Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky

       Photograph of the young Lottie Dod with friends and family at a local sporting event. Lottie Dod with signature cricket cap standing in the center of the back row. ©AELTC. Reproduced by kind permission of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.

      For Joseph Dod, son of William and Mary Ann Heart Dod, the decades after the midcentury—a time when the English empire’s expansion seemed limitless, and the ability of England’s business class to generate wealth unstoppable—had been good ones.

      Joseph was born in Bebington on April 25, 1830, into a large family. Nineteen years separated him from his oldest brother, Henry; and thirteen from his favorite brother, Edward. All told there were ten children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. Their parents, each of whom could trace their Cheshire lineage back generations, were middle aged by 1830, having both been born in 1790, just months after the epoch-shaking events of the French Revolution of 1789. William, the son of a butcher, had gone into the wool drapery business in Liverpool shortly after the Napoleonic Wars ended; and by 1827, with a home on Castle Street, in the center of town, he was wealthy enough to list himself as a gentleman.[1] Over the coming decades, he would acquire much property in the growing city, including a number of cotton warehouses, one of which was a large site on the east side of Cheapside, which he had acquired in 1844.[2]

      When the Dods died—William in the summer of 1857, at his son Thomas’s house in Lower Bebington, Mary in 1860—they would be buried in the county they had spent their lifetimes in, in St. Hilary Churchyard, in the little town of Wallasey on the mouth of the river Mersey.[3] By the 1860s, their son Joseph, having invested well the considerable inheritance he had come into upon William’s death, was firmly established in the cotton business as a broker and a financier.

      Before the American Civil War, cotton had poured into the kingdom from the southern slave states—up from a mere handful of bales in 1784, shortly after the end of the American War of Independence, to 128,000 bales on the eve of the 1812 war, to two and a half million bales in the years leading up to the Civil War.[4] Ships traversed the Atlantic, bringing the millions of pounds in weight of raw cotton that would make the fortune of merchants and factory owners in the English Midlands. And the port city of Liverpool, which had been central to the transatlantic slave trade in centuries past, became, by the last years of the eighteenth century, the epicenter of this business. A growing number of warehouses were clustered within a few minutes’ walk of the large Cotton Exchange Building, opened in 1808, out of which the brokers did their business.[5] By the early 1840s, these merchants were organized into the Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association and the Liverpool Cotton Association; and they were playing a leading role within the Anti–Corn Law League as free trade exponents in the fierce political debates that roiled England during those early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.[6]

      As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace in Britain, cotton came to be a crucially important raw product, its conversion into clothing and other textiles providing employment to huge numbers of newly urbanized workers in the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire, just east of the English border with Wales. Manchester teemed with textile factories; Liverpool with cotton distributers.

      “The cotton master,” wrote the historian Anthony Howe in 1984, “personified the new force of ‘industry.’”[7] They were brash young men, chasers of fortune, and unafraid of being seen as the new rich in a class-conscious, aristocratic society. They wore labels—originally thrown their way as pejoratives by members of the older moneyed classes they were displacing—like “cotton lords” and “cottonocracy” as badges of honor, and in the 1850s and 1860s acquired huge fortunes. In Howe’s analysis of more than three hundred Lancashire cotton masters, he found that the average value of the estates they left at death was 126,000 pounds, the equivalent of many millions of pounds today.

      During the American Civil War, Lancashire’s cotton barons came increasingly to rely on lower-grade produce from India. That they were able to do so was a testament to their foresight: in the 1850s, as America’s domestic situation deteriorated, the Cotton Supply Association had lobbied for increased infrastructure investments and land reforms in the territories of the British Raj, so as to promote, as an alternative source, the growing of cotton there. The strategy worked well enough to keep the British textile industry alive—but not enough to keep it functioning at prewar levels. For factory workers in Lancashire, 1861 to 1865 were known as the “Cotton Famine” years, times of underemployment and hunger. Yet for the few hundred men, Dod among them, who controlled the cotton supply chains through the Liverpool market, the famine was more an inconvenience than a catastrophe. They had, for years now, been spreading their investments, moving into banking in Liverpool and nearby Manchester, setting up department stores, taking positions in the newly important rubber industry.

      After the war ended, American cotton again flowed copiously into England, factory technologies increased productivity by leaps and bounds, and the elite merchants of Liverpool found that they had more money than they knew what to do with.

      Joseph Dod navigated these market shifts well. He imported cotton and sold it to the mills that were fueling the growth of Lancashire’s cities, and he used some of his profits to go into banking in Liverpool, which netted him still more money. During the American Civil War, as he diversified his business he also began importing large quantities of Canadian seed oat, which he advertised for sale in local newspapers.[8]

      By the time he married Margaret Aspinall, ten years his junior, on Thursday, September 11, 1862, in a ceremony presided over by the elderly Reverend A. Knox[9] at St. Mary’s Church in Birkenhead, Joseph, still only in his early thirties, was an extremely wealthy man.[10] Like so many of his cotton-broker peers, in addition to investing well he began spending some of that money on luxurious living conditions. The cotton lords, Anthony Howe wrote, largely abandoned the political field in those years, foregoing the agitation of the Anti–Corn Law decade early in Victoria’s reign, when they had made their mark as impassioned free traders, and instead “succumbed to the discovery of Europe, the hunt, yachting, London society, fishing and shooting in Scotland, and mock country-house life.” Howe wrote of “elaborate dinners, capacious wine cellars, plentiful servants, extensive travel abroad,” of a preoccupation with cricket, billiards, and other fashionable sports.[11]

      Joseph and Margaret Dod seemed determined to live up to this image. They moved into a sprawling Cheshire county estate, which they named Edgeworth House, a few miles outside of Liverpool and near the home of Joseph’s brother Thomas. The name Edgeworth, according to family legend, was chosen as an homage to one of Joseph’s ancestors, Sir Anthony Dod of Edge, an English archer who performed heroically during the fabled battle of Agincourt against the French in 1415 and was knighted on the field of victory by Henry V that very evening.[12]

      Edgeworth’s buildings were Gothic brick with stone entranceways, the rooms heated by ornate stone fireplaces that vented through high, thin chimneys, the grounds spacious enough for large outdoor social gatherings and an array of sports facilities. The floors were wooden, the noise muffled by thick, patterned rugs. In one corner of the dining room—a space cluttered with heavy upholstered chairs, high-backed wooden seats, and china vases, with ornately carved tables draped with thick tablecloths, and Romanesque statues—was a small organ. On the wall to the right of the organ, the young couple hung two small oil paintings: one of little sailboats in an ocean, the other delineating the fierce waves of the sea crashing against a wooded shore.[13] Over the years, as the family grew, the mantelpiece above the fireplace would come to host several framed photographic portraits of individual family members, as well as one featuring two of the children standing next to each other; a small clock; and several additional vases.

      In 1863, Joseph and Margaret’s first child, a girl whom they named Ann, was born. Four more children followed over the next nine years: William, Anthony, Charlotte—likely named after the dead wife of Joseph’s older brother