On 2 November 1859, Mary wrote to her sister Eleanor, who was then studying in Paris with their mother, that she had a new and very different commission:
"Ever since Mary [Palliser] has been here, a week, we have spent our days in the British Museum in the Halicarnassus Room. I had to do some drawings for Mr. Newton who has been lecturing at Oxford & Cambridge on this Mausoleum & at this moment that I am writing is at Windsor showing all his plans & diagrams to the Queen & Prince - & as I had to go to the museum, Mary said she will too & draw & it taught her so much. She did a large drawing very boldly with which Mr. Newton is very pleased. He is very particular, knows a great deal, he is a very nice, rather handsome, tall & thin, with very gentlemanlike manners, almost like Lord E [Eglington]. He is going to Rome as Consul, He was Consul in Greece & discovered the site of the Mausoleum [of Halikarnassos], which was one of the seven wonders of the world at about 200 years before Christ."
This was the archaeologist and diplomat Charles Thomas Newton, who had worked at the British Museum as an assistant from 1840-52, then was appointed vice-consul to Mytilene in Lesvos (then part of the Ottoman Empire and now a Greek island). He had completed excavations on the west coast of Turkey and was back in London supervising the unpacking of artefacts from that trip before taking up his new post as Consul at Rome. He needed an artist to draw these items from Turkey for his lectures and publications. His friend George Scharf, who he had worked with previously, was too busy running the newly opened National Portrait Gallery so William S. W. Vaux, a colleague at the British Museum and close friend of the Severn family, introduced him to Mary.
It was unusual for a woman to be commissioned to draw ancient sculpture, and she needed a chaperone,
so her best friend and fellow artist Mary Palliser stepped in, as did her younger brother Arthur and occasionally the art critic and mutual friend of Mary and Charles, John Ruskin. While there, Mary and her chaperones drew a lot of lions: so many that lions haunted Mary in her dreams. She also sketched Charles 'lionising' her on the qualities of the lions, though it was work she enjoyed:
"Every fragment, everything he found is fine and I have drawn several for Mr. Newton & I feel it has done me much good. I never drew anything so large."
3 November 1859, Birkenhead Collection – Severn Family
As I have written elsewhere, in her 1944 biography Sheila Birkenhead casts Charles Thomas Newton as a kind of sardonic Mr Rochester (the romantic hero from Jane Eyre) and he certainly still has an austere reputation. Charles gave his lecture using Mary’s pictures that November at the South Kensington Museum, then went to take up his position as Consul at Rome. By this point the Severn family had got to know him so well that various family members made different pictures of Newton going to Rome. Below is Joseph Severn’s version of Charles as the poet Goethe (who Joseph had known) outside the city. They knew Charles as the ‘philosopher’ as he was much more serious than the laughing and slightly chaotic Severns.
Charles proposed marriage to Mary before he went to Rome but she could not marry him as she was the principal provider for her family (at that time, her parents and younger siblings): the house they lived in was in her name. If a woman married, everything went to her husband; a fact until the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1870. Charles would have either been responsible for all of them or they would have had no income. Mary declined and explained why, and they continued to correspond. These sketches Mary made of their long courtship and engagement show her feelings while she repeatedly reads his letters, once making a joke about her crying (an ‘illuminated MS’) and another time writing that the sketch is indecipherable because she is crying (below). N. B. in her notes, "MS" is Mary Severn and "CTN" is Charles.
Charles returned from Rome in early July 1860 to appear at a Parliamentary Committee on the future of the British Museum. It is about this time that he and Mary got engaged but had no hope of marriage until the Severn family were financially less precarious. They were clearly wrapped up in each other in the short time they had together, as Mary’s sketch of them reading and ignoring Arthur shows (below). However, Mary had lots of art commissions and her father had none. Nevertheless, Charles went to the family for an engagement dinner – according to a later account:
Mary primed her mother in advance, anxious that the family should be on its best behaviour: ‘He does not wish me to draw for money—so when you see him you ought not to speak of this—He is so gentlemanlike, so refined, that I hope you will in speaking keep your face calm, & not rattle out everything anyhow.’ (Gale)
Mary then went to stay with Charles' mother and sisters in Brewardine, near Herefordshire, from where his sister Georgina wrote this to Eliza Severn (Mary’s mother) on 28 July:
"He will make her happy. I should rather perhaps say that Mary will & he make each other happy . . . I need hardly tell you how so absolutely we sympathise with them & how great a pleasure it has been to have them stay at this beautiful time in both their lives, as well as to find that every day adds our admiration & love for her, who I trust before many months will be the happy wife of our dear brother."
There is a touching sketch of C.T.N. putting a hat on M.S. from this time (above) as well as one of Charles watching her sew a ‘passion flower’.
In these sketches Mary captures their intimate moments and feelings. She is not passive – the reference to the passion flower and her weeping over Charles’ letters captures some of that high emotion. They share reading, walking, and each other. The sketches feel intense and, personally, I love the fact that books are scattered around their feet (what else do you take with you on a date?). But soon Charles had to return to Rome and Mary to her work and family in London.
On 2 October 1860, Newton wrote from Rome to the Principal Librarian of the British Museum and his friend Antonio Panizzi that he must come to England in the spring: ‘for I cannot defer my marriage any longer, we are both quite tired of waiting now.’ In the same month Mary sketches herself crying over his letters becoming an 'illuminated manuscript'.
In January 1861, it was made official that the British Museum’s antiquities department was to be split into three under Charles Thomas Newton (Greek and Roman), William Vaux and Samuel Birch. The same month, Joseph Severn was appointed Consul to the Papal State of Rome, despite being 67 when the age of a Consul was meant to be 50 – influential friends (Ruskin, Gladstone etc) had intervened. The implication, of course, is that they intervened on behalf of the young lovers. Mary Severn and Charles Thomas Newton married on 2 May 1861 at St Michael’s Church on Chester Square, with a wedding Breakfast at the Severns’ house in Eccleston Square, after
which the younger members headed to south London to visit the Crystal Palace. The witnesses to the marriage were Mary’s brother Walter, who gave her away as Joseph was by now working in Rome, William Vaux & Charles’ sister Julia Newton. The bridesmaids were her sister Eleanor and Mary's older sister Claudia's three daughters. Both Claudia and their mother were ill and so absent.
I popped into the church a few months ago, where I explained, in the midst of several drop-in prayer meetings, that I was here to see where an artist had got married. The bemused prayer leaders let me wander around and explore. The church is in classic Victorian gothic style and dates from the 1840s. It would have been very new when Charles and Mary married there.
Charles and Mary duly set up home in Gower Street, where they also worked together. More on that in the future. . .
References:
Birkenhead Archive – Severn Family Collection
Birkenhead, Sheila, Against Oblivion. The Life of Joseph Severn (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944).
Challis, Debbie, ‘The ghosts of Mary Ann Severn Newton: Grief, an imagined life and (auto)biography’, Clare Lewis & Gabriel Moshenska (eds.), Life-writing in the History of Archaeology. Critical perspectives (London: UCL Press, 2023).
Gale, Claudia E. (unpublished notes), A Forgotten Artist (1912/13?)
Newton to Panizzi, October 2 1860, Correspondence of Sir A. Panizzi, British Museum / BL* 1862-64. Add. Mss. 36722 - thanks to Lucia Patrizio Gunning for this.