Appendix E: Biographies

Leon

There are four sources for the life of Charlotte Leon (20 April 1764 – 24 January / 5 February 1847): Anna Whistler’s diaries, the BRBC STP 1845,1 the PREC STP (no. 5690), and a single extant letter written by Mrs. Leon.

It is important to remember that Anna Whistler’s knowledge of Mrs. Leon’s biography was completely second-hand: she says she heard none of it from Mrs. Leon herself. The Gellibrands, who were Mrs. Leon’s “constant friends these many years past,”2 were probably Anna Whistler’s major source. In addition to the possible mistakes of memory on the part of those narrating Mrs. Leon’s biography to Anna Whistler, she herself demonstrated more than once in the two parts of the diaries that she confused details of the lives of others. What she herself perceived in the personality of her grateful, “cheerful, useful … so neat & erect”3 friend, Mrs. Leon, was “her lively manner and intellectual remarks,” “her high regard for traits of good encountered in her extensive knowledge of the world,” and that “her usual deportment shewed she had been accustomed to the best society.” It was “her humble yet exalted aim to do all the good in her power”; indeed, one of “her favorite texts” was “‘she has done all she could’.”4 She reminded Anna Whistler of her own mother, Martha (Kingsley) McNeill (see Image 22).

The single extant personal document illuminating Charlotte Leon’s biography is a personal letter in French that she wrote, when destitute, from St. Petersburg on 20 February 1831 (whether Old or New Style cannot be determined) to the 10th Duke of Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton Douglas (5 October 1767 – 18 August 1852; see Image 328), entreating him to grant her an annual pension.5

According to Anna Whistler’s diaries, Charlotte Leon was the niece of Dr. Edward Jenner (Berkeley, Gloucestershire 17 May 1749 – Berkeley, Gloucestershire 26 January 1823; see Image 193), the discoverer of vaccination, “her maiden name having been the same [as his] when a very young girl.” She accompanied him to Paris, where they spent so much time in the circle of Benjamin Franklin, then American Ambassador to France, that “[Franklin] always addressed her as his child.” She married “an officer in the British army” and “lived in the West Indies & at other stations abroad.” The children of this marriage did not survive, and both Mrs. Leon’s husband and father died. Her mother was old and had “a limited income,” while Mrs. Leon had no independent means. It was then that through “a lady of her acquaintance among the English nobility” she received a post in “a very distinguished Polish family” as governess to “their daughter, Olga” (see Images 324–327). After a period at their home in Poland, they moved to St. Petersburg “to complete the education of their children,” living there in a palace that, some forty years later (i.e., by the year 1847, in which Anna Whistler was writing about Mrs. Leon) had been “converted into a charitable institution.” Through the fêtes given by the Countess, “Mrs. Leon [had been] accustomed to meet the court circle of Imperial St. Petersburg for she was usually mistress of ceremonies” and “was familiar with the reigns” of Paul I, Alexander I and Nicholas I, about which she had many anecdotes to relate. Mrs. Leon spoke of the Polish Countess, her employer, as “beautiful, … charitable, … generous high-minded noble,” and felt great attachment to and admiration for her charge, Olga.6

There came a time when the “family [had to] leave St P to travel,” but Mrs. Leon was prevented from going with them because she suffered a fall that left her temporarily lame and took two years to recover from. She lost whatever savings she had “thro the dishonesty of an agent.” Many of her English countrymen then helped her. When able to work again, she may have taken a post in the Naryshkin family. Eventually she became “house keeper to Mr. Gellibrand” in Moscow for five years before he married his first wife. When he returned to Russia with his bride, Mrs. Leon retired. Aided by the English Factory, she “lived respected in private lodgings” in St. Petersburg, helping the poor, “visiting her few intimate friends,” and “making lint for the hospitals.”7 In the autumn of 1846, a Mrs. Snow invited the now-ill Mrs. Leon to leave her lodgings in the Galernaia and come to live in her home. It is here that Mrs. Leon died.8 Her funeral “was very respectably attended,”9 and Mrs. Gellibrand undertook to carry out her last wishes concerning her estate by selling “her furniture and clothing” for the benefit of the poor or distributing it “to the few of her pensioners.”10

