Victorian Copyright: the Author Miss Letitia Higgin, and Editor Lady Marian Alford

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

My new eBay purchase arrived on Sunday afternoon: Letitia Higgin’s Hand Book of Embroidery, published by her employer (the Royal School of Art Embroidery) in 1880, and edited by the Vice President of the Society: Lady Marian Alford. It’s a modern reprint: the original is an appropriately antiquarian price.

The Society had been founded in 1872. Letitia (Lily) was a middle-class young woman needing to earn her own living, who, with two of her sisters, was employed by the Society.  She was promoted to a senior position, and wrote this handbook not for absolute beginners, but for ladies who had learned the basics and needed to know more. The introduction explains that the book answers some of the most frequently asked questions. Brilliant, I thought. This could be just what I need. You know how I enjoy embroidery, even if I’m just a relative beginner.

A Daughter of Margaret Maclean-Clephane

Portrait of Lady Marian Compton, from National Trust via Art.UK
Grant, Francis – Lady Marian Margaret Compton (1817-1888), Viscountess Alford; National Trust, Belton House; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/lady-marian-margaret-compton-18171888-viscountess-alford-176409 National Trust Images via Art.UK

Enter Margaret Maclean Clephane’s elder daughter, Marian (Marianne)!  The book’s editor was none other than a daughter of song-collector Margaret Maclean-Clephane. (Just for the record, Margaret’s married name was Lady Compton, and later Lady Northampton.  That’s why her daughter was Lady Marian Margaret Compton.)  Lady Marian’s musically gifted mother was also a poet.  The family evidently had creativity in their genes. Marian’s aunt Anna was a song and folklore collector too; her other aunt was artistic; and now we find that Marian was a talented needlewoman.

A Copyright Dispute

The guide was so popular that the Society had hoped to produce a second edition, but a copyright dispute between author and editor meant that this didn’t happen.

I sat bolt upright.  We ordinary folk shall never know what the dispute was. (I learnt this much from Wikipedia. See reading list below.) Maybe the Society has archival paperwork that tells more, but I really must not let myself get distracted at the moment!

Giving Credit where Credit’s due

From my vantage point as a 21st century author, it would be easy to feel outrage on Letitia Higgin’s behalf. Had she done all the work and written the whole book, only for Lady Marian Alford to sweep in and add her name to it? Realistically, having a titled name on it would probably have added gravitas and authority in 1880. My guess is that Letitia Higgin did most of the hard work, and Lady Marian put her own titled gloss on it, but I simply don’t know. We can’t jump to conclusions.

Bust of Lady Marian Compton, from National Trust via Art.UK
Lady Marian Compton (1817–1888), Viscountess Alford
Ernesto Cali (b.1821)
National Trust, Belton House, again via Art.UK.

I do know that Miss Higgin also wrote magazine articles referring to the book, and Lady Marian also authored other works. Neither woman’s expertise is in question.

Anyway, I intended to use the book for the purpose of self-instruction, so I turned the page to find out about needles. It informed me I should use a size 5 needle for crewel work. To be honest, I don’t think I’m doing crewel work (with crewel yarn), but embroidery. With embroidery silk. I had imagined it would be similar, but I imagined wrong.

Five is Larger than Nine

Moreover, Miss Letitia Higgin and Lady Marian Alford didn’t think to tell me that size 5 needles are larger than size 9. I suspect I may have been using the right size for embroidery all along (without knowing a scooby about sizes and numbers), but now I reached for the tiniest size needle, and spent far longer than was reasonable, trying to thread one strand of thread into the eye of a needle that I couldn’t even see. Ughh! I blamed the eye (my own) that can’t even read with glasses.  Eventually I used a needle threader. The thread broke. I did get dressmaking thread through the eye. And I bent the needle before getting the single strand of embroidery floss through the eye.  The eye of the needle was ludicrously, but appropriately small for such a tiny wee needle.

The thread that would not go into the eye of the tiny needle
Tiny needle threaded with dressmaking thread
Embroidered word, HELP
Embroidered word, HELP, a needle threader, a bent needle and an embroidered heart

Temporarily giving up on Higgin and Alford, I turned to YouTube.  Thankfully, Sarah Homfray has done a series of YouTube videos about embroidery, and that’s how I learned that 5 was actually larger than 9:-

‘Are you using the right sized needle? I show you how to pick the right one!’

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PtBGZn0yohU&si=LJomNgTXJTZ_hoMT

I shall eventually return to Miss Higgin and Lady Marian Alston.  I’m sure they have useful knowledge to impart, quite apart from the insights into the pastime of embroidery in the late Victorian era. You could buy a marked canvas, which someone at the Royal School of Art Embroidery had prepared and even started off for you. That sounds helpful!

