Читать книгу Little Wonder - Sasha Abramsky - Страница 7

Chapter 1

A Family Obsession

Photograph of the young Lottie Dod with friends and family at a local sporting event. Lottie Dod with signature cricket cap standing in the center of the back row. ©AELTC. Reproduced by kind permission of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.

For Joseph Dod, son of William and Mary Ann Heart Dod, the decades after the midcentury—a time when the English empire’s expansion seemed limitless, and the ability of England’s business class to generate wealth unstoppable—had been good ones.

Joseph was born in Bebington on April 25, 1830, into a large family. Nineteen years separated him from his oldest brother, Henry; and thirteen from his favorite brother, Edward. All told there were ten children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. Their parents, each of whom could trace their Cheshire lineage back generations, were middle aged by 1830, having both been born in 1790, just months after the epoch-shaking events of the French Revolution of 1789. William, the son of a butcher, had gone into the wool drapery business in Liverpool shortly after the Napoleonic Wars ended; and by 1827, with a home on Castle Street, in the center of town, he was wealthy enough to list himself as a gentleman.[1] Over the coming decades, he would acquire much property in the growing city, including a number of cotton warehouses, one of which was a large site on the east side of Cheapside, which he had acquired in 1844.[2]

When the Dods died—William in the summer of 1857, at his son Thomas’s house in Lower Bebington, Mary in 1860—they would be buried in the county they had spent their lifetimes in, in St. Hilary Churchyard, in the little town of Wallasey on the mouth of the river Mersey.[3] By the 1860s, their son Joseph, having invested well the considerable inheritance he had come into upon William’s death, was firmly established in the cotton business as a broker and a financier.

Before the American Civil War, cotton had poured into the kingdom from the southern slave states—up from a mere handful of bales in 1784, shortly after the end of the American War of Independence, to 128,000 bales on the eve of the 1812 war, to two and a half million bales in the years leading up to the Civil War.[4] Ships traversed the Atlantic, bringing the millions of pounds in weight of raw cotton that would make the fortune of merchants and factory owners in the English Midlands. And the port city of Liverpool, which had been central to the transatlantic slave trade in centuries past, became, by the last years of the eighteenth century, the epicenter of this business. A growing number of warehouses were clustered within a few minutes’ walk of the large Cotton Exchange Building, opened in 1808, out of which the brokers did their business.[5] By the early 1840s, these merchants were organized into the Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association and the Liverpool Cotton Association; and they were playing a leading role within the Anti–Corn Law League as free trade exponents in the fierce political debates that roiled England during those early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.[6]

As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace in Britain, cotton came to be a crucially important raw product, its conversion into clothing and other textiles providing employment to huge numbers of newly urbanized workers in the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire, just east of the English border with Wales. Manchester teemed with textile factories; Liverpool with cotton distributers.

“The cotton master,” wrote the historian Anthony Howe in 1984, “personified the new force of ‘industry.’”[7] They were brash young men, chasers of fortune, and unafraid of being seen as the new rich in a class-conscious, aristocratic society. They wore labels—originally thrown their way as pejoratives by members of the older moneyed classes they were displacing—like “cotton lords” and “cottonocracy” as badges of honor, and in the 1850s and 1860s acquired huge fortunes. In Howe’s analysis of more than three hundred Lancashire cotton masters, he found that the average value of the estates they left at death was 126,000 pounds, the equivalent of many millions of pounds today.

During the American Civil War, Lancashire’s cotton barons came increasingly to rely on lower-grade produce from India. That they were able to do so was a testament to their foresight: in the 1850s, as America’s domestic situation deteriorated, the Cotton Supply Association had lobbied for increased infrastructure investments and land reforms in the territories of the British Raj, so as to promote, as an alternative source, the growing of cotton there. The strategy worked well enough to keep the British textile industry alive—but not enough to keep it functioning at prewar levels. For factory workers in Lancashire, 1861 to 1865 were known as the “Cotton Famine” years, times of underemployment and hunger. Yet for the few hundred men, Dod among them, who controlled the cotton supply chains through the Liverpool market, the famine was more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. They had, for years now, been spreading their investments, moving into banking in Liverpool and nearby Manchester, setting up department stores, taking positions in the newly important rubber industry.

After the war ended, American cotton again flowed copiously into England, factory technologies increased productivity by leaps and bounds, and the elite merchants of Liverpool found that they had more money than they knew what to do with.

