Book contents
8 - Julia Margaret Cameron’s Railway Station Exhibition : A Private Gallery in the Public Sphere
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
On 11 November 1871, Julia Margaret Cameron mounted a gallery of eleven photographs in the waiting room of Brockenhurst railway station to commemorate a reunion with her son Hardinge, who was on leave from his Civil Service position in Ceylon. In England, railways knitted together the nation's identity, while in Britain's colonies, they promoted economic growth and reinforced governmental control. Cameron's gallery was timely in depicting men who supported the expansion of the Service by reforming its selection process to encourage broad participation, a reflection of her own support for the colonial mission. By displaying photographs at Brockenhurst Junction, Cameron symbolically joined Britain's colonial periphery to its imperial center and united national pride and good government in the public sphere.
Keywords: British Civil Service, railway station exhibition, private gallery, Victorian public sphere, colonial Ceylon, Julia Margaret Cameron
Introduction
I thought that artists were such jolly people – always dressing up and hiring coaches and going for picnics and drinking champagne and eating oysters and kissing each other and – well, behaving like the Rossettis.
‒ Virginia Woolf, Freshwater: A Comedy (1923).Lampooning the stereotype of the eccentric Victorian artist in her play, Freshwater: A Comedy , Virginia Woolf drew upon anecdotes of the cultured society associated with Little Holland House, the London home of Thoby and Sara Prinsep, Julia Margaret Cameron's sister. In 1859, when Cameron moved to Freshwater, a village on the Isle of Wight, to join Alfred Tennyson and his family, the small town became a new cultural destination for the artistic elite. Cameron, the woman whom Virginia Woolf called her “Aunt Julia,” seemed to personify the conceits of an artist's passionate, unpredictable personality, and although she feigned gentle mockery, Woolf clearly admired Cameron's buoyant disposition, endless energy, and single-minded activity, particularly in relation to her creative pursuit of photography. In the words of Anne Thackeray, who lived briefly with the Camerons in Freshwater during the 1860s following her famous father's death, Mrs. Cameron was “generous, unconventional, loyal and unexpected.”
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- Information
- The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces1750–1918, pp. 209 - 240Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021