However, today? I’ve signed up to a local evening class. (Although I don’t know if I’ll ever be capable of marking out a canvas to make Higgin’s and Alford’s piano cloth design!)

7. DESIGN FOR A SOFA-BACK COVER OR PIANO PANEL. By George Aitchison. Vincent Brooks Day & Son, Lith. (From Gutenberg website: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24964/24964-h/24964-h.htm#Page_75

READING LIST

  • Alford, Marian, Needlework as Art (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886.)
  • Alford, Marian – other works of local history interest.
  • Higgin, Letitia, ‘Art Needlework’, articles in The Art Amateur (1880) Vol.2 issues 5 and 6
  • Higgin, Letitia, Hand Book of Embroidery, ed. Marianne Margaret Compton Alford (London: Published by Authority of the Royal School of Art Needlework, 1880)
  • ‘Higgin, Letitia’ – Wikipedia entry
  • Homfray, Sarah, ‘Are you using the right sized needle? I show you how to pick the right one!’ YouTube
  • Hulse, Lynne, ‘Higgin, Letitia (Lily) , author and embroiderer’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  • Northampton, Margaret Compton, marchioness of (d. 1830), Manuscript book of poems, dated 1808-1821, by Lady Compton (Lady Northampton), also transcription of poems, dated 1804-1840, by her sister Anna Jane Douglas Maclean Clephane.] National Trust Libraries – Note on Jisc Library Hub Discover:- ‘Poems stated to be by Lady Compton (as Lady Northampton was known 1815-1828) on pp. 1-47, and by Lady Northampton on pp.113-120; poems by Anna Jane Clephane on pp. 52-110 and 121 to end (many with monogram AJC).
  • Royal School of Needlework. Our History

Two Ladies and a Harp: the Maclean-Clephane Sisters of Torloisk on Mull (and Edinburgh)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

You know how you buy a new car, and suddenly everyone seems to be driving the same white Fiat 500? It’s the same with research topics.

“Enthusiastic collectors of Gaelic songs and Irish harp tunes”

I researched Gaelic song-collectors Anna and Margaret Maclean-Clephane as part of my PhD (2009).

  • I blogged about the sisters as far back as 2012 in my librarian days, when the Whittaker Library was using Blogspot:- How Far Can a Song Travel? (Author Karen McAulay, Whittaker Live blog, Wednesday, 23 May 2012);
  • and of course they later made it into my book (Our Ancient National Airs, 2013).
  • I followed up with an extended article about them (also in 2013). See this excerpt from the article:-

Naturally, the Maclean Clephane sisters are in my Pure institutional repository at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I coined the above phrase, ‘enthusiastic collectors of Gaelic songs and Irish harp tunes’, using it both in my book (p.92) and my article (p.62), both in 2013.

‘While they were still in their teens’

The sisters had a book ‘printed but not published’ while they were still in their teens – you can read about it in my article, p.58. I have to say, the arrangements in their book were – well, okay, but not artistically stylish!

Margaret had a harp – there is actually a Raeburn portrait of Margaret with her harp – see below.   Alexander Campbell did say the sisters played, but there’s no portrait of Anna with a harp, so we can’t prove it either way. He didn’t meet them. (There was in fact a third sister, though her musical interest didn’t seem to carry through to adulthood. ) Indeed, Anna wasn’t that hot on the piano, as I recall.  They grew up on the Isle of Mull. I’ve driven past the house, Torloisk. It’s massive!

I just love researching and writing about people, particularly musicians! If they’re women musicians, then that’s all the more interesting – so it’s hardly surprising I was drawn to them, and went looking at materials in the National Library of Scotland and the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, and even visiting a manuscript that’s now down in London. (Blog post Women’s History Month 2024. Musicians, this present blog.)

Details of my article

But ever since, these fascinating and talented ladies keep cropping up in my social media feeds. People who’ve read my writings also contact me from time to time. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I get notifications that people have consulted my stuff, too … and there’s also a CD whose notes cite me, too:-

Tullochgorum – Haydn – Scottish Songs, by The Poker Club Band and Masako Art (BIS-2471 | SACD

Tullochgorum – Haydn  – Scottish Songs

The harpist, Masako, asked if she could cite my work – I was very appreciative that she went to the trouble of asking me.

Correctly cited 😀
Margaret Clephane … and Masako Art

I spent so long with my early nineteenth-century heroines, but eventually my research took different directions. Not being a Gaelic scholar was just one of the problems I’d encountered! I attended classes in speaking it, at the Conservatoire. I signed up to local authority evening classes at the Gaelic School in Glasgow. But somehow, I never really had time to give it enough attention, despite having been considered good at languages at school and possessing school certificates in – well, several European languages. I understand when someone agrees with me in Gaelic, and can pronounce ‘Torloisk’, for sure, but Gaelic remains beyond me!

But look – now the music is going to be played. That’s exciting!