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Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, "Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector" (Lund Humphries, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [01:07]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
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- [01:26]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth about her book titled Lady Charlotte Extraordinary Art Collector, published by lund Humphreys in 2025, which pretty much does exactly what the book, what the title suggests. We're going to be talking about a particular woman and, and the really intensive, intensively interesting, intensively interested way that she went about learning about art, collecting art, telling people about art, contributing to wider knowledge about art. She really was doing quite a lot of things. And of course this is especially interesting because she was doing this in Victorian Britain when collecting was definitely a thing. Talking about art, learning about it, telling other people about it, very much a thing, not so much for women at that point. So she was notable at her time and hopefully through our discussion we'll get to revive a little bit of what was so interesting about her life and her work. So, Caroline, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:36]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Thanks so much for having Me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and then tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm an art historian and a curator and currently a senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. And before that I was curator of ceramics and glass, 17th to 18th century at the Victorian Albert Museum in London. So the V and A. Several years ago, while I was a curator, I was actually in charge of Lady Charlotte's collection of almost 2,000 objects that she gave to the museum 140 years ago this autumn. And being in charge of that collection, I really sort of started to think about not only what the objects were, but also the person behind the objects. So many times, I think when we walk in into a museum today, we see all around us names so often kind of linked to men. And one of the things I was really keen to really unpick with Charlotte is her life biography, but also her motivations for collecting, for giving this huge collection to the museum in the 1880s, which was, you know, very unprecedented for a woman at that time. So, really, I had this incredible lucky position. I was in charge of her objects, I was custodian of her collection. And I thought, right, well, how do we best tell these stories? Stories? And this is really what led me to the book originally.
- [04:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a pretty cool end point for one to get to of. I have this massive collection. I'm going to give it to the va. I mean, that's really quite something. And that collection is still there and is still a really big deal. So obviously we want to know how we got to that point. So, starting from the beginning, can you tell us a bit about Charlotte's background and early years? Was she always interested in art? Was she educated about it? Yes.
- [04:24]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
So she's a really interesting person in many ways because when you read her initial biography, she very much has a traditional upbringing as an elite English aristocratic woman. So she is the daughter of the 9th Earl of Lindsey. She grows up in this very kind of typical English country house in Uffington in Lincolnshire. And I think originally, you think, right, well, she is just doing this very traditional kind of way of living life. But what was, for me, I think one of the key kind of draws for someone like Charlotte is that every single day from the age of 10, she starts writing a diary. She actually writes this almost every day until in her late 70s, sadly, she goes blind. And through those diary entries, she calls them her journal of sentiment. You really get this sense of who she was as A person, her real sense of individuality, slight awkwardness, almost curiosity about the world. And really through that you get to know this person who was desperate to break free from the kind of traditional archetype of the English elite. Aristocratic woman, you know, growing up in the early 19th century, spending most of her life as an adult in the Victorian era. So as a child she is very much impacted by the death of her father when she's only six years old. So the ninth heir, Love Lindsay, dies. He is this very respected figure at the time. He's also a collector, he's very interested in art and history. And I think she really feels the loss of his death. And that is then sort of coupled with the fact that her mother chooses to remarry and she remarries essentially below her station. She marries a reverend, someone called Mr. Pegas, and actually for their entire acquaintance, Charlotte and Pegas, that is how they speak to each other. He is always Mr. Pegus to her. They never really form a good relationship. He unfortunately becomes increasingly abusive throughout her childhood. And one of the kind of key things behind that is that he really believes that women should be effectively seen and not heard and not have anything else. So he makes sure that her brothers get tutors and governors and things like this and go to school. But she will have none of this when actually she's this incredible polymath and incredibly intelligent as well. So she says at one point very early on that, right, well, it's up to her. And she says that she'll give herself a man's education and that's essentially what she does. So she learns all kind of typical subjects of history, literature, anything she can really, about geography. She does what she calls her Oriental studies, where she's learning Arabic and Persian as well as the more traditional languages like French and German and Latin and Greek. I mean, so she really takes this upon herself to learn as much as she can about the world, but particularly about art. So she starts to teach herself particular kind of artistic techniques. She learns how to do copper etched engraving. She travels with her mother to artist studios within London. She is collecting prints, you know, she's drawing every single chance she can get when she's not learning her Arabic grammar or thinking about history. So we get this real sense from her diaries that the world is out there for her to learn as much as she can about it, despite the sort of more strict gendered kind of context that she's currently living within. So she actually ends up getting a very good education, but she's creating that very Much for herself at this point, despite her stepfather, effectively.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
As much as we maybe don't see her, like, being hugely interested in the specific kinds of arts she goes on to collect later. At this point, the drive is there, right? The interest is there. The wanting to make things happen and not just waiting around for them to be handed to her is very clearly there from this point. And so having read this part of the book, I wasn't particularly surprised to sort of turn the page and go, oh, yeah, she continues, as she gets older, to go after sort of what she wants. I was, however, a little bit surprised to read that one of the places she ends up is on a Welsh archaeological dig that did seem sort of very much a push from this origin story you've just told us about. So how does she get there?