Joseph Dod navigated these market shifts well. He imported cotton and sold it to the mills that were fueling the growth of Lancashire’s cities, and he used some of his profits to go into banking in Liverpool, which netted him still more money. During the American Civil War, as he diversified his business he also began importing large quantities of Canadian seed oat, which he advertised for sale in local newspapers.[8]

By the time he married Margaret Aspinall, ten years his junior, on Thursday, September 11, 1862, in a ceremony presided over by the elderly Reverend A. Knox[9] at St. Mary’s Church in Birkenhead, Joseph, still only in his early thirties, was an extremely wealthy man.[10] Like so many of his cotton-broker peers, in addition to investing well he began spending some of that money on luxurious living conditions. The cotton lords, Anthony Howe wrote, largely abandoned the political field in those years, foregoing the agitation of the Anti–Corn Law decade early in Victoria’s reign, when they had made their mark as impassioned free traders, and instead “succumbed to the discovery of Europe, the hunt, yachting, London society, fishing and shooting in Scotland, and mock country-house life.” Howe wrote of “elaborate dinners, capacious wine cellars, plentiful servants, extensive travel abroad,” of a preoccupation with cricket, billiards, and other fashionable sports.[11]

Joseph and Margaret Dod seemed determined to live up to this image. They moved into a sprawling Cheshire county estate, which they named Edgeworth House, a few miles outside of Liverpool and near the home of Joseph’s brother Thomas. The name Edgeworth, according to family legend, was chosen as an homage to one of Joseph’s ancestors, Sir Anthony Dod of Edge, an English archer who performed heroically during the fabled battle of Agincourt against the French in 1415 and was knighted on the field of victory by Henry V that very evening.[12]

Edgeworth’s buildings were Gothic brick with stone entranceways, the rooms heated by ornate stone fireplaces that vented through high, thin chimneys, the grounds spacious enough for large outdoor social gatherings and an array of sports facilities. The floors were wooden, the noise muffled by thick, patterned rugs. In one corner of the dining room—a space cluttered with heavy upholstered chairs, high-backed wooden seats, and china vases, with ornately carved tables draped with thick tablecloths, and Romanesque statues—was a small organ. On the wall to the right of the organ, the young couple hung two small oil paintings: one of little sailboats in an ocean, the other delineating the fierce waves of the sea crashing against a wooded shore.[13] Over the years, as the family grew, the mantelpiece above the fireplace would come to host several framed photographic portraits of individual family members, as well as one featuring two of the children standing next to each other; a small clock; and several additional vases.

In 1863, Joseph and Margaret’s first child, a girl whom they named Ann, was born. Four more children followed over the next nine years: William, Anthony, Charlotte—likely named after the dead wife of Joseph’s older brother Edward, a woman who had died in 1860 at the age of only thirty-seven—and Philip. The latter, born a year after Charlotte, would die in infancy in the late spring of 1873; the rest would grow up in Edgeworth House, taught from a young age to engage heartily with the world of sports that Joseph and Margaret held in such regard.

Well-to-do Victorians had, in recent decades, become increasingly obsessed with physical exercise. Some had installed portable gymnasiums in their homes, in which they did a series of exercises intended to limber up leg muscles, expand chests, and strengthen aching backs.[14] Others, modifying exercise regimens encountered by colonial soldiers in India, began swinging bottle-shaped wooden “Indian clubs” in a set of calisthenic exercises that looked something like a combination of weight lifting and the swinging of batons by latter-day cheerleaders.[15] From the 1860s on, a number of exercise machines patented by doctors in Sweden, the German states, and elsewhere began being imported into Britain. Weight lifting became popularized, for women as well as men. And over the coming decades, gymnastics, acrobatics, rope climbing, and the use of rowing machines to strengthen one’s abs would all become widely accepted parts of the fitness craze for health-conscious Victorians.[16] By the century’s end, wealthy young people were competing in a rash of new sports, both individual and team-based.

The four young Dods learned to shoot rifles and arrows, to run, to swim, to play an array of ball games—from cricket and billiards to the new fad of lawn tennis.

William would notch up considerable success as both an archer and a big game hunter—in which capacity, on a transatlantic ship taking him on one of his overseas trips, he met the great poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling, who reportedly asked him about the odd spelling of his last name, and then muttered grumpily that he guessed “if it was good enough for God, it’s good enough for Dod.”[17] Ann would thrive as a tennis and billiards player. Anthony, who as a young man spent months roaming around Europe with Lottie on bicycle, and climbing mountains with her in Switzerland and Norway, would eventually carve out a niche as a highly skilled chess player, able to hold his own with the world’s best. In 1889, he was the Liverpool Chess Club champion, a position he ceded to William three years later; to commemorate their wins, both brothers were presented with a huge silver trophy plate resting in a bed of red velvet, depicting an ancient Greek scene of a half-naked woman lounging in a temple, surrounded by three female courtiers. So good did Anthony become at the game that he would eventually be able to blindfold himself and play multiple games simultaneously, his photographic memory enabling him to keep perfect track of what was happening on each board.[18] Lottie . . . well, Lottie would be quite simply the greatest sportswoman of her, maybe of any, era.

