A life in my hands

by Anne Sebba, Weekend FT Magazine, 29th / 30th July 2006

Anne Sebba, biographer of Churchill’s mother, revels in a piece of personal treasure

Ask any writer. Every so often in the course of research one is made an irresistible offer. It’s the price one pays for information. That's what happened to me while researching the life of Winston Churchill's American mother, Jennie Jerome. And I didn’t hesitate for a second.

A Churchill scholar in America, more interested in the man than his mother, revealed to me during our interview that he owned a complete set of ten beautiful leather-bound volumes known as The Anglo-Saxon Review, a quarterly miscellany once the talk of London Society. The Review, founded and edited by the then widow of Lord Randolph Churchill, ran from June 1899 until September 1901 when Jennie decided she could continue no longer with the loss-making journal. If I wanted them, all I had to do in exchange was... send him some books available only in this country. The deal was easily struck.

Several months later ‘my’ books arrived back in their homeland. For weeks, I kept opening these dusty volumes with their gilded edges, high quality paper and hand-blocked covers, each one a facsimile of a famous medieval binding, and landing at random upon some obscure essay, poem or short story within. Many of the pieces are by authors who toiled in the late Victorian literary heartland but whose names have long been forgotten such as Pearl Craigie who contributed a whole play. When Mrs Craigie spurned George Moore, “a man who told but never kissed,” he spread malicious gossip about her and her friend, Jennie Churchill.
Why are these volumes so exciting? I had already seen Jennie’s original set, now owned by a descendant, and I could consult others any time at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. So I must own up to my frankly base possessive instincts. I have become a collector. I am exhibiting traits I have read of in others; touching, feeling and seeing an object gives me, the owner, a frisson no amount of consulting the same volume in a library could offer. My thrill at owning these books derives from the fact that I am currently writing the biography of their creator. I can indulge myself at leisure with the insights they offer into my subject. Owning a relic of one’s subject is a need to which many biographers succumb. As I have become obsessive about Jennie, wondering how she might react in any situation, owning something she created seems to bring me a heartbeat closer.

One year after launching the magazine Jennie, a widow, married the handsome but feckless George Cornwallis-West, 20 years her junior. She had hoped the venture would make them some money. Randolph had died in 1895 leaving her with a debilitating mixture of debts and dashed hopes. Such income as she had, derived from a property in Manhattan once owned by her father, the financier Leonard Jerome. But it was nowhere near enough to fund her famously extravagant lifestyle. Jennie, 46, set off for her honeymoon with George carrying two baskets of papers: one containing outstanding bills she hoped her new husband might pay, the other, editorial contributions to the next issue of her magazine.

Winston, then a young subaltern, wanted to be involved and advised his mother throughout. He was especially horrified at her suggestion of a subtitle; “Blood is Thicker than Water,” which Jennie wanted to play up the transatlantic connection. In 1900 he called this a cheap imperialist jibe. By 1941 he realised the usefulness of such emphasis.

Jennie had a small private army of friends - politicians, aristocrats and writers - she called upon to write for the Review including the Duchess of Devonshire, Henry James and Lord Rosebery in the first issue.

As an editor, Jennie was scatterbrained but charming. For example, an exchange with Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, indicates not only that her hectic social life made editing the review all but impossible but that she paid far more than she could afford for contributions because, like everything she bought, she wanted the Review to be of high quality to ensure its longevity.
I, too, want my books to last and so have had them gently preserved. They’d have fallen apart otherwise. I have also had a beautiful oak Arts and Crafts book trough made to hold them. Just as Jennie envisaged, the books have survived and that’s appropriate as she was one of life’s great survivors. The bookplate on the front endpaper of each volume, a drawing of a trawler, declares the volumes Ex Libris Grimsby Public Library, over-stamped withdrawn; such ephemera, I believe, adds to the history and the value.

Catty friends of Jennie commented that the price - a guinea - made each issue prohibitive, others that Jennie fancied herself as a literary lady or lost interest because of her marriage to George. But hers was a genuinely creative spirit and she used it in the Anglo-Saxon Review to brilliant – if not financial - effect. The volumes provide a clearly focused snapshot of an elite society on the cusp of change before the Edwardian era began. For me, her latest biographer, they reveal a woman of high ambition and forgivable flaws.