Little Wonder. Sasha Abramsky
off to his side. When Margaret’s father, John Aspinall, an elderly man with a long white beard, his shoulders slightly stooped, his hands clasped behind his back as he walked, traveled with his grandchildren to the nearby castle at Normanston—a mid-Victorian folly designed to look like a medieval fortress—they made a point to take a photograph of him on the tennis courts with William.
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In the summer of 1885, still only thirteen years of age, Lottie won a tournament at Waterloo. Then, heading north, she competed again in the prestigious Northern championships in Manchester, an event that attracted all the top women in the game. She got to the final, where she gave the reigning Wimbledon champion, Maud Watson, a considerable scare before eventually losing 8–6, 7–5. The following year, however, in the ancient Roman city of Bath, Dod got her revenge, with a straight-sets 7–5, 6–4 victory over Watson in the finals. It was the first time since 1881 that any player had beaten her in a singles match.[33] “Miss Dod is wonderful with her returns and promises exceedingly well for the future, only now being thirteen years old,” a writer on the scene opined, getting her age wrong by a year.[34] Another wrote that the fourteen-year-old returned all of Watson’s shots “with such force and judgement that her opponent was fairly run off her legs.” The crowd left restraint to one side. They cheered the young girl wildly, giddy with the promise and poise she brought to the game.
That same summer, all four Dod siblings showed up for the Northern championships. In the ladies’ singles, Lottie got to the championship match before succumbing to Maud Watson, 7–5, 6–3. In the ladies’ doubles, Ann and Lottie demolished their opponents to take a well-earned victory. In the mixed doubles, Lottie partnered with Harry Grove, and made it all the way to the championship match before losing to the indefatigable William Renshaw—already a multiple Wimbledon champion—and his partner, Miss M. Bracewell. Finally, in the men’s doubles, William and Anthony paired up; they didn’t win, but they did make it to the final of the consolation tournament, a parallel event for teams knocked out in the early rounds of the main draw.[35] It is doubtful that any set of four siblings was ever before, or since, so successful in a single major tennis tournament.
With Wimbledon and all the other prestige tournaments now open to women, the sports commentators of the day felt that it was only a matter of time before the teenage sensation Lottie Dod made her mark in them too. “As to the destination of the Ladies’ Challenge Cup, there is, on present appearances, little scope for conjecture,” a Pastime writer opined in mid-1887. “Everything points to the success of Miss Lottie Dod, whose recent career victory has been quite unchecked, and to whom the coming years promise an increase of strength and speed, as well as of skill and experience.”[36]
By now, Lottie knew her own worth, knew that she was destined for sporting greatness. She bought a dull-red scrapbook with thick, cream-colored pages. In it, she began carefully gluing every article sent her way on her and her siblings’ sporting accomplishments. She also took a heavy black leather photo album, given to her by the family friend R.O. Rawlins, a dapper-looking man with a mustache waxed to two fine points,[37] and dedicated it to tennis. On the inside of the front cover, she titled it Rambles with a Racket from Edgeworth. The two words beginning with R were lined up one above the other, with a single large R sufficing for both words. The stem of the capitalized letter was carefully penned by the young girl to look like a wooden net post, with the interior of the letter, as well as the surrounding space on the page, a series of grid-like lines meant to resemble the edge of a tennis net. Over the coming years, she would glue into that album dozens of photos, ranging from intimate family scenes with her siblings and friends on the fenced courts at Edgeworth, to images immortalizing her greatest public triumphs. She would also, as her successes mounted, jealously hoard her trophies and championship cups, filling her room in Edgeworth with so many of them that a visitor once noted it had become a “perfect storehouse” for her prizes.[38]
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The year 1887 was a crowded one. For literature buffs, it would come to be defined by the writer Arthur Conan Doyle publishing, in the November release of the magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual, the novel A Study in Scarlet, which introduced his inspired creation, one Sherlock Holmes, and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, to the reading public.
But while Sherlock Holmes’s debut would prove to be a sensation, by far the biggest event of that year was the queen’s jubilee celebration. As the months of 1887 rolled toward June 20, the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria’s ascension to the throne, so the British Isles were decked out in an extraordinary display of gilded pageantry. After all, in the long history of the kingdom, only three prior monarchs had ruled for fifty years or more—and in each of those previous instances the celebrations had been somewhat muted: Henry III marked fifty years as king during a time of civil strife and hunger, after years of unsuccessful wars in France, and decades of simmering rebellion and discontent at home; Edward III’s reign had been scarred by devastating plague epidemics; and George III, by 1810, had lost the American colonies, lost his mind, and ruled over a kingdom that had spent much of the previous twenty years, and huge amounts of economic capital, fighting the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1887, by contrast, England was at the height of its powers, its imperial reach spanning the globe, its wealth massively amplified by the Industrial Revolution. Victoria, crowned empress of India by order of Parliament eleven years earlier, was far and away the most recognized public figure on earth.
That spring and summer, in the months surrounding the actual anniversary of Victoria’s becoming queen, the shops of London were filled with jubilee paraphernalia—commemorative pottery pieces, medals, books rushed into print to honor every aspect of the empress-queen’s life. Periodicals and magazines published special issues. Poets from across the empire wrote celebratory odes, often sycophantic in tone. Hymns specially composed for the occasion were sung in churches throughout the land. And from the awnings of pubs and shops hung flags and bunting, as well as images of the long-reigning queen.
As the anniversary date neared, a sort of fever-pitch hysteria, an unreflective glorifying in empire, descended on London. While there were scattered political protests, notably by those calling for Irish independence, by and large the atmosphere was pure boosterism. Flags and anthems. Pomp and circumstance. Every day brought new celebrations, each one outdoing the next. There were soirees at Buckingham Palace with dozens of European monarchs, princes, and princesses sitting in attendance. There were gatherings in Hyde Park, in which tens of thousands of schoolchildren were given meat pies, sweet buns, and oranges in honor of the queen. There were military parades. New hospitals were opened. In May, Victoria even attended a special performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.[39] She was, reportedly, enchanted.
From the town of St. John, in Canada’s New Brunswick province, the poet William Peters Dole sent the words of his “Carmen Acadium: Ode for the Jubilee Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria.” “Now let glad song arise and pious prayer, / Let merry feast and grave solemnity / Shew to the world a mighty nation’s jubilee.” Dole extolled the virtues of the globe-encompassing empire, uncritically positing Britannia’s role in the world as being to bring enlightenment to troubled, backward lands—lands that now stretched from the “Orient” to the “sacred Ganges” and the “Abode of Snow,” all the way to “Africa’s dark coasts, / Where slavery and horrid heathen rites / From age to age have trod man to the ground.”[40]
On June 21, with royalty and political luminaries gathered from around the world to pay tribute to Victoria, the aging sovereign was conveyed to Westminster Abbey in an open landau, the four-wheel carriage—the wheels painted a vivid red, the body of the vehicle black—drawn through central London by six large horses from the royal stables. She was guarded on her journey by an escort of turbaned Indian cavalry and British guardsmen, some sporting red uniforms and plumed hats, others dark-blue uniforms. Some reports from the day mention seventeen princes, from Russia, Britain, Prussia, and elsewhere, among the mounted bodyguard.
Slowly they proceeded from the palace, through Trafalgar Square and on to Westminster Abbey. Red, white, and blue bunting, the colors of the Union Jack, hung from all the public buildings and surrounded Trafalgar Square’s famous lions. Under shop awnings, dotted around the square, and atop the roofs of the grand stone buildings, the museums and