* * *

Shortly after Major Wingfield patented his lawn tennis gear and published his pamphlet laying down the key rules of the new game, Joseph ordered some of the kits from Wingfield’s agent and had them installed on Edgeworth’s grassy grounds just to the east of the house.[19] He would, in all likelihood, have hired gardeners to closely crop the lawn, using the efficient mowing machines developed by the Gloucestershire tinkerer Edwin Budding in the 1830s. He would have presided over the laying of the canvas lines delineating the courts, the hammering of poles into the ground on which to attach the nets. He would have ordered boxes of the new sport’s felt balls with a vulcanized rubber core. By now, Dod was fashioning himself as a man of leisure. When, in 1877, he was summoned to sit on a local grand jury, several of his fellow jurors labeled themselves brokers—of cotton, of metal, of timber; Joseph, by contrast, along with half a dozen of the other more well-to-do jury members, insisted that “gentleman” be listed next to his name.[20] He was, in his midforties, a man defined by his wealth and the accoutrements that accompanied financial good fortune.

Perhaps, like so many other country estates of the time, those newly repurposed gardens in the Dods’ Edgeworth home had previously boasted croquet lawns; perhaps, too, when the croquet fad dissipated in the early 1870s, the lawns remained vacant, waiting for the next craze to come along and claim them.

There were at the time many candidates to fit that bill. For hundreds of years, royals had played a game of “tennis” that involved bats, hard balls, and indoor courts with high nets and various eaves for the ball to carom off. In the walls of the courts were holes, situated at various strategic points, for the ball to be batted into. It was in some ways a precursor to more modern racket games and also to such sports as basketball and lacrosse. More recently, a series of outdoor variants on the game had been tried out—some played one-against-one, others involving teams of up to twelve people, with the object of getting the ball down long outdoor fields. A sports genealogist could trace a family tree for tennis that encompasses everything from the modern sports of badminton, squash, and lawn tennis, through to a series of evolutionary dead ends that fizzled out somewhere in the nineteenth century.

Wingfield, however, had luck and considerable self-promotional skills on his side. When he rolled out his new idea for a sport in 1874, he gave it two names. The first was “lawn tennis,” the second “sphairistike.” Classically educated, he couldn’t resist the ancient Greek reference. The awkward name didn’t stick; but the game itself did. Aided by an extraordinarily effective public relations campaign—Wingfield used his army contacts to secure enthusiastic articles about his invention in various military journals, daily papers, society magazines, and sports periodicals—the fad took off like wildfire. Within months of Wingfield having been granted his patent, it was a sensation, something that a great many society people wanted in on.

The Dod children, boys and girls alike, homeschooled by a series of governesses and tutors, were given free rein to play on the newly installed courts whenever they liked. They were also expected to help out in cutting, rolling, and marking those courts, fenced off from the surrounding trees and scrubs, in putting up and taking down the nets each day, and in cleaning the tennis balls, at the end of a day’s use, on the doormats to the house.[21] Ann and young Lottie, perhaps four or five years old when tennis arrived at Edgeworth, took to the game especially well. It would hardly be a stretch to say that the younger girl in particular grew up on those courts, that from both of their early childhoods Lottie Dod and tennis were inextricably linked together. When she wasn’t playing on the courts she would go off to one of the corners of the estate and hit a ball against a wall again and again and again, harder and harder and harder, honing her reflexes as the ball bounced back at her fast and low.[22]

* * *

But then tragedy struck the Dod family. On November 30, 1879, when Lottie was only eight years old, Joseph died. A brief death notice was published in the Liverpool Mercury two days later, with details of the funeral arrangements and the hint that “friends will accept this intimation.”[23] He was interred, at eleven o’clock on the morning of December 3, in a family vault in Bebington Cemetery, in the same place his infant son Philip was buried, and where Margaret’s father, John Aspinall, and Margaret herself would ultimately be laid to rest.[24]

After her husband’s death, Margaret seems to have viewed Edgeworth as a world unto itself. Within its boundaries she felt in control, able to be the elegant hostess, the graceful, well-provided-for widow. In his will, handwritten in black ink, his neat script leaning slightly to the right, Joseph had left the house and its furnishings, its paintings and most of his book collection, to his wife. The exception was some of his father’s books, which he bequeathed to his brother Thomas.

Despite the fact that in the 1860s and 1870s the Dods had splurged on fine living and elaborate sports grounds, Joseph had also been careful to nurture his finances. He was, perhaps, cognizant of the Dod family crest and motto: a serpent wrapped around a wheat sheaf, underneath which was the Latin phrase In Copia Cautus, which translates to “In Plenty Be Cautious.” In other words, don’t tempt fate by overspending.[25] Now, Joseph’s widow and children were to reap the benefits of his financial good sense. In addition to the house and its contents, his will had established an annuity of two hundred pounds to be given to Margaret, so long as she didn’t remarry, for the rest of her life. He had also authorized two additional payments each year of two hundred pounds from the proceeds of the auctioning off of parts of his estate. He had provided for all four of his children equally, their money to be invested, until they reached the age of maturity, in government bonds, property, and what were seen as safe industries such as railways and canal construction, both in England and abroad. While they were minors, the estate would cover their education and other expenses. Once they reached adulthood, what was left of the money would be released to them—and Joseph specified that in the case of his daughters, that wealth would transfer directly to them rather than to any husbands they might acquire along the way. Beyond these specific details, as well as a few minor bequests to local hospitals and to a handful of other relatives, the additional elements of Joseph’s estate, presented to the local court a few months after his death by his executors, totaled up to just under eight thousand pounds. That was the equivalent of nearly one million pounds in today’s currency.[26]

