Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
they reached adulthood, what was left of the money would be released to them—and Joseph specified that in the case of his daughters, that wealth would transfer directly to them rather than to any husbands they might acquire along the way. Beyond these specific details, as well as a few minor bequests to local hospitals and to a handful of other relatives, the additional elements of Joseph’s estate, presented to the local court a few months after his death by his executors, totaled up to just under eight thousand pounds. That was the equivalent of nearly one million pounds in today’s currency.[26]
With no incentive to remarry, the wealthy widow lived with her four children, a young housemaid named Harriet Jane Picton, originally from Liverpool, and a live-in cook named Jane Jones. They played their role of leisured country gentry well. On the grounds of their large estate, the Dods kept brown shorthorn cows, some of which they would periodically offer up for sale, the ads posted in local newspapers.[27]
Relatives would stop by to talk and to play; on Joseph’s side of the family alone, Lottie and her siblings had twenty-six first and second cousins, many of whom lived within a few miles of Edgeworth. Friends, including the teenage Joshua Pim, who would go on to become a medical doctor, and also a two-time Wimbledon champion shortly after Lottie retired from the game, would come to spend weekends at the house. They arrived early in the afternoon on bicycles or in pony traps,[28] riding up the graveled, tree-lined drive to the stone steps leading to the entrance to the house; they came to play tennis and billiards and all the other sports that had come to define the estate. For a couple of hours the hosts and their visitors would exercise, and then all the young people would sit down in the dining room to eat scones lathered with thick Cornish cream, delivered by the milkman the previous evening, and a variety of country jams. Margaret would pour dark-brown tea for the guests, and, according to the writer Gwen Robyns, who spoke to Lottie late in her life about those long-gone days, the crowd “talked of nothing but tennis and the forthcoming county championship. They were not pat-ball parties. Tennis was a serious matter. And at the end of the day, fortified by home-made lemonade for the girls and beer for the boys, everyone went home.”[29]
Outside, however, the world increasingly appeared to Margaret to be a frightening, unpredictable place, one that she had an obligation to protect her four surviving children from experiencing.
Increasingly controlling as she aged, the widow Margaret insisted her children be homeschooled, rather than going off to school and university.
For Ann and Lottie, Margaret and Joseph’s choosing to educate them via privately hired governesses, and Margaret’s carrying on with this practice after her husband’s death, would have been a fairly ordinary decision. After all, into the second half of the nineteenth century, up to 40 percent of women in England remained illiterate and unschooled—not until the 1880 Elementary Education Act was it made mandatory for children of both sexes aged from five to ten to attend schools; and for the upper classes, while a few girls’ boarding schools, such as the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, had opened in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, no widespread system of quality schooling for girls yet existed. Thus, for those who wanted their daughters to be schooled in the classics, to learn music and art, and to engage intellectually with the broader world, tutors remained the easiest option.[30] But for the boys, there were myriad choices outside of the home. Most towns had private education establishments, either secular or church-based, and around the country there was a network of elite boarding schools catering to families with the sorts of resources that the Dods now had. That William and Anthony were tutored at Edgeworth spoke more to the preferences of their parents, to the extraordinarily close-knit nature of the family, than to any innate need for homeschooling.
As the 1880s got underway, the Dod children, with their mother hovering in the background, were something of a world unto themselves. They were a sporting equivalent of the Mitfords a generation later, that obsessive, self-enclosed family, each sibling of which would go on to make their mark in the world of politics or literature; or perhaps of the Durrells, homeschooled in islands around the Mediterranean, one of the siblings going on to become a top novelist, another a brilliant naturalist. In sports, the Dod children were free to go their own way; in matters of love and life, however, Margaret’s presence was inescapable. She wanted, her grandchildren surmised decades later in conversations with the writer Jeffrey Pearson, to always be in control.
Later, when Ann, William, Tony, and Lottie had finished their education, Margaret made it emotionally difficult for them, as young adults, to leave the family home, to fledge from the Edgeworth nest. In the late 1880s, family legend had it, she wouldn’t give her blessing for twenty-six-year-old Ann’s wedding to Ernest Worssam, an already well-established brewer and manager with the Whitbread beer company. The couple eloped instead; afterward, for months on end, Ann wrote near-daily letters to her mother asking forgiveness. The envelopes were all returned unopened, discovered by her family, after her death from cancer nearly forty years later, when they went through her possessions. Surviving portrait photographs of Margaret show a stern-looking woman, her posture ramrod straight, her floral-patterned dark dress buttoned up all the way to her chin. The Dod matron’s hair is pulled up into a severe bun under her ornate, lacy hat; her mouth is turned down slightly at the edges. In the one family photograph that Lottie Dod pasted into her album, a photo with Margaret, the four children, and a family friend named R.O. Rawlins, the matriarch is looking down, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the cameraman. In none of the surviving sepia images does Margaret look like a woman who wore life lightly; in none of them is there even the hint of a smile.
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The Dod materfamilias made it clear that it would be socially unacceptable for her children to work for a living—which family lore had it was why, as the century wound down, neither William nor Tony were willing to make money off of their manifest skills as photographers and wood-carvers. It simply wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to do to profit off of such gifts. Thus, as their cousins went off into the world to become civil engineers, architects, and dentists—to go into business as manufacturers of chemicals, timber merchants, accountants, and estate agents—the four Dod siblings, each one sitting on a comfortable inheritance from Joseph, were left to find ways to fill their time in rural Cheshire.[31]
Given the constraints placed on how they could live their lives, the obsession with sports that all four embraced may well have been the only way the children could escape their mother’s control. Margaret expected her grown children to stay with her in Edgeworth House, only begrudgingly letting them explore beyond Cheshire’s somewhat claustrophobic confines.
Ann seems to have done what she could to make her environs lighter. She turned her room into an art studio; filled its bookshelves with dozens of heavy tomes piled somewhat haphazardly; brought in a display case in which she housed small vases, statuettes, and flowers; and hung a huge Japanese paper fan above it. She covered her floor with intricately woven rugs, and crowded the room with a cream-colored armchair, with tables stacked with hand-painted plates, and with numerous family photos. Around the top of the walls, she painted a line of birds—geese, ducks, and several other species. And underneath these she hung her own paintings, including a seashore scene and a close-up of an old man pouring water from a jug into a glass.[32] But, when she wasn’t in her art studio, she still had to make her way through daily life under Margaret’s close watch.
When Ann began taking her younger sister out on the road to play tennis tournaments from the early 1880s on, it may well have been a reaction to the cloistered environment that Margaret was imposing at Edgeworth, largely an excuse for the children to get some fresh air. If that was the case, for the sporting world it was a fortuitous decision. By the summer of 1883, the young girl, beating out much older competitors in tournaments in Dublin, in northern England, and elsewhere, had already been noticed by a number of sports journalists. After all, none of them had ever seen an eleven-year-old, the age Lottie was that spring when she first won matches at the Northern championships, so comprehensively beating her grown opponents in a sporting contest.
For the Dod brothers, William and Anthony, as well, tennis was an escape hatch. Both began entering tournaments in northern England, sometimes in singles, other times playing doubles together; and both began racking up respectable, if not spectacular, records. At times, it seemed, the entire family was tennis obsessed. Tony, a thin, somewhat sickly-looking