When I sit at my work computer tapping away at emails under the screen banner reminding me of the two-year retention policy, I sometimes briefly imagine the plight of a historical researcher from 100 years hence. The facial expression is invariably glum, as this poor (imaginary) researcher sifts through the meagre offerings that escaped the GDPR blanket, in search of some piece of information that might help fill a gap in their own particular scholarly jigsaw.
Protection of privacy, desperately essential as it is, does have this downside. Fortunately, it was not the case for a historian like Patricia Neate, chronicling the life of a nineteenth-century family prolific in their letter-writing and scrupulous in their archiving. It is a skilful feat of organisation, to produce an comprehensible narrative from such a Gordian knot. Not only does Neate have to contend with a sprawling family, all with interconnected stories, but also with the issues that arise from complications such as the use of the same names across family branches and generations.
The family under the microscope here is two generations of the Macirones, a nineteenth-century family with influence in music, politics, art, the military and more. The story is fuller than for many because of the physical separation of the members for so long, and is told mainly through the viewpoints of the “loving trio” of siblings – Clara the musician, Emily the artist and George Augustus the engineer. Neate has attempted to do justice to many stories. The result is not always clear, especially given the name issue, though Neate does her sterling best to differentiate between all the Georges and Mary Anns and Claras. The family tree at the beginning of the book does get consulted frequently! But I enjoy the “messiness”; there is a realism to it that captures some of the feel of what life must have been like.
Neate’s book is as much about the epistolary relationship itself as it is about the people wielding the pens. The preface tells us the story of her access to the letters, the serendipitous discovery of the well-kept bundles in the writing desk belonging to her husband, a direct descendant, and she has kindly and generously created a website that contains every letter in her transcription. This is well worth noting, given that the letters run into the hundreds.
There are many extraordinary stories amongst the members of the Macirone family, both the public stories and the private. An account such as the swashbuckling adventures of Colonel Macirone is riveting stuff, with much of it played out in the public eye; I wish we had as much material on the much more private but just as extraordinary feats of the two women who were his concurrent wives, and who brought up families and contended with social inspection for decades, including after the colonel’s death. This emphasis on the public face of the family has its finale in the sad little obituary that Clara earned at the end of her extraordinarily full and influential musical life: “the last surviving daughter of George Macirone esq. and niece of Colonel Francis and Mrs Macirone”.
OOf course, my interest in mainly in Clara and her musical life. While several chapters are dedicated to her extraordinary musical life (see last week’s blog entry for just a taste of this), it feels as though she features less than other members of her immediate family. Perhaps this is a direct result of her enormous financial responsibilities; for so much of her young adulthood the whole family seems to have been dependent almost entirely on her income. What an enormous burden for a young woman, to have the lives of four adults and one teenager incumbent upon her. And what a tribute to Clara – and a dent in the common assumption that women were historically absent from the music scene – that she managed it. There are mentions in sister Emily’s letters of Clara not having time to write, or of Clara’s exhaustion and need for a holiday. Emily seems to have been more aware than the others of the burden on Clara, perhaps because the sisters lived together, right up until Emily’s death in 1866. Certainly, however, it easy to see how fundamental to Clara’s very being music was, and how intrinsically connected she was to the London music scene and beyond. An 1846 letter from Emily to her mother combines the recognition of Clara as a professional woman with a little insight into what made her so sought after:
“I trust that when dear Herr Pischek comes to London and Clara has a concert that she will make an effect, for she has been practising so very hard that her touch is immensely improved, and as light and pearly as possible. I am glad that we go to the country as she longs for some change of air. The expression ‘pearly touch’ is not mine but Mr Horne’s… She had scarcely played ten bars before he said to me, “How did your sister get that pearly touch of hers?””
Clara’s time at the Royal Academy of Music was a joyous one, with so much promise; it is our own incapacity to recognise the importance of everyday musical connections that colours our recognition of her musical worth. The Royal Academy of Music was there to teach productive and busy musicians, and Clara Macirone was well aware of the need for her own practical success:
“More I see, more I feel that neither Minnie nor I must, for Mamma’s sake as well as our own, lose a minute in trying to get on to be independent… Why then do we work?… To help Mamma, to give ourselves the future advantage, mental and social, of independence, the present invigorating one of labour, to give a good example, to do our duty. God help us to do that, and fame and wealth may go elsewhere for all we care.”
As a whole, the book is a wonderful window on the colourful reality of these lives. The letters themselves are liberally quoted from; all the correspondents have an adroit pen, with a surprisingly modern and ironic humour sparkling from between what was, even for the era, an at-times overly-conventional morality. There are many pictures throughout the book, many not published before, and many from the brush of Emily. Landscape and architecture also abound, well-chosen for the atmosphere they lend the book; I have always had a fascination for the experience of nineteenth-century London, the multitude of cities it was (and still is) for so many different ways of living in it. At times some of the detail seems to me to be lingered upon too much, losing my attention as letter after letter unpacks some small corner. But I am, of course, a biased reader, hungry for glimpses of my own particular heroine, seizing these and fitting them into a picture that is becoming more important and fascinating the more I learn. There will be more of Clara Macirone, in these pages, but much more importantly, on the concert platform. I’m really looking forward to getting to know her better, and this book was a fundamental inspiration for that.
A Street in Genoa bear San Mattio, Emily Macirone 1866