With no incentive to remarry, the wealthy widow lived with her four children, a young housemaid named Harriet Jane Picton, originally from Liverpool, and a live-in cook named Jane Jones. They played their role of leisured country gentry well. On the grounds of their large estate, the Dods kept brown shorthorn cows, some of which they would periodically offer up for sale, the ads posted in local newspapers.[27]

Relatives would stop by to talk and to play; on Joseph’s side of the family alone, Lottie and her siblings had twenty-six first and second cousins, many of whom lived within a few miles of Edgeworth. Friends, including the teenage Joshua Pim, who would go on to become a medical doctor, and also a two-time Wimbledon champion shortly after Lottie retired from the game, would come to spend weekends at the house. They arrived early in the afternoon on bicycles or in pony traps,[28] riding up the graveled, tree-lined drive to the stone steps leading to the entrance to the house; they came to play tennis and billiards and all the other sports that had come to define the estate. For a couple of hours the hosts and their visitors would exercise, and then all the young people would sit down in the dining room to eat scones lathered with thick Cornish cream, delivered by the milkman the previous evening, and a variety of country jams. Margaret would pour dark-brown tea for the guests, and, according to the writer Gwen Robyns, who spoke to Lottie late in her life about those long-gone days, the crowd “talked of nothing but tennis and the forthcoming county championship. They were not pat-ball parties. Tennis was a serious matter. And at the end of the day, fortified by home-made lemonade for the girls and beer for the boys, everyone went home.”[29]

Outside, however, the world increasingly appeared to Margaret to be a frightening, unpredictable place, one that she had an obligation to protect her four surviving children from experiencing.

Increasingly controlling as she aged, the widow Margaret insisted her children be homeschooled, rather than going off to school and university.

For Ann and Lottie, Margaret and Joseph’s choosing to educate them via privately hired governesses, and Margaret’s carrying on with this practice after her husband’s death, would have been a fairly ordinary decision. After all, into the second half of the nineteenth century, up to 40 percent of women in England remained illiterate and unschooled—not until the 1880 Elementary Education Act was it made mandatory for children of both sexes aged from five to ten to attend schools; and for the upper classes, while a few girls’ boarding schools, such as the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, had opened in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, no widespread system of quality schooling for girls yet existed. Thus, for those who wanted their daughters to be schooled in the classics, to learn music and art, and to engage intellectually with the broader world, tutors remained the easiest option.[30] But for the boys, there were myriad choices outside of the home. Most towns had private education establishments, either secular or church-based, and around the country there was a network of elite boarding schools catering to families with the sorts of resources that the Dods now had. That William and Anthony were tutored at Edgeworth spoke more to the preferences of their parents, to the extraordinarily close-knit nature of the family, than to any innate need for homeschooling.

As the 1880s got underway, the Dod children, with their mother hovering in the background, were something of a world unto themselves. They were a sporting equivalent of the Mitfords a generation later, that obsessive, self-enclosed family, each sibling of which would go on to make their mark in the world of politics or literature; or perhaps of the Durrells, homeschooled in islands around the Mediterranean, one of the siblings going on to become a top novelist, another a brilliant naturalist. In sports, the Dod children were free to go their own way; in matters of love and life, however, Margaret’s presence was inescapable. She wanted, her grandchildren surmised decades later in conversations with the writer Jeffrey Pearson, to always be in control.

Later, when Ann, William, Tony, and Lottie had finished their education, Margaret made it emotionally difficult for them, as young adults, to leave the family home, to fledge from the Edgeworth nest. In the late 1880s, family legend had it, she wouldn’t give her blessing for twenty-six-year-old Ann’s wedding to Ernest Worssam, an already well-established brewer and manager with the Whitbread beer company. The couple eloped instead; afterward, for months on end, Ann wrote near-daily letters to her mother asking forgiveness. The envelopes were all returned unopened, discovered by her family, after her death from cancer nearly forty years later, when they went through her possessions. Surviving portrait photographs of Margaret show a stern-looking woman, her posture ramrod straight, her floral-patterned dark dress buttoned up all the way to her chin. The Dod matron’s hair is pulled up into a severe bun under her ornate, lacy hat; her mouth is turned down slightly at the edges. In the one family photograph that Lottie Dod pasted into her album, a photo with Margaret, the four children, and a family friend named R.O. Rawlins, the matriarch is looking down, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the cameraman. In none of the surviving sepia images does Margaret look like a woman who wore life lightly; in none of them is there even the hint of a smile.