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Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Oh, yeah. So, I mean, I think one of the brilliant things about Charlotte is you just get this absolute sense of. Of vivacity for life, really. And very kind of early on, as a teenager, there are some sort of scandals abounding, essentially surrounding her. So she falls in love with a local squire and that, you know, the family are completely shocked by this. Her mother says she would rather see her in the grave and dead rather than married to him. So that's called off. A couple of years later, she has a sort of tantalizing affair with one of her brother's tutors. At some point, she's courting Disraeli and roaming around London with him, going to the opera and seeing exhibitions at Somerset House. So she has this kind of, you know, very active, sort of Bridgerton esque love life in her late teens, mid to late teens. But by the time she settles down for her first marriage, there is a real kind of sense, very much driven by the stepfather, that she needs to marry well. They are financially not very stable. And she is essentially sent to London several times to, you know, go on the marriage market, find her husband. And she manages in the end to actually find someone very much, you know, very, I think, a sympathetic soul to her as well. And that is a Welsh man. He is called Sir Josiah John Guest, or typically known as John Guest. He was a Whig politician. He owned a huge iron industry in Wales. He was one of the wealthiest people in Britain at this time. One of the kind of great writers of the day said of their marriage that he was looking for blue blood and she was looking for money. So they were pretty happy when it all worked out. And I think they really were. They were actually very much in love. They end up having 10 children, which is just crazy to even think about 10 children alongside everything else that she's doing. But one of the key things is that he's Welsh and she's an English aristocrat, and he's one of the key leading people within Wales at this point in the mid 19th century, or sort of 1830s onwards, where Wales is really trying to reconfigure, rediscover its heritage, to really have a sense of pride in its medieval history in particular, and to really encourage, for example, the use of Welsh to be spoken and read and understood across all social classes, not just the working classes, which is what it had been up until this point. So she jumps into this new world basically as much as you would kind of expect from what we've already heard about her. So she learns Welsh. She also starts to learn medieval Welsh. She wants to. To read everything she can about Welsh history and literature and folklore and myth. And one of the key things that she does very early on in the marriage is she actually starts doing archaeological digs of local Welsh castles. So, you know, within the first few weeks of their marriage, when a sort of typical woman at that time would be, I don't know, in this era, settling down, thinking about children, getting to know kind of the locals and, you know, figuring out how to be a wife, she actually has found someone that lets her be herself and she suddenly has the freedom to do what she wants to do. And in this case, it's history. So she goes to a place called Morlas Castle, which is in Glamorgan. It's a sort of quite isolated castle. It was used very much as a stronghold in the 14th century during the Welsh Revolt, and it was destroyed by King Edward I at that point in the late 13th, early 14th century. And it is this ruin, essentially. It's only really kind of got sort of a vaulted chamber and a bit of a cylindrical keep that's still there. And she decides that she is going to do this archaeological excavation of this Welsh ruin. I mean, even just to think that at this point, but she does it. She has her husband help her get workers from the iron kind of factory to come and help dig out things with her. At one point, she moves a sofa there so they can all have breaks and sit down in between the dig. You know, it's kind of fascinating to think about. And it's because of her that she manages to kind of clear out the passageway into the vaulted basement in the southeast tower. And whilst they're doing this excavation, they're also finding numerous pieces of medieval Material culture, in particular metal seals, but also 12th and 13th century old coins. And, of course, that really gives us a sense of her antiquarian interest at this point. Of course, people within Britain were very interested in Greco Roman antiquity at this moment, but there was also this growing shift towards a more kind of national antiquarian tradition. Things like. Like Stonehenge, for example, there was great kind of local archaeological investigations taking place in more regional spaces, particularly in Wales, in Scotland and in Ireland. So she's jumping into something which is starting to exist, but at this point is absolutely not a space that women were typically involved in. So we see her jump into the ruins of the castle and kind of really embrace everything she can about Welsh history. And through that, she realizes that one of the big kind of gaps or areas for Welsh heritage at this point are English translations. And so she decides, as an English woman who is incredibly well educated by herself, and a real sort of polymath, I suppose, but also a linguist, because she's learned so many languages by this moment, that she will teach herself medieval Welsh and she will translate the Mabagna, which is this huge kind of compilation of oral tradition and ballads from the 12th to 14th centuries of Wales, these medieval teals, sort of knights at the round table, Arthurian legends, and she will translate those from medieval Welsh into English. And that is what she then does. And she spends Most of the 1830s and 1840s doing these incredible translations, which really only until recently were still the translations being used for the map Ignalpion that we have today. So it's almost not a surprise that she's jumping around Welsh castles and ruins and really dedicating herself to very detailed linguistic translation and archival research into the mavignogyon. And I think in many, almost foreshadows the particular type of art collector she will become and how she will treat art collections and objects. She treats them as specimens, like an antiquarian would do. She's seeing these as kind of testaments or testimonials, I suppose, of history, of what has been offered. And in this case, she's thinking in a textual sense. And as we move through her life, it moves more into sort of material objects.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, we're definitely going to talk about that. But before we get into some of the other objects she engages with, I wonder if we can talk a little bit about sort of the politics of what she's doing, because you've explained how her husband is being really supportive of all of this, which is great. But you also mentioned that she is An English aristocrat turning up in Wales and getting very into all things Welsh, which, on the one hand could be seen as a really good thing. Right. As you mentioned, this is part of a general revival of interest in such things. But of course, there is also the possibility that this is seen as kind of, who are you to intrude? So her husband was supportive of all of these efforts. Did she get wider support, too?