In her letter of 20 February 1831, Mrs. Leon explained to the 10th Duke of Hamilton that she was Charlotte Leon, sixty-seven years old and infirm, who had the honor of having been personally known to him in Russia as governess to the countesses Potocki. He had at that time told her to feel free to call on him for help if circumstances should ever require it. She had not taken advantage of his offer, wishing instead to earn her bread independently, engaged in the education of young women. But the weight of years and the misfortune of having lost the small amount of capital she had by giving it to a family that had suffered irreparable losses and had been obliged to declare itself bankrupt had made her decide to take advantage of the Duke of Hamilton’s generous promise now and to beg him to make her final years independent and tranquil. Unable to further hold any situation, she wished to retire in St. Petersburg, where she at present was, with her fellow countrymen and live out her days quietly, but, having no means, could not do so. She therefore implored him to grant her an annual pension that would enable her to spend her last days independently, retired from the world. She gave her place of residence as Grande Morskoy Street (Bol’shaia Morskaia) in the building she said belonged to Rauz [should be Shtraukh] in the home of Madame Crayeffski [Kraevskaia], born Princess Schakoffskoi [Shakhovskaia].11

The following is the result of attempts to check the information given in Anna Whistler’s diaries and Mrs. Leon’s letter.

If we look at Anna Whistler’s statement that Charlotte’s maiden name was the same as Edward Jenner’s when she was a very young girl, a possible implication could be that her surname had changed while she was still a young girl, but well before she married, thus raising the question of whether the wives of any of Dr. Jenner’s relations were widowed and then remarried. The discovery of another surname for her might not help clarify her birth date and parents, but it might help us to find the details of her marriage and issue. The amount of research required to determine this surname makes the research prohibitive at this time. She herself signed her letter to the 10th Duke of Hamilton simply “Charlotte Léon,” revealing no maiden name. It is interesting that only in the burial register of the English Church was her Jenner connection noted and that because Rev. Law instituted (in 1841) the practice of entering the maiden name of a widow or married female in her burial entry, if it could be ascertained.12

Consultation of the IGI has failed to produce a birth date and parents for Charlotte Jenner. My selection of 20 April 1764 as her date of birth is based on the fact that on 15 April 1845, she told the Whistlers that “her 81st Anniversary of her birth day would be next Sunday,”13 which was 20 April.

As for the statement that Dr. Edward Jenner was her uncle, (the late) Canon J.E. Gethyn-Jones of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, who in 1988 was preparing a biography (unfinished) of Dr. Edward Jenner and was adamant that Charlotte was not Jenner’s niece, suggested that she belonged to a collateral line or may have been a “byblow,” of which there were a few in the family, to his knowledge. Of interest is his further information about the descendents of Edward Jenner’s older brother, Reverend Henry Jenner (1736–1798). The latter’s fourth son was Reverend George Charles Jenner (1767–1846), who was as well a medical doctor (an MD “of Paris”) and “visited Paris” more than once. But this son was born three years after Charlotte Jenner, and thus seems unlikely to be the doctor with whom she travelled to Paris. Reverend George Charles Jenner’s only son, George Charles Jenner, Esquire (1824–1892), had eleven children and named his third daughter Charlotte Jenner Jenner,14 but I believe she was named for her father’s aunt, Charlotte (Fryer) Jenner.15

As for Charlotte’s visits to Paris and her closeness to Benjamin Franklin (17 January 1706 – 17 April 1790), who purportedly always addressed her as “my child,” there is no corroboration.16 Franklin was in France from late 1776 until 1785. In 1778, he was appointed minister plenipotentiary to the French Court. Charlotte Jenner’s age in those years ranged from twelve to twenty-one. Given Franklin’s advanced age, she could have appropriately been called “my child” by him at any time in that period. Charlotte Jenner does not appear in Claude-Anne Lopez’s book about Franklin and the women he knew in Paris.17 But as he “kept an open house every Sunday for English and American visitors, … a visit may well have taken place,” although there seems to be “no written trace” of it.18

Although her surname changed from Jenner at an early age, the IGI, consulted for her marriage, failed to produce a marriage for a Charlotte Jenner to a man with the surname Leon. There are thus no records of the birth of her children, who did not survive. It has not been possible to find information in foreign or army registers about the marriages of men with the surname Leon to women with the first name Charlotte in the appropriate period.