* * *

The Dod materfamilias made it clear that it would be socially unacceptable for her children to work for a living—which family lore had it was why, as the century wound down, neither William nor Tony were willing to make money off of their manifest skills as photographers and wood-carvers. It simply wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to do to profit off of such gifts. Thus, as their cousins went off into the world to become civil engineers, architects, and dentists—to go into business as manufacturers of chemicals, timber merchants, accountants, and estate agents—the four Dod siblings, each one sitting on a comfortable inheritance from Joseph, were left to find ways to fill their time in rural Cheshire.[31]

Given the constraints placed on how they could live their lives, the obsession with sports that all four embraced may well have been the only way the children could escape their mother’s control. Margaret expected her grown children to stay with her in Edgeworth House, only begrudgingly letting them explore beyond Cheshire’s somewhat claustrophobic confines.

Ann seems to have done what she could to make her environs lighter. She turned her room into an art studio; filled its bookshelves with dozens of heavy tomes piled somewhat haphazardly; brought in a display case in which she housed small vases, statuettes, and flowers; and hung a huge Japanese paper fan above it. She covered her floor with intricately woven rugs, and crowded the room with a cream-colored armchair, with tables stacked with hand-painted plates, and with numerous family photos. Around the top of the walls, she painted a line of birds—geese, ducks, and several other species. And underneath these she hung her own paintings, including a seashore scene and a close-up of an old man pouring water from a jug into a glass.[32] But, when she wasn’t in her art studio, she still had to make her way through daily life under Margaret’s close watch.

When Ann began taking her younger sister out on the road to play tennis tournaments from the early 1880s on, it may well have been a reaction to the cloistered environment that Margaret was imposing at Edgeworth, largely an excuse for the children to get some fresh air. If that was the case, for the sporting world it was a fortuitous decision. By the summer of 1883, the young girl, beating out much older competitors in tournaments in Dublin, in northern England, and elsewhere, had already been noticed by a number of sports journalists. After all, none of them had ever seen an eleven-year-old, the age Lottie was that spring when she first won matches at the Northern championships, so comprehensively beating her grown opponents in a sporting contest.

For the Dod brothers, William and Anthony, as well, tennis was an escape hatch. Both began entering tournaments in northern England, sometimes in singles, other times playing doubles together; and both began racking up respectable, if not spectacular, records. At times, it seemed, the entire family was tennis obsessed. Tony, a thin, somewhat sickly-looking adolescent, in a well-tailored bespoke wool suit, posed for formal photographs with his racket resting nattily just off to his side. When Margaret’s father, John Aspinall, an elderly man with a long white beard, his shoulders slightly stooped, his hands clasped behind his back as he walked, traveled with his grandchildren to the nearby castle at Normanston—a mid-Victorian folly designed to look like a medieval fortress—they made a point to take a photograph of him on the tennis courts with William.

* * *

In the summer of 1885, still only thirteen years of age, Lottie won a tournament at Waterloo. Then, heading north, she competed again in the prestigious Northern championships in Manchester, an event that attracted all the top women in the game. She got to the final, where she gave the reigning Wimbledon champion, Maud Watson, a considerable scare before eventually losing 8–6, 7–5. The following year, however, in the ancient Roman city of Bath, Dod got her revenge, with a straight-sets 7–5, 6–4 victory over Watson in the finals. It was the first time since 1881 that any player had beaten her in a singles match.[33] “Miss Dod is wonderful with her returns and promises exceedingly well for the future, only now being thirteen years old,” a writer on the scene opined, getting her age wrong by a year.[34] Another wrote that the fourteen-year-old returned all of Watson’s shots “with such force and judgement that her opponent was fairly run off her legs.” The crowd left restraint to one side. They cheered the young girl wildly, giddy with the promise and poise she brought to the game.

That same summer, all four Dod siblings showed up for the Northern championships. In the ladies’ singles, Lottie got to the championship match before succumbing to Maud Watson, 7–5, 6–3. In the ladies’ doubles, Ann and Lottie demolished their opponents to take a well-earned victory. In the mixed doubles, Lottie partnered with Harry Grove, and made it all the way to the championship match before losing to the indefatigable William Renshaw—already a multiple Wimbledon champion—and his partner, Miss M. Bracewell. Finally, in the men’s doubles, William and Anthony paired up; they didn’t win, but they did make it to the final of the consolation tournament, a parallel event for teams knocked out in the early rounds of the main draw.[35] It is doubtful that any set of four siblings was ever before, or since, so successful in a single major tennis tournament.