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Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Such a brilliant question in so many ways. He really, really was so supportive. There's one point where he's asked to give a speech at a dinner or something and he gives a toast. He decides he'll offer a toast to Charlotte and he starts to mention her love and adoration for Wales and for his home country, and he starts to cry, which at that point, for a man in the 1830s and 40s, must have been completely unheard of. So he's absolutely won over. It is slightly different, I think, with the rest of the community at that point. So together they're very involved in sort of celebrating Welsh heritage and really make a sort of. Make it their mission to encourage the use of Welsh music, Welsh kind of language, things like this in the local communities, particularly with all of his iron industry workers. So she. Charlotte actually sets up evening schools for the workers and their families, and one of the key things of that is that they are being taught Welsh, but also, you know, other. Other subjects as well. But there is kind of this suggestion that even though she is trying to demonstrate a sort of particular type of Welsh patriotism, which is, you know, befitting of this new social position she now has, she is a Welsh, An English woman, so she's trying to do this incredibly arduous task of the translation of the mavignochion, and she's a woman doing it first and foremost, and she's not even Welsh. So there are these kind of different things that pop up. At one point, there's a suggestion that maybe she should not continue with the translation, or perhaps there's almost this hope that she's gotten bored of it, and she goes, oh, absolutely not. I'm still doing this. And then one of the big things which the book tackles as well, is that during her process of doing the translation, she is increasingly concerned that her teachers, who are helping her with her translations of the medieval Welsh, are passing off her translations to others, in particular to men. She can't really, you know, she's struggling to actually have evidence for this. But we do know that a French historian, a French writer at this point called Villa Marche actually goes to Charlotte, sees Charlotte in Wales, they become friends. But at some point, I think in 1838, she discovers that he is going to try and publish her translation of one of the Mavignagian stories, Peradur. So he's using her translation and he's going to pass it off as his own work. And actually some letters have come to light which show that that translation was shared by one of her teachers. So there's all this sort of men trying to usurp her, but it's Charlotte. So she absolutely kind of rises to the challenge. She is determined to thwart their plans, and she spends weeks upon weeks getting her translation of Peragert up to the best kind of possible state that it can be to send it to print first. One day she actually works on it for 12 hours. And she only takes a break because she has to give birth to her fifth child, Montague. And after she's given birth, she tries to go back to her room to study. They won't let her. So the doctor says, you absolutely can't. So she makes them bring all of her papers to her bedroom, having just given birth to this child, so she can continue her translation. In the end, she's successful. She gets it published before him. So, you know, kind of the woman triumphs in this particular instance. But I think it's also this idea that, okay, if she was English, but a French man was fine to do this, but an English woman, absolutely not. So there's something very interesting there about kind of national identity, but also the expectations of society at this time in terms of gender and capacity of intellect as well.
- [20:49]
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- [21:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really quite evocative image with the staying up till 12, you know, staying up for all that time and then trying to ferret out who's telling me the truth, who's lying, and then, you know, let's throw in childbirth in the middle of all of that. Clearly, as we've been discussing from the beginning, very determined. So let's then talk about the next sort of step, because what you've outlined for us so far is very determined, very interested in lots of different things, very committed to those investigations. But a lot of the investigations have been more around archaeology, around language, linguistics. How do we get to the point of Charlotte becoming a collector?
