A lurid purple nightgown, discarded violets, tawdry trinkets—a fallen woman remembers her bygone virtuous life.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, exhibited 1859, oil on canvas, 86.4 x 50.8 cm (Tate Britain, London). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] She stands against the window, looking out but really looking in, in a terribly gaudy purple nightgown. Out the window, we can see the city of London. We can see the Thames River.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:15] We’re looking at John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s “Thoughts of the Past.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:19] If we were Victorian, looking at this painting, we would immediately recognize that she was a prostitute.
Dr. Harris: [0:24] And that she’s thinking about her past life as a virtuous woman, likely from the countryside, who had come to the city and who had fallen. In Victorian terms, a fallen woman, a prostitute. Fallen women were the subject of paintings and literature during this period, a kind of social problem for artists and writers to deal with.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] So she’s a sympathetic figure to a large extent, and we, as a middle-class public, were expected to grapple with her predicament.
Dr. Harris: [0:53] Exactly. Who was at fault, and what could be done about it? You can see how closely the artist ties her problem to the problem of the city and the growth of the city.
Dr. Zucker: [1:03] Well, let’s look out that window. It’s this bustling port on the Thames, on the river that bisects London. I can almost hear men yelling to each other across those boats, and in the foreground, we see what looks like hay on a barge.
[1:16] That hay, of course, would have been brought to the city from the country in order to feed the horses, and it does make a kind of analogy to this woman who has become a commodity, something that is bought and sold.
Dr. Harris: [1:28] Apparently, this part of the Thames was an area that was well-known for prostitution, so all of this would have been recognizable to a Victorian viewer. Another thing we can immediately notice is the fact that this is painted very much in a Pre-Raphaelite style.
[1:39] We have those intense colors that are really saturated, like this purple and the greens and the reds, and showing a female figure with long red hair is also very Pre-Raphaelite.
Dr. Zucker: [1:49] One of the things the Pre-Raphaelites are so known for is to imbue almost everything with a secondary meaning, with a kind of symbolism. They were looking back at the great paintings at the very beginning of the Renaissance — perhaps, for instance, the “Arnolfini Wedding Portrait,” which is in the National Gallery now.
[2:07] And so when you look at that red hair, there’s that secondary reference to the Renaissance tradition of representing Mary Magdalene with long red hair, and of course the tradition of her being a prostitute, but there there’s a sense of redemption, and here I think that’s an open question.
Dr. Harris: [2:23] We’re not sure what her future holds. She’s thinking about her past. She’s thinking about what’s happened to her and perhaps her family in the countryside, her lost childhood, her lost innocence. As you said, all of that is also indicated by the accessories in this room.
Dr. Zucker: [2:40] In the lower-left corner of the painting, I see a potted plant, maybe two, and they’re a little bit too low. The plants have been stretching up to get back to the sun. They’re dry, they’re not tended. They may die.
Dr. Harris: [2:51] Their leaves are turning yellow.
Dr. Zucker: [2:53] Perhaps worse, in the right corner of the painting, you can see those violets, there’s purple and white, which are linked directly to the colors that the woman wears. They’ve been discarded and they will now wilt and die.
Dr. Harris: [3:07] If you look at the “Arnolfini Wedding,” everything in that painting speaks about the wealth of the couple that’s represented. But here we have furniture that’s chipped and worn. Even her jewelry on the table looks cheap and tawdry.
[3:20] Other details in the room that tell us about her life are a little bit hard to see perhaps. In the foreground on the left, we see a man’s walking stick and glove.
Dr. Zucker: [3:30] This painting, in many ways, is a wonderful window into the moral preoccupations of Victorian life in the city at this time.
[3:37] [music]
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, 1859, oil on canvas, 86.4 x 50.8 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A “fallen woman”
In the 1840s and 1850s, Victorian artists and writers increasingly turned their attention to modern life, including topics they considered to be social problems such as prostitution and the limited employment opportunities for women.
These were decades when the costs of the industrial revolution came to the attention of the Victorian public. Parliamentary Reports and newspapers chronicled low-wage and child labor, long hours in factories and mines, crowded cities, and, perhaps most painful to the Victorians, the increased autonomy of women in a world of wage labor and economic insecurity. Writers such as Harriet Martineau wrote about the need for increased employment opportunities for middle-class women (becoming a governess or dressmaker were virtually the only options at that time).
A common trope in the literature of the period is the “fallen woman”—a woman who became a prostitute, usually due to dire economic circumstances. Thoughts of the Past is an example of this familiar theme.
Woman and view of the Thames with Waterloo Bridge (detail), John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, 1859, oil on canvas, 86.4 x 50.8 cm (Tate Britain, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The artist places his figure in front of the window looking out onto the Thames River crowded with boat traffic. Waterloo Bridge can be seen in the distance and not far away is The Strand, a bustling London thoroughfare, popular with prostitutes during the Victorian period. The woman stares not at the busy scene, but soulfully out at the viewer, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance. She pauses from brushing her hair, perhaps, as suggested by the title, to remember some episode from her past.
Visual clues
Visual clues in the painting implicate her as a prostitute. The showy purple dressing gown, her untended plants, the man’s glove and walking stick on the floor, and the money and jewelry on the table beside her (perhaps payment from the owner of the glove) all provide the viewer with evidence of her status as a “fallen woman.”
Her red hair, a popular feature with Pre-Raphaelite painters, also relates to traditional images of the prostitute Mary Magdalene, who is often shown with red hair. On the floor beside her feet is a small bunch of violets. In the language of flowers, something all Victorians were familiar with, violets were a symbol of faithfulness, and the fact that they have been cast aside to wither and die may speak to the multiple liaisons that is the reality of prostitution.
The river in the background adds to the symbolism of the picture. During the Victorian period the problem of the prostitute was often discussed in terms of the threat to public health from disease. The river too was a public health issue, most notably during the “the Big Stink” in the summer of 1858 when central London was permeated with the smell of raw sewage rising from the river.
George Frederic Watts RA, Found Drowned, c. 1848–50, oil on canvas, 119.4 x 213.4 cm (Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village)
Stanhope, who had a studio on the river on Chatham Place at Blackfriars just below one occupied by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, would have been intimately aware of both the picturesque quality of the Thames and its sanitation issues. It is also the case, that in the narratives of Victorian art and literature, women forced into prostitution often committed suicide, usually by drowning (see for example, George Frederick Watts’s famous painting, Found Drowned, of 1848–50). The end suggested for the young girl in the painting is bleak indeed.
It is critical to remember that these paintings (and works of literature) do not represent the true lives these women lived. Nevertheless, these narratives allow us to see the Victorians trying to come to terms with the dire problems and profound changes wrought by urbanization and industrialization.
Stanhope and the Pre-Raphaelites
John Rodham Spencer Stanhope was born in Yorkshire and was educated at Rugby and Oxford. In 1850 he worked with the artist Watts and was introduced to the artistic circle of Little Holland House, where he met Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In 1857 he was asked by Rossetti to participate in a project to paint frescoes on the walls of the Oxford Union. During the project he became friends with Edward Burne-Jones, who was to become an important influence in his art.
Thoughts of the Past provides the viewer with much to think about. Rossetti tells us that the painting was originally conceived as part of a diptych, showing an “unfortunate” in two separate phases of her life. It would be fascinating to know what the artist intended for the other panel. Perhaps it would have shown the viewer just how the young woman came to find herself in this situation. As is typical with Victorian paintings, the detailed symbolism helps us understand the narrative. Stanhope has given us a haunting image of a young woman remembering the innocence of youth rather than confronting the bleakness of her future.