With Wimbledon and all the other prestige tournaments now open to women, the sports commentators of the day felt that it was only a matter of time before the teenage sensation Lottie Dod made her mark in them too. “As to the destination of the Ladies’ Challenge Cup, there is, on present appearances, little scope for conjecture,” a Pastime writer opined in mid-1887. “Everything points to the success of Miss Lottie Dod, whose recent career victory has been quite unchecked, and to whom the coming years promise an increase of strength and speed, as well as of skill and experience.”[36]

By now, Lottie knew her own worth, knew that she was destined for sporting greatness. She bought a dull-red scrapbook with thick, cream-colored pages. In it, she began carefully gluing every article sent her way on her and her siblings’ sporting accomplishments. She also took a heavy black leather photo album, given to her by the family friend R.O. Rawlins, a dapper-looking man with a mustache waxed to two fine points,[37] and dedicated it to tennis. On the inside of the front cover, she titled it Rambles with a Racket from Edgeworth. The two words beginning with R were lined up one above the other, with a single large R sufficing for both words. The stem of the capitalized letter was carefully penned by the young girl to look like a wooden net post, with the interior of the letter, as well as the surrounding space on the page, a series of grid-like lines meant to resemble the edge of a tennis net. Over the coming years, she would glue into that album dozens of photos, ranging from intimate family scenes with her siblings and friends on the fenced courts at Edgeworth, to images immortalizing her greatest public triumphs. She would also, as her successes mounted, jealously hoard her trophies and championship cups, filling her room in Edgeworth with so many of them that a visitor once noted it had become a “perfect storehouse” for her prizes.[38]

* * *

The year 1887 was a crowded one. For literature buffs, it would come to be defined by the writer Arthur Conan Doyle publishing, in the November release of the magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual, the novel A Study in Scarlet, which introduced his inspired creation, one Sherlock Holmes, and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, to the reading public.

But while Sherlock Holmes’s debut would prove to be a sensation, by far the biggest event of that year was the queen’s jubilee celebration. As the months of 1887 rolled toward June 20, the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria’s ascension to the throne, so the British Isles were decked out in an extraordinary display of gilded pageantry. After all, in the long history of the kingdom, only three prior monarchs had ruled for fifty years or more—and in each of those previous instances the celebrations had been somewhat muted: Henry III marked fifty years as king during a time of civil strife and hunger, after years of unsuccessful wars in France, and decades of simmering rebellion and discontent at home; Edward III’s reign had been scarred by devastating plague epidemics; and George III, by 1810, had lost the American colonies, lost his mind, and ruled over a kingdom that had spent much of the previous twenty years, and huge amounts of economic capital, fighting the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1887, by contrast, England was at the height of its powers, its imperial reach spanning the globe, its wealth massively amplified by the Industrial Revolution. Victoria, crowned empress of India by order of Parliament eleven years earlier, was far and away the most recognized public figure on earth.

That spring and summer, in the months surrounding the actual anniversary of Victoria’s becoming queen, the shops of London were filled with jubilee paraphernalia—commemorative pottery pieces, medals, books rushed into print to honor every aspect of the empress-queen’s life. Periodicals and magazines published special issues. Poets from across the empire wrote celebratory odes, often sycophantic in tone. Hymns specially composed for the occasion were sung in churches throughout the land. And from the awnings of pubs and shops hung flags and bunting, as well as images of the long-reigning queen.

As the anniversary date neared, a sort of fever-pitch hysteria, an unreflective glorifying in empire, descended on London. While there were scattered political protests, notably by those calling for Irish independence, by and large the atmosphere was pure boosterism. Flags and anthems. Pomp and circumstance. Every day brought new celebrations, each one outdoing the next. There were soirees at Buckingham Palace with dozens of European monarchs, princes, and princesses sitting in attendance. There were gatherings in Hyde Park, in which tens of thousands of schoolchildren were given meat pies, sweet buns, and oranges in honor of the queen. There were military parades. New hospitals were opened. In May, Victoria even attended a special performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.[39] She was, reportedly, enchanted.

From the town of St. John, in Canada’s New Brunswick province, the poet William Peters Dole sent the words of his “Carmen Acadium: Ode for the Jubilee Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria.” “Now let glad song arise and pious prayer, / Let merry feast and grave solemnity / Shew to the world a mighty nation’s jubilee.” Dole extolled the virtues of the globe-encompassing empire, uncritically positing Britannia’s role in the world as being to bring enlightenment to troubled, backward lands—lands that now stretched from the “Orient” to the “sacred Ganges” and the “Abode of Snow,” all the way to “Africa’s dark coasts, / Where slavery and horrid heathen rites / From age to age have trod man to the ground.”[40]

On June 21, with royalty and political luminaries gathered from around the world to pay tribute to Victoria, the aging sovereign was conveyed to Westminster Abbey in an open landau, the four-wheel carriage—the wheels painted a vivid red, the body of the vehicle black—drawn through central London by six large horses from the royal stables. She was guarded on her journey by an escort of turbaned Indian cavalry and British guardsmen, some sporting red uniforms and plumed hats, others dark-blue uniforms. Some reports from the day mention seventeen princes, from Russia, Britain, Prussia, and elsewhere, among the mounted bodyguard.