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Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
In so many ways, I think they are really clearly interconnected with the overarching feeling that I get from her diaries, from the collection, from everything that we know about her and others say about her. She was a historian. I think from the very beginning. She had this curiosity for life, of course, but also for culture, for heritage, for the preservation of heritage, for history. Whether that's figures from history or particular kind of political events from history, or it's actually, you know, archaeological excavations and kind of really digging up history. And in many ways, I think that really informs the type of collector she becomes, particularly when she starts acquiring paintings, but also furniture, ceramics, prints. She is seeing these objects as material manifestations of very particular moments in history and using them to tell history in a very particular way. And I think that, for me, is really clear with all of the different categories almost, that she kind of, sort of leans towards over the years. So from the very beginning, she is determined to collect her own family's history as a child. I mean, in her early teens, we're talking here. And I think in many ways, of course, that is coming, probably, we can assume, from the death of her father, from the fact that that lineage of the Earl of Lindsey, of various kind of the history and the gravitas, I suppose, that comes through that sort of English, aristocratic, aristocratic line, is lost because he's not there to tell those stories to her. So she's determined to uncover the stories for herself. So as a teenager, she goes about assembling a history of the family, and that is, but through paintings, but also through objects and prints, as well as going through old archival documents that are in the attics. And eventually she ends up writing what she calls her Bertie Book, which is a book of family history, which we now still have. It's in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, which is brilliant. We still have that. So even from her earliest days, she's thinking about capturing history through the objects and the things that she's collecting. And I think this is one of the things that the book really grapples with at this moment of when, you know, we know she gave thousands of objects to the B and A to the British Museum, but when does someone become a collector that then forms this huge collection which will ultimately, you know, be given out many decades down the line? And it's difficult to, you know, sort of pinpoint one particular occasion. I think there were many that really sort of speak about, you know, through the research that really kind of spoke to me about her not just acquiring or assembling, but actually becoming a collector. And maybe we'll come to this in a bit later, in a bit more detail at a later point, but one of the real things that's kind of thrown at Charlotte, or has been over the last hundred years, is that she was a magpie. She was sort of, you know, just carelessly roaming around picking up trinkets. But actually, really, you know, just a quick glimpse at her shows, it's much more strategic in relation to kind of this visceral response she has to these objects. As a historian, maybe just one example, I suppose, to kind of show what I mean by that. So in 1842, she goes, along with half of London, essentially, to the Strawberry Hill sale, which is a huge auction done by George Robbins at Strawberry Hill, mostly of Horace Walpole's collection. So even though Walpole has been dead for several years or decades, at this point, it's all sold off in 1842, and it's this kind of highly anticipated seal of his collection. She goes. She writes about it in very kind of animate. She's very animated, the way she writes about it in her diaries. I'll just maybe read you a very quick extract from that. But she says, we went early. The cry was immense. My dress was nearly torn from my shoulders so rude and unmannerly with a mob for such alone could it be called. But for all this, I was gratified, I was delighted. Strawberry Hill is quite all I had expected. I saw the Holbeins and the pictures and I long to have them all. So I think you even just get a sense of her interest in that. But what's brilliant is that she's actually one of the few women that buy from that auction in 1842. And we have the auction kind of prices, and the results were actually all published in a book the following year. And so she's only one of a few women listed within that. And we know that she buys a painting by Holbein, which was in Horace Walpole's collection. And one of the key things that she writes about, why she chose to buy that one is because there's Walpole's writing on the back of the painting. So it's not actually. Oh, we think not by Holbein, it's probably by a follower of Holbein. But nonetheless, I think it's this tangible imprint of. Of Walpole on the back of this painting that's kind of giving her a way into history, a sort of sense of ownership of the past. As someone so great, you know, from very recent history, really, at this point, of a late 18th century person, she was constantly rereading Walpole's letters. She says at one point that they are her constant companions. So there's this real sense that for her, history was coming alive through these objects and these artworks at that point. But also, what's so interesting to me is that because of property laws at this point, typically so often, even if women were buying at auction, it was still the man's name was being sort of jotted down as the owner because of the legal kind of situation. But here she is, the one listed. It's not John Guest, it's her. And that, I think, actually just says so much about who she already was as a collector in the early 1840s at this point.
- [28:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely the sort of detail that jumps out of the record when someone like you takes a look at it and go, oh, wait, that's unusual here because you have mentioned it about the ways in which she is perhaps unusual compared to other Victorian collectors and the way in which she's been portrayed as being different from others. Why don't we go ahead and talk a bit about that? Obviously, she's different in terms of being one of very few women who is making these sorts of purchases in her own name. Are there other differences with other collectors in terms of how she chose objects, the types of objects she collected, or what she did with them once she had them?
- [29:20]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Yes, I think there's quite a lot there, really, that sort of sets her apart, actually. And I think one of the useful ways into that is thinking about the things that she collected which were not necessarily the most fashionable at the time. So very early on, when she sort of starts becoming interested in ceramics, that happens. Well, really from the 1840s onwards, but particularly there's an incident in 1842, she goes to Dresden. And she goes to the Japanese palace, which is where Augustus the Strong, so the King of Saxony and Poland had kept his collection of I think almost 30,000 pieces of European and Chinese and Japanese porcelain. So in 1842 she goes and she sees all of this porcelain together and you know, it's incredibly impressive and you know, the most kind of covered in gold and you know, those beautiful kind of luxurious objects at that point. But actually what really captures her attention are some of the earliest experiments of the Meissen porcelain factory in like 1710, you know, and the people before that in the very early 18th century. And they are not the most decorative or aesthetically pleasing objects. But what she's interested in is their technical achievements, the processes that they went through to actually figure out how to create porcelain in Europe, which up until the early 18th century was not. People didn't know. It was kind of this alchemy in a sense of unknown material, of how it was created, how it's made, and that sort of sense of interest in the making process really kind of follow. You can sort of sort of follow that through all of her collecting from that point onwards. So at various points she's buying molds for making teapots and cups and sauce boats and things like this. She's buying enamel glass cakes, which would then be kind of cut apart and ground down to have the color for glass or enamel process is being made. She's interested in copper plates and how prints were being transferred onto ceramics. You know, she's really thinking quite carefully about the sort of technical advancements and technology that was being used particularly in the 17th, but especially the 18th century for the decorative arts. And at that point that was really not what people were interested in thinking about. Not alone collecting. She's collecting these objects just like she would collect the artworks at that point. So I think there's something really kind of fascinating with her interest in that moment. And then in terms of how she was similar to others. I mean, even just her first husband, John Guest, was not particularly a collector. Together they formed quite a small, decent geological collection. But even in terms of art, he gave patronage to some contemporary artists, but he did not collect really anything historic. And at that point she was quite unusual as a woman collector for collecting historic paintings, but also ceramics as well. With her second husband, she does join what are sort of emerging collecting clubs and things in the 1850s. So I think that is a really useful way for her to meet like minded collectors who she exchanges objects with, as well as kind of exchanging information and knowledge. With as well. And that, I think, helps her really situate herself within these broader collecting networks, not just within the British Victorian art market, but also further afield. So when she really starts traveling across Europe from the 1860s onwards, she is meeting key collectors, key dealers, key museum curators in all of these different cities, and shares quite a lot with them as well in terms of her interest not only in the technical side, but also in different manufacturers and archives. And I suppose her determination to actually kind of create an encyclopedic collection, which is ultimately what she will go on to do. She will desperately try to kind of map out the world, or as much of it as she can, through the objects that she's collecting. Hmm.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really quite an extensive type of interest. But the thread I most want to pick up from there is you mentioned John as her first husband. So how do we end up with a second husband?
