensible Janie tried to convince her sister of the truth. "I fear to say that W.S. will never change his conduct of life - and with no guiding principles to keep his emotional nature straight he follows every whim that takes his fancy - you have tried so often to trust him, and he has deceived you times without number." But nothing dissuaded Ellen from loving Walter Sickert and believing he would change.
Ellen was a gentle, needy woman. Her childhood letters reveal a "daddy's girl" whose entire existence was about being his daughter. Ellen politicked, said and did the right things, was always appropriate, and carried on her father's missions as much as her limited strength and courage would allow. She could not see a stray or injured animal without trying ed f W to rescue it, and even as a small child she could not bear it when the lambs
were herded away for slaughter and the mother sheep bleated plaintively in the fields. Ellen had rabbits, dogs, cats, goldfinches, parakeets, ponies, donkeys - whatever came into her kind and sensitive hands.
She deeply cared about the poor and campaigned for free trade and home rule for Ireland almost as tirelessly as Janie did. Over time, Ellen became too worn down to accompany her words with her feet. While Janie would move on to become one of the most prominent women suffragettes in Great Britain, Ellen would drift deeper into depression, illness, and fatigue. Yet in the hundreds of surviving letters Ellen wrote during her relatively short life, she does not lament the social plight of the Unfortunates her husband brought into his studios to sketch and paint. She did nothing to better the lives of those women or their pitiful children.
The suffering remnants of humanity, adult or child, were for Sickert to use or abuse as he pleased. Perhaps his wife did not want to see the music-hall stars who posed for him in the upstairs studio at 54 Broadhurst Gardens or later in Chelsea. Perhaps she could not bear to see any child or childlike person her husband may have been interested in just a bit too much. Sickert watched little girls dance in sexually provocative ways in the music halls. He met them backstage. He painted them. Much later in life, when Sickert became obsessed with the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, he asked her in a letter if she had any photographs of herself "as a child."
Ellen and Sickert would have no children. There is no real evidence Sickert ever had children, although a story has persisted that he had an illegitimate son by Madame Villain, a French fishwife he stayed with in Dieppe after his separation from Ellen. In a letter, Sickert refers to Madame Villain as a mother figure who took care of him at a low point in his life. This does not mean he did not have sex with her, assuming he could. The supposed illegitimate child's name was Maurice, and Sickert would have nothing to do with him, so the story goes. Madame Villain was said to have had many children by many different men.
In a July 20,1902, letter from Jacques-Emile Blanche to novelist Andre Gide, Blanche says that Sickert's "life more and more defies everyone… This immoralist has ended up living alone in a large house in a working class suburb so that he doesn't have to do anything regarded as normal and can do what ever he likes whenever he likes. He does this without a sou having a legitimate family in England and a fishwife in Dieppe, with a swarm of children of provenances which are not possible to count."
The medical implications of Sickert's early surgeries would suggest he was unable to father children, but without medical records all one can do is to speculate. He would not have wanted to bother with children, even if he could have fathered them, and Ellen probably wouldn't have wanted them, either. She was almost thirty-seven and he was twenty-five when, after a four-year engagement, they married at the Marylebone Registry Office on June 10, 1885. He was starting his career and did not want children, says his nephew John Lessore, and Ellen was getting a bit old to have them.
She may also have been an advocate of the Purity League, which encouraged women not to engage in intercourse. Sex was what held women back and victimized them. Ellen and Janie were both ardent feminists, and Janie had no children, either, for reasons not clear. Both women were in agreement with the Malthusians, who used Thomas Malthus's essay on population as the basis for promoting contraception - even if the Reverend Malthus himself was actually opposed to contraception.
Ellen's diaries and correspondence reveal an intelligent, socially sophisticated, decent woman who was idealistic about love. She was also very careful. Or someone was. Over the thirty-four years she knew and loved Walter Sickert, she mentions him very few times. Janie mentions him more often, but not with the frequency one might expect from a thoughtful woman who should have cared about her sister's spouse. Gaps in the some four hundred existing letters and notes the sisters wrote to each other suggest that much of their correspondence has vanished. I found only thirty-some letters from 1880 to 1889, which is puzzling. During this decade Ellen got engaged to Sickert and they were married.
I found not a single allusion to Ellen's wedding, and based on the list of witnesses on the marriage certificate, no one in her family or Sickert's was present at the Registry Office, a very odd place for a first marriage in those days, especially when the bride was the daughter of Richard Cobden. There does not appear to be a single letter from Ellen when she was on her honeymoon in Europe, and in no archival source did I discover correspondence between Ellen and Sickert or between Ellen and Sickert's family or between Sickert and his family or between Sickert and the Cobden family.
