Anyone familiar with the two-volume Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals: Confidences of a Collector of Ceramics and Antiques (1911), edited by her son Montague Guest, will be aware that the subtitle of the present volume, Lady Charlotte Schreiber: Extraordinary Art Collector, is no exaggeration.
Charlotte’s best-known activity as a ceramics collector frames this new account, with her other collecting interests given due consideration. Her aristocratic but penurious childhood, her two marriages, her experience of London high society and roles as housebuilder, manager of ironworks, philanthropist and educator are touched on lightly here. Using unpublished material in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) National Art Library, Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, establishes the rigorous and, for the time, unusual scholarly approach that informed Charlotte’s collecting.
In the introduction, China-Hunting with Charlotte, the author plots the chronology of her subject’s ceramic collection, and over the seven chapters that follow, the “extraordinary art collector” emerges in vivid detail.
A porcelain tureen in the form of a rabbit (around 1755), one of thousands of items Charlotte donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The future Lady Charlotte Schreiber, as she is usually known, was born in 1812, the daughter of Albemarle Bertie, 9th Earl of Lindsey, who died when she was six. Four years later her mother remarried—Charlotte’s poor relationship with her stepfather was redeemed by his gift of the small diary that started her life-long practice of recording.
Quest for an education
The first chapter, A Man’s Education, traces Charlotte’s initiation into London life and society, alongside her search for the type of classical instruction that her high intellect, energy and restless curiosity demanded. There was no opposition to her quest for an education, just indifference: for every new topic she had to create her own syllabus, which was certainly the equal, even superior to that devised for her brothers. To facilitate an early interest in Orientalism, for example, Charlotte learned Arabic, Hebrew and Persian (now Farsi), revealing her superior skills as a linguist. A shy young woman, Charlotte was too clever for the conventional inanities of Victorian upper-class social life. In 1833, after a brief dalliance with the future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, she accepted the marriage proposal of the wealthy but decidedly un-aristocratic Welsh iron-master Josiah John Guest (1785-1852), 28 years her senior.
Chapter Two, A Welsh Heiress, explores Charlotte’s immersion, with Guest’s encouragement, into Welsh history and literature, her interest in the family business (she later managed the Dowlais Iron Company accounts) and the welfare of the workers and their families. In addition to conventional forms of philanthropy, including the provision of schools and housing, Charlotte would challenge another exclusively male world by translating the masterpiece of ancient Welsh literature, the Mabinogion, which was published in seven volumes between 1838 and 1845, the first edition in a modern print format.
Early days of art dealing
The publication (as noted) of Charlotte’s Journals marked her irrevocably as a woman collector of porcelain, old lace and fans. But as Chapter Three discloses, she began with a conventional focus on Old Master paintings and sculpture—her hero was the 18th-century collector, Horace Walpole. In so doing, she encountered the fascinating, competitive and fast-developing mid-19th century world of auction houses and dealers in art, antiquities and curiosities.
Charlotte was widowed in 1852, at which point she took over the running of the ironworks. Charles Schreiber (1826-84), a prize-winning fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was hired as the tutor to her eldest son Ivor. Their relationship began as an affair, followed in 1855 by marriage (with two tragic miscarriages).
Chapter Four, Our Ceramic Chasse, enters the familiar territory of Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals with their unmatched picture of 19th-century continental travel and antiques-hunting. The descriptions of lodging houses, including meals at the table d’hôte (unusual for someone of her status), the great variety of conveyances and the weather offer a fascinating picture of the Victorian tourist experience. Chapter Five, English Ceramic Art, looks at the topic of early ceramic production in England—a neglected story by the 19th century—that directed Charlotte’s collecting strategy. Her bequest to the V&A, with 1,800 items of English-ware alone, including mid-18th century Chelsea porcelain, transformed the museum’s ceramic collections into what they are today.
Eclectic
Chapter Six, Collecting History, brings her lesser-known benefaction to the British Museum, encouraged by the collector Augustus Wollaston Franks, into focus. Charlotte’s eclectic donations included Romano-British pottery, souvenir fan leaves, playing cards—an enthusiasm shared with Franks—and games.
The final chapter, My Adieu to the Collection, might have been poignant if it had not been so triumphant. Charles Schreiber’s death in 1884 prompted Charlotte’s great disbursement to the V&A and British Museum, among other institutions, in her late husband’s memory. These collections were accompanied with her own cataloguing, having long intended to share them with the public. Charlotte lived on, busy as ever, until 1895.
Lady Charlotte Schreiber needs no special pleading to be acknowledged as exceptional. Among the women collectors of her time, McCaffrey-Howarth refers to Charlotte’s friends Lady Dorothy Nevill and Lady Londonderry. Yet, in remarking that their tastes were largely for the aesthetically pleasing, this excellent book never loses sight of the ways in which its subject, as a connoisseur and historian, was indeed extraordinary.
• Lady Charlotte Schreiber: Extraordinary Art Collector, by Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth. Published 19 September by Lund Humphries, 192pp, 80 colour illustrations, £40 (hb)