- [34:06]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Yes, well, it's sort of sad in many ways, but in the end, I think it kind of all works out that essentially John was several years older than her. I want to say he was actually 25 years older than her when they get married, and that's his second marriage. He had no kids from his first marriage and she had died, I think. I think perhaps. Perhaps in childbirth. And so John dies in 1852, and Charlotte is really devastated. Actually, there's a point in the diaries. Just a couple of days after he dies, he passes away. She's there with him. She sleeps at the bottom of his bed and she holds his hand until. Until the last moments. And she writes very kind of eloquently about returning back to their home and going and seeing a marble bust of him that still resembled him. And she goes and she kisses the lips and says, you know, they're not cold, just like my loves, essentially. So they had this, you know, absolutely intense relationship and really a loving marriage, which at that point, of course, was really not always a guarantee. And so when he passes on, she still has her 10 children to look after. She is officially in charge of the ironworks in Wales. They have a country house called Canford Manor, Canford Estate, and they have London, a London house as well. So she is pretty busy and I think very much kind of moves towards, right, this is my life. I'm now in widowhood. From that point onward, she only ever wears darker clothing as sort of a sort of form of mourning almost. And yet everything changes in 1853. So the following year, just after John has died, she hires someone called Charles Schreiber. Charles is an academic fellow at the University of Cambridge, and she hires him specifically to come and tutor her eldest son, Ivor, as he kind of prepares for his last couple of years of school before he goes off to university. And Charles comes and starts working as a tutor. And within the first few months of arriving, he gets very, very ill. And so, you know, I think, almost loses his life, basically, he's so ill. And she is one of the people who kind of starts to take care of him in this moment when he's quite ill. And then from that point over the next couple of years, they develop this friendship, I think, very much at first, which then turns into a love affair. And she is, I think, very concerned about what this will look like to the rest of society, even though she really doesn't care. In many ways, she is concerned about the prospects or the impact it might have on her 10 children in particular. But nonetheless, she very much is in love. Again, he is much younger than her. He's 14 years younger than her, actually. So at one point she dyes her hair brown because I think she's maybe slightly embarrassed about the age difference or she wants to disguise the age difference. It's quite interesting that she decides to do that. But they announce officially their engagement and they get married a couple of years later. Of course, court cases ensue. There is, you know, sort of the question, she can no longer be in charge of the ironworks. Her family are. Several of them are devastated. Three of them, only three out of the ten attend the wedding. So there's a lot of tension there for the first few years of their new marriage. But nonetheless, over the years, it kind of, you know, everything sort of starts to settle. She actually very sadly has two miscarriages with Charles, so she's still keen to continue to grow the family with her new husband, with her second husband, but obviously that doesn't end up working, but they are. They do all sort of start to make it work. But one of the key things she decides to do shortly after their marriage is to. And when her eldest son officially comes of age, she leaves Canford Manor, the kind of main country house, the estate that she's bought with John. And she sets up in a much smaller living situation in London, or just outside of London with Charles and the rest of her children. And I think that is a sort of moment of distancing herself from. From everything she's done with John. She really kind of distanced herself from Wales at this point in particular as well. And she thinks differently about how she's gonna move on in her life. And one of the key things that really kind of comes through in this moment is her joy for collecting. And this is not something that Charles is interested in. At one point, they go to Manchester to see the big Art Treasures exhibition, which takes place in 1857. And you sort of get the sense in the diaries that she's, like, dragging him around this exhibition. And then at some point, something clicks and she writes, I can't remember what she says exactly, but she basically says, oh. And Charles realized why this is also interesting, and suddenly, you know, was interested in learning more. So I think she slowly turns him around to this idea of this importance of history. But he is quite a gentle soul. He's very reserved. He's quite conservative as a person. And you really get the sense that she's always been the one and always will be the one leading their relationship forward.
