Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
The latter, born a year after Charlotte, would die in infancy in the late spring of 1873; the rest would grow up in Edgeworth House, taught from a young age to engage heartily with the world of sports that Joseph and Margaret held in such regard.
Well-to-do Victorians had, in recent decades, become increasingly obsessed with physical exercise. Some had installed portable gymnasiums in their homes, in which they did a series of exercises intended to limber up leg muscles, expand chests, and strengthen aching backs.[14] Others, modifying exercise regimens encountered by colonial soldiers in India, began swinging bottle-shaped wooden “Indian clubs” in a set of calisthenic exercises that looked something like a combination of weight lifting and the swinging of batons by latter-day cheerleaders.[15] From the 1860s on, a number of exercise machines patented by doctors in Sweden, the German states, and elsewhere began being imported into Britain. Weight lifting became popularized, for women as well as men. And over the coming decades, gymnastics, acrobatics, rope climbing, and the use of rowing machines to strengthen one’s abs would all become widely accepted parts of the fitness craze for health-conscious Victorians.[16] By the century’s end, wealthy young people were competing in a rash of new sports, both individual and team-based.
The four young Dods learned to shoot rifles and arrows, to run, to swim, to play an array of ball games—from cricket and billiards to the new fad of lawn tennis.
William would notch up considerable success as both an archer and a big game hunter—in which capacity, on a transatlantic ship taking him on one of his overseas trips, he met the great poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling, who reportedly asked him about the odd spelling of his last name, and then muttered grumpily that he guessed “if it was good enough for God, it’s good enough for Dod.”[17] Ann would thrive as a tennis and billiards player. Anthony, who as a young man spent months roaming around Europe with Lottie on bicycle, and climbing mountains with her in Switzerland and Norway, would eventually carve out a niche as a highly skilled chess player, able to hold his own with the world’s best. In 1889, he was the Liverpool Chess Club champion, a position he ceded to William three years later; to commemorate their wins, both brothers were presented with a huge silver trophy plate resting in a bed of red velvet, depicting an ancient Greek scene of a half-naked woman lounging in a temple, surrounded by three female courtiers. So good did Anthony become at the game that he would eventually be able to blindfold himself and play multiple games simultaneously, his photographic memory enabling him to keep perfect track of what was happening on each board.[18] Lottie . . . well, Lottie would be quite simply the greatest sportswoman of her, maybe of any, era.
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Shortly after Major Wingfield patented his lawn tennis gear and published his pamphlet laying down the key rules of the new game, Joseph ordered some of the kits from Wingfield’s agent and had them installed on Edgeworth’s grassy grounds just to the east of the house.[19] He would, in all likelihood, have hired gardeners to closely crop the lawn, using the efficient mowing machines developed by the Gloucestershire tinkerer Edwin Budding in the 1830s. He would have presided over the laying of the canvas lines delineating the courts, the hammering of poles into the ground on which to attach the nets. He would have ordered boxes of the new sport’s felt balls with a vulcanized rubber core. By now, Dod was fashioning himself as a man of leisure. When, in 1877, he was summoned to sit on a local grand jury, several of his fellow jurors labeled themselves brokers—of cotton, of metal, of timber; Joseph, by contrast, along with half a dozen of the other more well-to-do jury members, insisted that “gentleman” be listed next to his name.[20] He was, in his midforties, a man defined by his wealth and the accoutrements that accompanied financial good fortune.
Perhaps, like so many other country estates of the time, those newly repurposed gardens in the Dods’ Edgeworth home had previously boasted croquet lawns; perhaps, too, when the croquet fad dissipated in the early 1870s, the lawns remained vacant, waiting for the next craze to come along and claim them.
There were at the time many candidates to fit that bill. For hundreds of years, royals had played a game of “tennis” that involved bats, hard balls, and indoor courts with high nets and various eaves for the ball to carom off. In the walls of the courts were holes, situated at various strategic points, for the ball to be batted into. It was in some ways a precursor to more modern racket games and also to such sports as basketball and lacrosse. More recently, a series of outdoor variants on the game had been tried out—some played one-against-one, others involving teams of up to twelve people, with the object of getting the ball down long outdoor fields. A sports genealogist could trace a family tree for tennis that encompasses everything from the modern sports of badminton, squash, and lawn tennis, through to a series of evolutionary dead ends that fizzled out somewhere in the nineteenth century.
Wingfield, however, had luck and considerable self-promotional skills on his side. When he rolled out his new idea for a sport in 1874, he gave it two names. The first was “lawn tennis,” the second “sphairistike.” Classically educated, he couldn’t resist the ancient Greek reference. The awkward name didn’t stick; but the game itself did. Aided by an extraordinarily effective public relations campaign—Wingfield used his army contacts to secure enthusiastic articles about his invention in various military journals, daily papers, society magazines, and sports periodicals—the fad took off like wildfire. Within months of Wingfield having been granted his patent, it was a sensation, something that a great many society people wanted in on.
The Dod children, boys and girls alike, homeschooled by a series of governesses and tutors, were given free rein to play on the newly installed courts whenever they liked. They were also expected to help out in cutting, rolling, and marking those courts, fenced off from the surrounding trees and scrubs, in putting up and taking down the nets each day, and in cleaning the tennis balls, at the end of a day’s use, on the doormats to the house.[21] Ann and young Lottie, perhaps four or five years old when tennis arrived at Edgeworth, took to the game especially well. It would hardly be a stretch to say that the younger girl in particular grew up on those courts, that from both of their early childhoods Lottie Dod and tennis were inextricably linked together. When she wasn’t playing on the courts she would go off to one of the corners of the estate and hit a ball against a wall again and again and again, harder and harder and harder, honing her reflexes as the ball bounced back at her fast and low.[22]
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But then tragedy struck the Dod family. On November 30, 1879, when Lottie was only eight years old, Joseph died. A brief death notice was published in the Liverpool Mercury two days later, with details of the funeral arrangements and the hint that “friends will accept this intimation.”[23] He was interred, at eleven o’clock on the morning of December 3, in a family vault in Bebington Cemetery, in the same place his infant son Philip was buried, and where Margaret’s father, John Aspinall, and Margaret herself would ultimately be laid to rest.[24]
After her husband’s death, Margaret seems to have viewed Edgeworth as a world unto itself. Within its boundaries she felt in control, able to be the elegant hostess, the graceful, well-provided-for widow. In his will, handwritten in black ink, his neat script leaning slightly to the right, Joseph had left the house and its furnishings, its paintings and most of his book collection, to his wife. The exception was some of his father’s books, which he bequeathed to his brother Thomas.
Despite the fact that in the 1860s and 1870s the Dods had splurged on fine living and elaborate sports grounds, Joseph had also been careful to nurture his finances. He was, perhaps, cognizant of the Dod family crest and motto: a serpent wrapped around a wheat sheaf, underneath which was the Latin phrase In Copia Cautus, which translates to “In Plenty Be Cautious.” In other words, don’t tempt fate by overspending.[25] Now, Joseph’s widow and children were to reap the benefits of his financial good sense. In addition to the house and its contents, his will had established an annuity of two hundred pounds to be given to Margaret, so long as she didn’t remarry, for the rest of her life. He had also authorized two additional payments each year of two hundred pounds from the proceeds of the auctioning off of parts of his estate. He had provided for all four of his children equally, their money to be invested, until they reached the age of maturity, in government bonds, property, and what were seen as safe industries such as railways and canal construction, both in England and abroad. While they were minors, the estate