Henry James Senior's Mrs. Chichester

Henry James Senior's Mrs. Chichester by Jacqueline E. M. Latham, Open University In his recent study The Jameses, R. W. B. Lewis expressed the wish to know more about Mrs. Chichester (53), the woman of "rare qualities of heart and mind" (James Senior 49) who directed Henry James Senior towards Swedenborg and thus effected a cure after his Windsor vastation of 1844. Even the name of the English watering place to which his doctors sent him is unknown. Sophia Chichester was born in 1795, the third daughter of Sir Francis Ford, Member of Parliament from 1793 to 1796, and the first baronet. He was the owner of a large sugar plantation in Barbados and made a useful marriage to Mary Anson, sister of the first Viscount Anson, a rising and well connected Whig grandee . Sophia married Colonel John Palmer Chichester, as his third wife, in 1822 and thus became mistress of the Arlington Court estate near Barnstaple in Devon. When Colonel Chichester died in 1823 at the age of 54, having made a repetitious will with codicils in the two months prior to his death, his prime concern seems to have been to safeguard the future of his younger children, each of whom received over £7,000. To his young widow, Sophia, he first left the jewels and trinkets he had already given her, but then in a codicil he revoked this legacy in favor of his daughter, leaving Sophia £300 in lieu. (The elder son entered Parliament and was created baronet; the baronetcy is now extinct.) Sophia Chichester had been left £5,000 under the will of her father and there would have been a substantial marriage settlement; nevertheless the will with its absence of signs of affection makes strange reading.1 Sophia Chichester's elder sister Georgiana Ford married in 1816 Stephen John Fletcher Welch of Ebworth Park, Painswick, Gloucestershire. His will reveals that he died in Paris leaving everything to a Frenchwoman, who in fact predeceased him. We do not know when Georgiana's marriage broke down, but nearly all the published references to the sisters show them living together at Ebworth Park, an early seventeenth-century house about seven miles from Cheltenham which was in the possession of the Welch family from 1800 and by 1839 was held by trustees for Georgiana Welch. It seems possible, therefore, that the Jameses' watering place was Cheltenham, a spa town whose Regency popularity was beginThe Henry James Review 14 (1993): 132-140 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Henry James Senior's Mrs. Chichester 133 ning to decline. Cheltenham certainly fits Henry James's lyrical description ofthat English landscape, with his dream of becoming "one of those innocent and ignorant sheep pasturing upon that placid hillside, and drinking in eternal dew and freshness from nature's lavish bosom. ' ' Moreover, he tells us that the ' 'cure' ' was situated on ' 'the borders of a famous park' ' (46-8), referring perhaps to Pittville Park, recently laid out as an adjunct to the Pittville Pump Room.2 Sophia Chichester's best-known role is as friend and supporter of James Pierrepont Greaves, the mystic and "sacred socialist" who founded the Aesthetic Society at his house in Burton Street, London, and in 1838 the educational and communitarian experiment at Alcott House, Ham Common, Surrey, visited by Bronson Alcott in 1842 just after Greaves's death. Greaves had gone to Alcott House for the cold water cure just established there by Dr. von Schlemmer but his death seems to have ended that experiment (Metcalfe 43-4). Though Carlyle called Greaves a "blockhead" (338) his followers adulated him: "essentially a superior man to Coleridge" is the much quoted tribute of Francis Barham (174). It is not known how Greaves and Sophia Chichester met, but Greaves's sister, with whom he was staying in 1832, lived at Randwick, Gloucestershire, only about four miles from Painswick (Greaves xvii-xix). William Harry Harland, who had access in 1905 to Alcott House primary sources now lost, tells us that Mrs. Chichester had purchased Greaves an annuity of £100 and that Greaves—resolutely celibate—usually sent her two letters a week (Myerson 30-1). Though Sophia Chichester certainly visited...