- [39:33]
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- [40:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Okay. Definitely a very interestingly different dynamic from her first marriage in a lot of ways, really. I mean, certainly not 10 more children. So that definitely would have an influence on her collecting. Are there any other ways that we see her collecting interests or practices changing over the years in terms of how she went about it or focusing on ceramics or other things?
- [40:43]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
It's a really. It's a really good question, actually. I think in so many ways, because he was so much younger, and there was this kind of sense that they, as her children get older and older, they're easy. You know, it's easier for them to travel. From the 1860s, they are traveling widely across Europe and across Britain and Ireland. I mean, multiple times a year on what she calls her collecting trips. So she specifically sees these trips, these journeys as opportunities for her to increase her collection. And as she's doing that, they're going out, sometimes they're spending something like sometimes up to seven hours a day in dealer shops trying to find objects. And she's kind of really pushing for a hard bargain. I think at times, clearly, the dealers must have fled in the other direction when they saw her coming, because she would really whittle them down on the price. But on the other hand, they were also really eager for her advice and for her knowledge as well. So quite often she's buying things that they think is something else, and she knows they're wrong, and she knows exactly what it is and what it's worth, and she, you know, kind of maneuvers the situation that way. And I think Charles is there at this point. He's supporting her very much, but he is kind of very much taking a back seat. So things like every day, when they finish on these collecting journeys, when they bring their objects back to wherever they're staying that night, she catalogues them. She writes out what she's bought and what they are in her journals, and he always washes them and cleans the objects. And I think there's something very interesting about that particular relationship playing out in that way. But I think in terms of the interests changing over the years, I think this constant traveling and often repeat visits to the same museum, same dealers, same private collections in different cities across the world, you know, year on year, really helps her refine her eye. So she has this, you know, she really knows what she's looking for or what the best thing is, or she knows when she's being duped or deceived or something like this, which I think is very key for any collector. But that also really enables her to start forming a very specialized collection, and particularly in terms of ceramics. So one of the key things that she starts to do from 1865, she says that she's going to start a collection dedicated to English ceramic art. So she's been buying paintings and all sorts of kind of material objects at this point, and decorative art objects. And she has a huge collection of ceramics, from Iznic pottery to Chinese porcelain to, you know, French tinglias, earthenware and faience and things like this. But she specifically decides she will collect all things British. And that is very interesting, almost. There's a sort of national identity or national pride there, but it's also something that had not been done before. So it was really an area of scholarship, an area of collecting that people kind of left to one side. There was a lack of information. There were no real kind of published sources, and the scholarship was very, very scarce at this point for the collecting. And the history of English ceramics. And I think there's sort of an idea that she goes, right, well, I'm going to create this field. And that's basically what she then does. From the 1865 until her death in 1895, she becomes the expert on English ceramics. Most books that are written after that time on English porcelain and English pottery are all dedicated to her or for the most part have several of her pieces from her collection in them, or the other thing that she does, not just collecting the objects, she also goes out and collects documentary sources and archives as well. So there's this brilliant story in the 1860s where she decides that she's going to form a collection of Fulham pottery, which is all done by an alchemist, a potter called John Dwight. At the end of the 17th century, he was very celebrated for what he did and he. He was one of the first people in England to produce pottery, particularly stone glazed pottery, at a commercial kind of, in a commercial manner. But in the late 17th century, he was desperate to try and figure out the chemical makeup of porcelain because he was an alchemist and he did all of these different. He tried all these different recipes, he did all these different experiments, he took out various patents to make porcelain and he feels he couldn't do it. So he decides at one point that he's gonna get rid of everything and lock it all away. And that gets rediscovered. His kind of locked up stuff gets rediscovered in the 1860s. So they find moulds and tools and some of his objects. And Charlotte goes along to see this and get some of the objects. But she's basically what she's very interested in is finding his recipe book, finding his archives and his experiments, because she's really certain that he must have written things down. And all of the men around her go, oh, you're just wasting your time, don't worry, there's nothing there. But she goes and she finds two of his ceramic recipe books from, I think, the 1670s and 1680s, and she transcribes them all and they really impact scholarship at that time. She also goes and she finds factory account books and pattern books and schedules of labour and costs and things for other porcelain factories, in particular Bow factory, which were based in East London in the 18th century. So she's not just looking for the objects, she's also looking these archival sources again, this kind of idea of her as a historian really coming to the forefront. And she does that specifically for English ceramics at a point at a time when no one else had. Effectively, people weren't interested or they didn't have the time or the patience or the expertise to do it correctly. And she does.
- [46:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And was she known for this? I mean, there is of course the risk that because no one else was focusing on this, she goes off and becomes the expert, but no one's aware of it. Is that what was happening here?
