Both her parents were dead. She had no one to advise her or raise objections. I doubt that Sickert would have gained Richard Cobden’s approval. Cobden was a wise and insightful man and would not have been ‘fooled by Sickert’s acts or enchanted by his charm. Cobden would have detested the absence of compassion in the handsome young man.
“Mrs. Sickert and all her sons were such pagans,” Janie would write Ellen some twenty years later. “How sad that fate has ever brought you into their midst.”
The differences between the character of Ellen’s father and that of the man she would marry should have been blatantly obvious, but in Ellen’s eyes the two men might have appeared to have much in common. Richard Cobden did not have an Oxford or Cambridge education and was in many ways self-taught. He loved Shakespeare, Byron, Irving, and Cooper. He was fluent in French, and as a young man he had fantasized about being a playwright. His love of the visual arts would be a lifelong affair, even if his attempts at writing for the stage were a failure. Cobden too was not adept at handling finances. He might have been savvy in business, but he had no interest in money unless he had none.
At one point in his life, his friends had to raise sufficient funds to save the family home. His financial failings were not the result of irresponsibility but were a symptom of his driving sense of mission and idealism. Cobden was not a spendthrift. He simply had loftier matters on his mind, and this may have impressed his daughter Ellen as a noble flaw rather than a blameworthy one. Perhaps it was fortuitous that in 1880, the year Sickert first met Ellen, John Morley’s long-awaited two-volume biography of Cobden was published.
If Sickert read Morley’s work, he could have known enough about Cobden to script a very persuasive role for himself and easily convince Ellen that he and the famous politician shared some of the same traits: a love of the theater and literature, an attachment to all things French, and a higher calling that was not about money. Sickert might even have convinced Ellen that he was an advocate of women’s suffrage.
“I shall reluctantly have to support a bitches suffrage bill,” Sickert would complain some thirty-five years later. “But you are to understand I shall not by this become a ‘feminist.’ ”
Richard Cobden believed in the equality of the sexes. He treated his daughters with respect and affection – and never as witless brood mares good for nothing but marriage and childbearing. He would have applauded the political activism of his daughters as they matured. The 1880s were a time of foment for females as they formed purity and political leagues that lobbied for contraception, reforms to help the poor, and the right to vote and to have representation in Parliament. Feminists such as the Cobden daughters wanted to enjoy the same human dignity as men, and that meant quashing entertainment and vices that promoted the enslavement of women, such as prostitution and the lasciviousness of London’s many music halls.
Sickert must have sensed that Ellen’s life belonged to her father. There was nothing she would do to smear his name. When she and Sickert divorced, Janie’s prominent publisher husband, Fisher Unwin, contacted the chief editors of London’s major newspapers and requested that they print “nothing of a personal nature” in their papers. “Certainly,” he insisted, “the family name should not appear.” Any secret that might have hurt Richard Cobden was safe with Ellen, and we will never know how many secrets she took to her grave. For Richard Cobden, the great protector of the poor, to have a son-in-law who slaughtered the poor was inconceivable. The question may always be whether Ellen knew that Walter had a dark side “From Hell,” to quote a phrase the Ripper used in several of his letters.
It is possible that at some point and on some level Ellen suspected the truth about her husband. Despite her liberal stance in regard to women’s suffrage, Ellen was weak in body and spirit. Her increasingly friable fabric may have been the result of a genetic trait she shared with her mother, but Ellen might also have been damaged by the torment her well-meaning father put her through because of his own desperate needs. She could not live up to his expectations. In her own eyes, she was a failure long before she and Walter Sickert met.