The Shawl in the Photograph | A Gentle Victorian Sleep Story | Isle of Wight, 1866

A slow Victorian sleep story for adults, set in a little dairy above Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1866, when Julia Margaret Cameron was making her famous photographs just along the lane. Philippa, a dairywoman who never had her own likeness taken, finds a shawl she once knitted in one of those photographs, wrapped around a girl nobody can name. Where does a small kindness go, once it has walked out of your door? Two summers before the story begins, on a wet August evening, Philippa lent her blue shawl to a young stranger caught in the rain and never saw her again. This is the gentle summer that follows: cream skimmed in a cool stone dairy, hay drying on the hill, a lodger from Bath with a parcel of photographs, and long golden evenings on the shingle where Philippa slowly learns something about sitting still. No one is in danger, and nothing jumps out at you. The girl keeps her secret right to the end. What's real in tonight's story Philippa, her aunt Keturah, Mrs. Wraxall and the girl in the shawl are invented. The world around them is not. Julia Margaret Cameron really did live at Freshwater. She was given her first camera at the age of forty-eight, as a present from her daughter, and turned her coal-house into a darkroom and a glazed fowl-house into her glass studio. She worked with wet glass plates and albumen prints, a fiddly process where one speck of dust could spoil a picture, and around 1865 she moved to a larger camera for her big, soft, close-up heads. She didn't only photograph the famous friends who gathered at Freshwater. Her own housemaid, Mary Hillier, posed as the Virgin Mary so often that the locals called her "Mary Madonna." Cameron borrowed ideas from paintings and sculpture, and she draped her sitters in cloaks and cloths to turn them into saints and heroines, which is exactly how a borrowed shawl could end up in one of her pictures. She lived on the island until 1875. Sources: Victoria and Albert Museum: Julia Margaret Cameron's working methods https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/julia-... V&A Collections: St. Agnes (sitter Mary Hillier), 1864 https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O8... V&A Collections: La Madonna Aspettante, 1865 https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1... Put the kettle on, open the window a crack if the night is warm, and let the sea do the rest. If you'd like to tell me where you're tucked up tonight, the comments are always open, and subscribing is the easiest way to find the next quiet story when it arrives. #SleepStory #VictorianEngland #BedtimeStoryForAdults