- [47:00]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Interestingly, no. She does very much become known for this. So she was incredibly well celebrated by contemporaries in her lifetime. It's really probably only in the 20th century that has shifted. Contemporaries always said that her house was like a museum of antique treasures. She was incredibly well known for this. She was traveling around, she was giving advice at various points, she was rocking up at different museums across the continent and the curators were literally giving her the keys to their cases so she could take out objects and have a look at things and let them know what she thought and they would change their labels and their catalogues based on her feedback. I mean, it's incredible when we think of it like that, the agency that she had, but also the respect, how much her authority was respected in that moment. So she's very much influencing scholarship and publications, which is very, very important. But I think the other thing is she's very good friends with all of the other up and coming historians and curators and scholars and collectors of these objects too. So they're all constantly swapping objects. You know, these collecting networks were so much more closely related than we necessarily would always like to think that they were. So I think that is also very key. So she really kind of makes her mark amongst other meal collectors at this point. So someone like Augustus Franks, who is the keeper of Art and Antiquities at the British Museum, becomes very good friends with her. They swap a lot of objects between each other. They also swap notes. At one point, she writes a ceramic. She writes her ceramics, kind of a notebook of her ceramic thoughts, the ceramic histories. And several years later, she gives that to Franks. He asks her to catalog some of his collection, which she then does, you know, so it's quite symbiotic, I think, these relationships that she has with others. But she is being seen and treated as an equal. And sort of further to that, it's also how she's seen by other women collectors at this point. So lots of other women collectors come to her for advice about what objects they should or shouldn't buy. And there is also, what I was so excited to find in the unpublished papers of hers, evidence that she was actually buying for other women as well. She was acting almost like a kind of quasi dealer, particularly for women collectors. But this is Charlotte we're talking about. So she's not just doing this kind of out of the goodness of her own heart. She was also charging them commission and making a profit doing this sort of dealing. So that in itself, I think this shows someone who is incredibly confident in their own expertise. And we really see that. Particularly when she decides to give the collection to the va. She makes it very clear from the beginning that she will. It will be. The collection will be accompanied by a catalogue and she will be the one writing the catalogue. And that this point, that was really very much unheard of, you know, even for necessarily the collector to have written the catalogue. Quite often you would bring in a historian or kind of a ceramics. You know, you'd bring in the art scholar of that particular type of art object to do the catalogue. Because she is, you know, she's doing it and that's what she does.
- [50:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's pretty cool that she's continuing to stick up for herself in lots of ways there and being known for it as well. And clearly she had plans for what would happen to her collection while she had it with the V and A. But also after her death as well. What were those plans and to what extent were they enacted?
- [50:34]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Yeah, well, so I think it's very interesting that she really starts thinking about kind of the legacy of her collecting practice and her collection pretty early on. I wonder if that's because of the first husband dying. So she's sort of thinking about kind of life and legacy death at an earlier point, and then, of course, which she has, you know, decades and decades left, and then, you know, a whole other kind of life almost from that point onwards. But I think the key thing is that she is very interested in the educational power and the importance of museums at this time. Now, that was very typical in this sort of cultural moment of the 19th century. You have this kind of birth of the museum, particularly things like the 1851 Great Exception Exhibition. She actually pays for over 100 workers from the iron industry to go from Wales up to London to see the British Museum and to see the great exhibition in 1851, which was really unheard of at that time, that she actually paired for that to happen. But very early on, I think there's this idea that she is interested in cultural philanthropy and the purpose of art museums in particular. And I think that is then coupled with this. This, you know, very specialized collection that she has formed. So in the 1860s and 1870s, she loaned several objects to different temporary exhibitions happening in London. One is at the Alexandra palace in the early 1870s, which is an exhibition dedicated to English porcelain. She loaned several objects to that, and she's delighted because Queen Victoria has also lent quite a bit to that. And Queen Victoria and Charlotte's objects are displayed side by side. This sort of validation of her through this. Unfortunately, there's a huge fire and all the objects in that exhibition burn down and are all destroyed. So not so good on that one. But she also lends hundreds of objects to the South Kensington museum in the 1860s and 70s, and they're displayed in the South Court and again, very much celebrated by contemporaries. Now, the South Kensington Museum is, of course, founded in the 1850s and has this real sort of didactic principle about educating people about good taste, about good design, as well as kind of culture and heritage, and will eventually become what we now know as Victoria and Albert Museum, the VA in London. So from that moment of her giving these loans temporarily in the 1860s and 1870s, there's this idea that that is the best museum for her collection to ultimately go to. But it takes her several years to kind of get to that point. One of the things that sort of puts it all in motion in the 1880s is, unfortunately, Charles Schreiber also dies before her. So she loses a second husband. He gets ill in 1883, and the doctors basically say that they think he needs a long sort of sea voyage and he needs sun and sea air to get better. So they travel to Cape Town, and before they go on that huge voyage, she actually changes her will. So in case anything happens to her on that voyage, her collection will go to the South Kensington Museum permanently. That's what she writes out in the will. They do go to Cape Town. He actually gets worse with the son, and so they are forced to return home, but they don't make it back to London because he's too ill. They actually end up in Lisbon for several months. And sadly, that's where he passes away in 1884. And when he dies, she returns to London by herself and within days, basically turns all of her energy into creating this legacy. She says she wants to leave her collection to be for the public, for the good of the nation, is what she says. And so she gets all the kind of necessary people together. She brings the director of the V and A Museum over, and they create this sort of deed of gift, essentially of what her bequest will look like. So she will give mostly her English ceramics, because she believes that's her real kind of what she's met, you know, her mark in. And that's what she's done kind of the most. And it's also a huge gap in the museum. The museum really doesn't have very much English or British ceramics at this point. So she's aware that her collection will kind of help fill those gaps. And I think the key thing really driving this is she's really determined that she will see this collection come to life and be put into the museum before she dies. And she's very concerned that she won't see this. She writes about the frailty and the fragility of life, and she's concerned that this won't happen in the end. Luckily enough, she does manage to get the collection of almost 2,000 objects into the V and A. They go in autumn 1885. She writes her catalogue, which is also published, for the objects there. She oversees kind of the logistics. She selects everything, she changes how things are displayed, and it opens officially on boxing day, so 26 December 1885. And then several years later, from 1887 onwards, she will start giving almost 3,000 objects to the British Museum, and again lives to see most of that given there as well. At one point, I think at the beginning of the catalogue, she writes, giving the objects to the museum is like a parent seeing their children happily married in their lifetime. So there is again, this sort stuff of sense of the agency of these objects so that she really feels like they're her children almost, or she's sort of. She's seeing them safely onto their final kind of resting place, in one sense, into the public museum, so that they can be the benefit for others. I think that's kind of one of the overarching aims that she has at this point.
