A kind tyrant

Apart from its size, perhaps, there’s nothing much about the house to distinguish it from its neighbours — one of the countless, vaguely Gothic, Victorian seaside villas that fringe the coast of the Isle of Wight. Even its name, Dimbola Lodge, seems like that of a respectable boarding house, which, indeed, was what it became in the 1920s after its days of glory passed. But, like the house itself, the name has an exotic background, for it was the title of the Cameron family’s estate in Ceylon. And in the 1860s and 1870s Dimbola Lodge was home to as brilliant a circle — social, literary, scientific — as any in that immensely confident period.

Julia Margaret Cameron was the youngest of five Pattle sisters, the only one without the blessing of beauty and elegance. She was rather squat, with a swarthy, heavy face; she dressed in strong colours and smelt slightly of the chemicals that brought her fame as a photographer. But her overwhelming personality — exasperating, loveable, generous, imperious, impetuous — made up for the lack of conventional good looks.

In 1860 she and her husband Charles Cameron set up home in the village of Freshwater to be near her hero Tennyson. Julia Margaret Cameron, ‘the greatest portrait photographer of the 19th century’, stumbled accidentally into her art. In 1863 her daughter gave her a camera to fill the time while her husband was absent in Ceylon. Her distinguished guests became her prey — under protest. Years later she admitted to Tennyson, ‘I bullied you — but worshipped you.’

But it was not only the great who experienced the torture of sitting, cramped, for minutes on end before her lens. Children were drawn in, too. One of her child victims recalled in later life her technique for capturing subjects: ‘Mrs Cameron was neither mysterious nor awe-inspiring, but just a kind, exacting tyrant.