The fact that Mrs. Leon wrote to the 10th Duke of Hamilton and identified herself as governess to the countesses Potocki constitutes strong evidence that the Potocki family by whom she was employed was that of Count Stanislaw Szczęsny Potocki (1752 – 16/28 March 1805; see Image 324), who married, as his third wife, his mistress the adventuress and “Greek beauty” of “libertine morals,” Zofia (Glavani) (Witt) (1760 – Berlin 12/24 November 1822; see Image 325).19 They had two daughters: Zofia (1801 – Paris 2 September 1875; see Image 327) and Olga (1802 – Paris 7 October 1861; see Image 326).20 The Potockis lived on an estate in Tulczyn in the south of Russia, as well as having a mansion in St. Petersburg.21 Alexander Hamilton Douglas had been appointed ambassador to the Court of St. Petersburg on 26 May 1806 and had been recalled in 1807 (becoming the 10th Duke of Hamilton in February 1819). He had remained in Russia and Poland until October 1808,22 traveling to Tulczyn in late 1807 with the widowed Countess Potocka, who was his lover.23 He could, therefore, only have become acquainted with Charlotte Leon in the short period (about two years and two months) between about February 1807 and October 1808 (when she was forty-three to forty-four years old).

While in the employ of the Potocki family, Mrs. Leon could also have met the Scottish artist, William Allan (see Image 320), who, during his first stay in Russia (July 1805 – August 1814), had lived in St. Petersburg from 1805–1807. Leaving St. Petersburg in late 1807 with Douglas and Countess Potocka, he had then traveled “through the southern parts of the Russian empire.” After “extended stays in the Ukraine, Crimea, Kuban and Caucasus regions,” sketching the local peoples and collecting their arms and armor, Allan spent at least eighteen months with the hospitable Countess and her family in Tulczyn in the period from 1810–1813.24

It is almost impossible to say when the trip that Mrs. Leon’s accident prevented her from making took place. However, her assessment of the Countess as good and high-minded had to belong to the period after 1810, which has been pinpointed as the year in which a change in the Countess’s moral behavior began, continuing until her death.25 In this period, she is said to have performed much philanthropy. She also devoted much time to a lengthy legal battle with her late husband’s sons from his second marriage, attempting to ensure the financial future of her own children by Szczęsny.26 This litigation required her to travel back and forth to St. Petersburg from Tulczyn. We know, for example, that in the summer of 1811 she received a summons from her own son to come to St. Petersburg without delay, and that she set out for the capital with her entire family.27 It is perhaps the return from St. Petersburg on this trip or on one like it that Mrs. Leon was prevented from making. The events of the Countess Potocka’s life between April 1811 and 1820 cannot be helpful, because her correspondence for this period is not in the Potocki archives.28 From the letters of people in St. Petersburg to the 10th Duke of Hamilton,29 we know that she was in St. Petersburg in June 1810 and in December 1810.30 She left St. Petersburg in the winter of 1811 (?) “on Acct of the Contracts at Kieff.”31 It is said that she was in St. Petersburg during the War of 1812.32 In July 1813, she was at Tulczyn.33

The Naryshkin family in which Mrs. Leon is said to have taken a situation two years after her injury cannot be identified. It is tempting to conjecture, despite the order of the narration by Anna Whistler, that perhaps the Naryshkin family for whom Mrs. Leon worked was that of Lev Aleksandrovich Naryshkin (1785–1846), who married her former charge, Countess Olga Potocka, on 23 March / 4 April 1824.34 Mrs. Leon would thus have taken up the post after Mr. Gellibrand’s first marriage. But the Naryshkins’ only daughter, Sophie, was born in 1829,35 when Mrs. Leon’s age would have been an impediment to her taking such a situation.

As her position of Mr. Gellibrand’s housekeeper in Moscow, previous to his first marriage, lasted five years, and he married in December 1825 in England, Mrs. Leon would have to have taken up this employment no later than 1820–1821.

She certainly did not abuse Alexander Hamilton Douglas’s offer, waiting some twenty-five years before approaching him for help in 1831. Whether he gave her financial aid so long after meeting her cannot be determined, as there is no extant reply to her, no acknowledgment from her, and the Hamilton family archives do not have any nineteenth-century “account books relating to payments to destitute individuals.”36

However her financial situation may have been resolved, Mrs. Leon’s friends and compatriots helped her to varying degrees. When Anna Whistler invited her to dinner, she was living at 54 Galernaia Street,37 in lodgings where there was a curfew. There were few luxuries she could allow herself, so Anna Whistler sent her back to her lodgings with a bottle of cream.38 Dr. James Rogers, her physician, personally had her prescriptions filled and paid for them himself.39 In the autumn of 1846, Mary Snow (born Dillow), widow of Thomas Snow, invited the now-ill Mrs. Leon to move to her home at 20 Karavannaia Street (in the house of Kuprianov, in the First Ward of the Third Admiralty District).40 It is here that Mrs. Leon died. After a funeral service in the English Church (see Images 110–111), she was buried on 28 January / 8 February 1847, in the Smolensk Cemetery.41

Notes