If such letters existed, possibly they were destroyed or have been kept out of public circulation. I find it strange that a husband and wife apparently did not write or telegraph each other when they were apart, which was more often than not. I find it significant that the legacy-minded Ellen apparently did not preserve letters from Sickert when she believed in his genius and that he was destined to become an important artist.
"I know how good it is," Ellen writes of Sickert's art. "I have always known," she wrote Blanche.
By 1881, the young, beautiful, blue-eyed Walter had attached himself to a woman whose yearly stipend was as much as 250 pounds - more than what some young physicians earned then. There was no reason why Sickert shouldn't enroll in the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. The 1881 Slade syllabus indicates courses strong in the sciences: antique and life classes, etching, sculpture, archaeology, perspective, chemistry of materials used in painting, and anatomy. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there were lectures that focused on "the bones, joints and muscles."
During Sickert's time at the Slade he became friendly with Whistler, but how they actually met is hazy. One story is that Sickert and Whistler were in the audience at the Lyceum while Ellen Terry was performing. During the curtain call, Sickert hurled roses weighted with lead onto the stage and the fragrant missile almost hit Henry Irving, who was not amused. Whistler's infamous "ha ha!" could be heard in the crowd. As the audience was filing out, Whistler made a point of meeting the audacious young man.
Other accounts suggest that Sickert "ran into" Whistler somewhere or followed him into a shop or met him at a party or through the Cobden daughters. Sickert was never accused of being shy or reticent about whatever it was he wanted at the moment. Whistler supposedly persuaded Sickert to stop wasting his time with art school and come to work in a real studio with him. The young man left the Slade School and became Whistler's apprentice. He worked side by side with the Master, but what his days with Ellen were like is a blank.
Available references to the early years of Ellen and Walter's marriage do not indicate an attraction to each other or the slightest fragrant scent of romance. In Jacques-Emile Blanche's memoirs, he refers to Ellen as so much older than Sickert that she "might have been taken for his elder sister." He thought the couple were well matched "intellectually" and observed that they allowed each other "perfect freedom." During visits to Blanche in Dieppe, Sickert paid little attention to Ellen, but would disappear in the narrow streets and courtyards, and into his rented "mysterious rooms in harbour quarters, sheds from which all were excluded."
The divorce decree cites that Sickert was guilty of "adultery coupled with desertion for the space of 2 years 6c upwards without reasonable excuse." Yet it was really Ellen who eventually refused to live with Sickert. And there is no evidence he had even one sexual transgression. Ellen's divorce petition states that Sickert deserted her on September 29, 1896, and that on or about April 21, 1898, he committed adultery with a woman whose name was "unknown" to Ellen. This alleged tryst supposedly occurred at the Midland Grand Hotel in London. Then, on May 4, 1899, Sickert supposedly committed adultery again with a woman whose name also was "unknown" to Ellen.
Various biographers explain that the reason the couple separated on September 29th is that on this day Sickert admitted to Ellen that he wasn't faithful to her and never had been. If so, it would appear that his affairs - assuming he had more than the two mentioned in the divorce decree - were with "unknown" women. Nothing I have read would indicate that he was amorous toward women or given to inappropriate touching or invitations - even if he did use vulgar language. Fellow artist Nina Hamnett, a notorious bohemian who rarely turned down liquor or sex, writes in her autobiography that Sickert would walk her home when she was drunk; she stayed with him in France. The kiss-and-tell Nina says not a word about Sickert ever so much as flirting with her.
Ellen may really have believed Sickert was a womanizer, or her claims may have been something of a red herring if the humiliating truth was that they never consummated their marriage. In the late nineteenth century, a woman had no legal grounds to leave her husband unless he was unfaithful and cruel or deserted her. She and Sickert agreed to these claims. He did not fight her. One would assume she knew about his damaged penis, but it is possible the brotherly and sisterly couple never undressed around each other or attempted sex.
During their divorce proceedings, Ellen wrote that Sickert promised if she would "give him one more chance he [would] be a different man, that I am the only person he has ever really cared for - that he has no longer those relations with [unknown]." Ellen's lawyer, she wrote, felt certain Sickert was "sincere - but that taking into consideration his previous life - amp; judging as far as he could of his character from his face amp; manner he does not believe he is capable of keeping any resolve that he made, and his deliberate advice to me is to go on with the divorce.
"I am dreadfully upset amp;t have hardly done anything but cry ever since," Ellen wrote Janie. "I see how far from dead is my affection for him."