- [56:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely very clear vision there. And obviously the fact that you then, all these years later wore the curator at the VA for the collection shows that rather a lot of what she wanted did come to pass. Are there any other aspects of her legacy or the legacy of her collection that we want to discuss?
- [56:56]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
I'm trying to think, I think really having this too much I could really say about her. I think. I think one of the key kind of sticking points for me is that she is so celebrated and so well known in her lifetime. You know, really, when you think about it, so unheard of at a point, particularly in the 19th century, especially in kind of Victorian Britain, you know, when men predominantly dominated these emergent fields of history, museums, connoisseurship, the art market, and she really kind of carves out her position within that is the fact that over the 20th century, within historiography, her place is. And her sort of status is kind of called into question or is sort of put to one side at various points. So there are lots of different kind of books where she sort of casually mentioned, as you know, as I said before, kind of being a magpie, collecting trinkets, being a China maniac. There's one that is a book about Victorian, great Victorian patrons of the arts. And it says, oh, Lady Charlotte Schreiber, well, she didn't really like art anyway. You think, oh, my goodness, how have we gone from this incredible woman at this moment in the 19th century to, you know, someone whose length sort of cast aside as we move through the 20th century. The other thing that scholarship so often has kind of falsely said, and one of the key things I really wanted to get right once and for all with the book is that a lot of scholarship says that her second husband, Charles Schreiber, is the reason she became a collector. Well, absolutely not. And the other thing is that, oh, her sons are the reason. So, of course, this woman could not have done any of this by herself. It must be her second husband years after she's already, you know, formed a good collection, or her sons, you know, who are born years after she's already really become a collector in and of herself. And I think that is something really to think about. Her legacy and more generally, I think, points to this idea of collecting and this kind of construction of knowledge and heritage and this very strategic interest in history as being something which is still perceived as a meal coded activity. And how do we actually, as historians. This is a question I ask myself as a historian, but also as someone who is a curator. How do I rethink, reframe these wider systemic issues, essentially in terms of gender, that actually, for a woman in the 19th century was given a lot more credit where credit was due. And actually that has kind of shifted over the years. You know, ultimately she gave 5,000 objects to two of the biggest museums in the world, both in London. And that is a legacy which really deserves to be celebrated. But it was unprecedented at the time, but also actually probably in some ways still quite unprecedented today. I think that kind of says more of a commentary on where we are currently in 2025.
- [60:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, now that you have brought us all the way up to the present, I'm going to ask you to go one step further and tell us a little bit about what we might expect from you in future, if you have any upcoming or current projects you want to give us a brief sneak preview of.
- [60:14]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Yes. What can I say about current and future projects? So I'm predominantly a historian of collecting, a cultural historian. I think it's really where everything, all my interests end up aligning. So I'm just about to submit my next book, which is for Blooms Reacademic, which is tracing the collecting a very particular type of French ceramic from the French revolution through the 19th century, particularly thinking about the French British context of that in terms of the market as well as kind of politics and the construction of history at that time. But my next project, which I'm just about to start working on, is a bit of a more kind of picking up with some of those discussions that we were having towards the end, thinking a bit more broadly about the role of collecting within society today and within history and particularly the role of women in that. So I'm just starting to work on a book that I can't say very much about at the moment for Chatto and Windus with Penguin Vintage, which will be coming out in a couple of years, thinking a bit more broadly about collecting, which I'm really, really excited about.
- [61:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that definitely sounds interesting. Best of luck with the project.
- [61:26]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Thank you.
- [61:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Lady Charlotte Extraordina Ordinary Art Collector, published by lund Humphreys in 2025. Caroline, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [61:39]
Dr. Caroline McCaffrey Howarth
Thanks so much. It's been brilliant to speak about her some more. And Doug Limu and I always tell.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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