Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
countless thousands of Londoners stood and cheered.[41] Victoria sat on the rear bench of the landau, looking forward, her two younger consorts facing her from the opposite bench. As the procession moved at a snail’s pace through the throngs, the portly figure stared ahead, calmly, regally, taking in the hullabaloo.
Inside Westminster Abbey, ten thousand invited guests awaited Queen Victoria’s arrival. The high priests of the Anglican church stood to one side of the altar, all wearing their ceremonial robes, some deep reds, others a lush hue of gold. Opposite them, the women in flowing gowns, the men in full military regalia, stood invited royalty, including the Hawaiian queen, Kapi‘olani, and her sister-in-law Lilii‘uokalani; the Belgian queen, Marie Henrietta; and Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Beyond them, arrayed down the more than thirty thousand square feet of the abbey’s interior, thousands upon thousands of guests stood in rapt attention as Victoria entered the echoing, cavernous church, its stone columns soaring more than two hundred feet into the air above. On the second and third floors, from the galleries ranged around the nave and over the aisles that snaked between the ancient columns, thousands more leaned forward to see the spectacle below.[42]
That evening, after the religious services held in Westminster Abbey and around the country had concluded, great bonfires blazed in celebration from hilltops around the British Isles. Photos from the time show large oxen, their torsos wrapped in Union Jack cloths, being led to huge pits, there to be slaughtered, roasted over the spit, and eaten in village-wide festivities. Elsewhere, huge “royal barons of beef,” weighing close to two hundred pounds and carried in on litters by upward of ten liveried servers, were dished up in town halls and manor houses to gathered local elites, the platters ornamented with Union Jacks. Plum pudding and great crates of cider were distributed to the less affluent townsfolk outside.[43]
In the days following the jubilee, London’s celebrations continued unabated. The Guildhall held a ball, at which were served up aspics of lobster and eels, pies, roast meats, pastries, meringues, and copious amounts of alcohol.[44] In the capital city’s great public parks, patriotically themed Punch-and-Judy shows, marionettes, and other spectacles entertained the huge crowds.[45]
* * *
Eleven days after Victoria’s jubilee, that summer’s Wimbledon championships commenced. Dod was coming off a hat trick, having won the Irish championships, Bath, and the Northern championships earlier in the season. She was by now the undisputed number one in women’s tennis. Flush with victory, she headed to the grounds at Worple Road.
In addition to the eponymous strawberries and cream of Wimbledon, vendors at the event were also likely selling cherries jubilee, a newly popular dessert of pitted bing cherries cooked in syrup and then, tableside, flambéed in brandy, offered up atop a vanilla ice. The concoction had been crafted by a leading French chef of the era to honor the queen and her well-known love for cherry dishes, and that summer it was all the rage in London.
When Dod took to the court, wearing a pleated skirt, layered on the outside with a polo-necked “overdress,” a sprig of white heather pinned to her bodice for good luck, she exuded both a steely purpose and a devastating pose. Her eyes were blue gray; she was tall and muscular; and she gave off a “coolness and presence of mind” that made it “almost impossible” for her opponents to “disconcert or un-nerve her.”[46]
It was a hot Monday afternoon, perhaps slightly humid. The clouds that would later in the evening roll in to take the edge off of the heat were still far off.[47] Dod stood just inside of the baseline, waiting to receive serve, her eyes supremely focused on her opponent. Behind her hovered a small ball boy in a suit and bowler hat,[48] and the umpire sat high in a chair adjacent to the net. The court, to a modern eye, would have looked narrow, for there weren’t doubles lines back then. By default, each court was singles only, and when doubles matches were to be played, extra lines were added in—the benefits of Wingfield’s patented portable system, the canvas lines easy to fold up and put away after each match, fully on display.
Ranged around the teenager were hundreds of spectators, many of the women standing close to the court under white parasols, the men in top hats, some of the younger boys in bowlers.[49] They were kept back from trespassing too close by knee-level ropes that separated spectators from players. Above and behind these front-row observers rose the newly constructed stands, holding perhaps upward of one thousand more cheering fans. As occurred at so many of the tournaments Dod had entered over the past few years, locals in nearby houses were leaning out of upper story windows, hoping to get a glimpse of the unfolding drama.
In the first few years of the championships, there had been twelve courts in a three-by-four grid. A handful of the spectators were lucky enough to get tiered bench seats under the one awning, emblazoned with a large decal for the tennis-kit manufacturer F.H. Ayres.[50] Most, however, simply sat or stood around the perimeter of the grounds, at court level, trying to get nearest to whichever match held their fancy. In 1881, two of those courts had been combined to create a larger central locale on which the most high-profile matches were played. It became known, informally, as Centre Court, and the name stuck. Over the next several years, three stands were constructed around that court; at first temporary, ramshackle affairs, little more than canopies and a few tiers of seats; then more permanent structures. In 1886, the year before Dod made her debut, the three stands, with their canopy roofs held up by metal posts, had been joined together at the corners. It was a squat affair—the surrounding trees towered over the stands—giving little indication of the templelike quality that the Centre Court stadium would come to embody over the coming decades. But it did at least provide some measure of shade and comfort for the tennis enthusiasts who were, in increasing numbers, flocking to Wimbledon each year.[51]
From that very first match, it was clear that Wimbledon had a new star at hand. Using a wooden racket, the head of which flattened out at the top—a racket that weighed a little under a pound,[52] its handle wrapped in a strip of tightly bound brown leather—she played a raw, powerful game. Seemingly, she took pleasure in blasting her opponents out of contention. The tennis correspondent for Pastime, surprised by the teenager’s ferocity, informed readers that Dod had “fully convinced us that none of the ladies now playing can hope to dispossess her of her position without completely altering their style of play.” The crowd loved it. Much as large sports audiences today chant the names of their heroes and heroines, so back in the 1880s they did the same for the new star of Wimbledon. “Lot-tie! Lot-tie!” they shouted out, slowly, rhythmically, as she skewered her hapless opponents.[53]
* * *
A year later, Dod cemented her reputation by successfully defending her Wimbledon title. Once again, she routed her nearest rival, Blanche Bingley Hillyard. Once more, the newspapers waxed rhapsodic about her abilities. “Nothing but praise can be written. She appears to improve at every successive meeting at which she competes,” Pastime purred. “Her play on Saturday was far superior to any previously shown by a lady. Her forehand stroke across the court is, for pace and length, almost unapproachable, even among the men players.”[54]
Dod’s meteoric rise, and the coverage the newspapers and magazines of the late 1880s accorded it, was tapping into a powerful new force in late Victorian society. Sports culture had taken off with a vengeance in that decade in both Britain and the United States. The new individual and team sports of the age, from tennis to football, from cycling to baseball, were all capable of furnishing new mass-culture heroes for the rapidly changing and urbanizing era. For women, sports, along with the adventurous pastime of travel writing, afforded an escape from at least some of the strictures of Victorian life. Take, for example, the New York World reporter Nellie Bly, the globe-trotting young American who had so famously beaten Phileas Fogg’s fictive eighty days for circumnavigating the globe. Or Freya Stark, the young Englishwoman who began traveling to some of the most far-flung places on earth and chronicling her adventures in a series of well-received books. Or consider the accolades accorded the American sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
In the Victorian world, women were hemmed in (literally) in terms of what they could do . . . except in those odd instances when they weren’t. Someone like Lottie Dod, improbable as her achievements were, captured the late Victorian imagination as surely as did the exploits of Nellie Bly. Such women were allowed to