Slowly they proceeded from the palace, through Trafalgar Square and on to Westminster Abbey. Red, white, and blue bunting, the colors of the Union Jack, hung from all the public buildings and surrounded Trafalgar Square’s famous lions. Under shop awnings, dotted around the square, and atop the roofs of the grand stone buildings, the museums and churches and offices that had been erected around the periphery of Nelson’s Column, countless thousands of Londoners stood and cheered.[41] Victoria sat on the rear bench of the landau, looking forward, her two younger consorts facing her from the opposite bench. As the procession moved at a snail’s pace through the throngs, the portly figure stared ahead, calmly, regally, taking in the hullabaloo.

Inside Westminster Abbey, ten thousand invited guests awaited Queen Victoria’s arrival. The high priests of the Anglican church stood to one side of the altar, all wearing their ceremonial robes, some deep reds, others a lush hue of gold. Opposite them, the women in flowing gowns, the men in full military regalia, stood invited royalty, including the Hawaiian queen, Kapi‘olani, and her sister-in-law Lilii‘uokalani; the Belgian queen, Marie Henrietta; and Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Beyond them, arrayed down the more than thirty thousand square feet of the abbey’s interior, thousands upon thousands of guests stood in rapt attention as Victoria entered the echoing, cavernous church, its stone columns soaring more than two hundred feet into the air above. On the second and third floors, from the galleries ranged around the nave and over the aisles that snaked between the ancient columns, thousands more leaned forward to see the spectacle below.[42]

That evening, after the religious services held in Westminster Abbey and around the country had concluded, great bonfires blazed in celebration from hilltops around the British Isles. Photos from the time show large oxen, their torsos wrapped in Union Jack cloths, being led to huge pits, there to be slaughtered, roasted over the spit, and eaten in village-wide festivities. Elsewhere, huge “royal barons of beef,” weighing close to two hundred pounds and carried in on litters by upward of ten liveried servers, were dished up in town halls and manor houses to gathered local elites, the platters ornamented with Union Jacks. Plum pudding and great crates of cider were distributed to the less affluent townsfolk outside.[43]

In the days following the jubilee, London’s celebrations continued unabated. The Guildhall held a ball, at which were served up aspics of lobster and eels, pies, roast meats, pastries, meringues, and copious amounts of alcohol.[44] In the capital city’s great public parks, patriotically themed Punch-and-Judy shows, marionettes, and other spectacles entertained the huge crowds.[45]

* * *

Eleven days after Victoria’s jubilee, that summer’s Wimbledon championships commenced. Dod was coming off a hat trick, having won the Irish championships, Bath, and the Northern championships earlier in the season. She was by now the undisputed number one in women’s tennis. Flush with victory, she headed to the grounds at Worple Road.

In addition to the eponymous strawberries and cream of Wimbledon, vendors at the event were also likely selling cherries jubilee, a newly popular dessert of pitted bing cherries cooked in syrup and then, tableside, flambéed in brandy, offered up atop a vanilla ice. The concoction had been crafted by a leading French chef of the era to honor the queen and her well-known love for cherry dishes, and that summer it was all the rage in London.

When Dod took to the court, wearing a pleated skirt, layered on the outside with a polo-necked “overdress,” a sprig of white heather pinned to her bodice for good luck, she exuded both a steely purpose and a devastating pose. Her eyes were blue gray; she was tall and muscular; and she gave off a “coolness and presence of mind” that made it “almost impossible” for her opponents to “disconcert or un-nerve her.”[46]

It was a hot Monday afternoon, perhaps slightly humid. The clouds that would later in the evening roll in to take the edge off of the heat were still far off.[47] Dod stood just inside of the baseline, waiting to receive serve, her eyes supremely focused on her opponent. Behind her hovered a small ball boy in a suit and bowler hat,[48] and the umpire sat high in a chair adjacent to the net. The court, to a modern eye, would have looked narrow, for there weren’t doubles lines back then. By default, each court was singles only, and when doubles matches were to be played, extra lines were added in—the benefits of Wingfield’s patented portable system, the canvas lines easy to fold up and put away after each match, fully on display.

Ranged around the teenager were hundreds of spectators, many of the women standing close to the court under white parasols, the men in top hats, some of the younger boys in bowlers.[49] They were kept back from trespassing too close by knee-level ropes that separated spectators from players. Above and behind these front-row observers rose the newly constructed stands, holding perhaps upward of one thousand more cheering fans. As occurred at so many of the tournaments Dod had entered over the past few years, locals in nearby houses were leaning out of upper story windows, hoping to get a glimpse of the unfolding drama.

In the first few years of the championships, there had been twelve courts in a three-by-four grid. A handful of the spectators were lucky enough to get tiered bench seats under the one awning, emblazoned with a large decal for the tennis-kit manufacturer F.H. Ayres.[50] Most, however, simply sat or stood around the perimeter of the grounds, at court level, trying to get nearest to whichever match held their fancy. In 1881, two of those courts had been combined to create a larger central locale on which the most high-profile matches were played. It became known, informally, as Centre Court, and the name stuck. Over the next several years, three stands were constructed around that court; at first temporary, ramshackle affairs, little more than canopies and a few tiers of seats; then more permanent structures. In 1886, the year before Dod made her debut, the three stands, with their canopy roofs held up by metal posts, had been joined together at the corners. It was a squat affair—the surrounding trees towered over the stands—giving little indication of the templelike quality that the Centre Court stadium would come to embody over the coming decades. But it did at least provide some measure of shade and comfort for the tennis enthusiasts who were, in increasing numbers, flocking to Wimbledon each year.[51]

From that very first match, it was clear that Wimbledon had a new star at hand. Using a wooden racket, the head of which flattened out at the top—a racket that weighed a little under a pound,[52] its handle wrapped in a strip of tightly bound brown leather—she played a raw, powerful game. Seemingly, she took pleasure in blasting her opponents out of contention. The tennis correspondent for Pastime, surprised by the teenager’s ferocity, informed readers that Dod had “fully convinced us that none of the ladies now playing can hope to dispossess her of her position without completely altering their style of play.” The crowd loved it. Much as large sports audiences today chant the names of their heroes and heroines, so back in the 1880s they did the same for the new star of Wimbledon. “Lot-tie! Lot-tie!” they shouted out, slowly, rhythmically, as she skewered her hapless opponents.[53]

* * *

A year later, Dod cemented her reputation by successfully defending her Wimbledon title. Once again, she routed her nearest rival, Blanche Bingley Hillyard. Once more, the newspapers waxed rhapsodic about her abilities. “Nothing but praise can be written. She appears to improve at every successive meeting at which she competes,” Pastime purred. “Her play on Saturday was far superior to any previously shown by a lady. Her forehand stroke across the court is, for pace and length, almost unapproachable, even among the men players.”[54]

Dod’s meteoric rise, and the coverage the newspapers and magazines of the late 1880s accorded it, was tapping into a powerful new force in late Victorian society. Sports culture had taken off with a vengeance in that decade in both Britain and the United States. The new individual and team sports of the age, from tennis to football, from cycling to baseball, were all capable of furnishing new mass-culture heroes for the rapidly changing and urbanizing era. For women, sports, along with the adventurous pastime of travel writing, afforded an escape from at least some of the strictures of Victorian life. Take, for example, the New York World reporter Nellie Bly, the globe-trotting young American who had so famously beaten Phileas Fogg’s fictive eighty days for circumnavigating the globe. Or Freya Stark, the young Englishwoman who began traveling to some of the most far-flung places on earth and chronicling her adventures in a series of well-received books. Or consider the accolades accorded the American sharpshooter Annie Oakley.

In the Victorian world, women were hemmed in (literally) in terms of what they could do . . . except in those odd instances when they weren’t. Someone like Lottie Dod, improbable as her achievements were, captured the late Victorian imagination as surely as did the exploits of Nellie Bly. Such women were allowed to be transgressive, to do what were thought of as men’s jobs, to accomplish what were thought of as inherently male achievements. And, in so doing, in resonating so deeply with the public’s imagination, they helped shatter the stereotypes of what women were and what they could and couldn’t do.

Dod was by now the object of something approaching fan adoration. After her second Wimbledon victory, the New York World had a special correspondent in London write up a glowing portrait of the champion and her fans. Titled “The Girls Go See Champion Lottie Dod and Get Points on Style,” it reported that “it is quite a fad with society girls to go in parties to see Lottie Dod play tennis. A London girl asked her the other day the secret of her success. ‘Well,’ said the pretty championess, ‘I never lose my head in a game, and experience has taught me never to lose my temper. I think tennis a capital game to teach a girl self-control.’” Rich American girls in London on their grand European tours would corner Dod at garden parties and beg her to visit them across the sea.[55]

That same year, an anonymous scribe, writing under the pseudonym of Thomas Moore, wrote a satirical poem on the inability of Scottish lasses to defeat Dod on the tennis court:

Weep Weep Hibernia,

Let thy tears

Bedew the verdant sod.

For vanished are thy

hopes and fears

Before Miss Lottie Dod!

Miss Martin—had you

Played as well

As we have seen you play,

Another tale we had to tell,

Than must be told today.

But who can face that skating sling

That sends the ball like bird-on-wing

And drives it to the very spot

Where, at the moment, ye are not. [56]