Their Home Life and Social Life

While their grief over Charlie’s death, the effects of climate and of illness, and Anna Whistler’s disinclination to venture out into what she called “the gay quarter of this showy city,”1 kept them mostly at home in the final months of 1843, the family began very soon after their arrival to attend Sunday morning service at the English Church (see Images 110–111), where they remained communicants during their entire stay. The rare occasions on which Anna Whistler missed a Sunday service were her near collapse at the approaching first anniversary of Charlie’s death and her ministrations to the dying Miss Hirst. Every morning, James and Willie would pass through their mother’s dressing room and head for the parlor, where they studied assigned scripture lessons until it was time for prayers, which took place at eight o’clock. After the blessing, they would recite a verse from the Psalms and their mother would give the response. When Anna Whistler rose from her knees, she would embrace Debo; only then did they have breakfast. Every night, she spent an hour with the boys at their bedside reading sacred biography or scripture or religious travels to them and commenting on it. On Saturday nights, James and Willie had a bath. On Sundays, the family went to the service at the English Church in the morning and sometimes to the afternoon service as well. Otherwise, Anna Whistler went to the non-conformist British and American Congregational Church (see Image 125) in the afternoon.2 Later in their stay, they sometimes traveled to a third service in the schoolroom at the Alexandrofsky Head Mechanical Works (see Images 223–225), where the locomotives and rolling stock for the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway were being manufactured, and the Harrisons, the Eastwicks, and Thomas Winans lived. On Sunday evening, one of them read a sermon – often by Henry Blunt – to the others. In the afternoons of other days, Debo and Anna Whistler read aloud to each other works like Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1843).

Anna Whistler made an effort to be cheerful for her husband’s sake. That autumn, they accepted Colonel Todd’s invitation for the grownups alone to visit the Winter Palace (see Images 114–117). They began to return the calls of those who had left their cards, and their social life became very full. They made good friends of the Ropeses and their cousin, George Henry Prince; the Maingays (see Images 258–264); the Gellibrands (see Images 265–266); and the Woods (see Images 271–272); and readily expanded their social engagements to these homes, to which generally the piety of the wives drew Anna Whistler. Eventually they became friends with the Mirrieleeses (see Images 268–269), who were close to the Ropeses and Gellibrands and, like them, dissenters. There was much social interchange with the Harrisons (see Images 226–227) and the Eastwicks (see Images 233–238), once the wives and children arrived. The sympathizing young widowed Mrs. Nicol Baird, old widowed Mrs. Charles Baird (for Charles Baird, see Image 274), and Miss Krehmer, who had witnessed Charlie’s death on the boat to Cronstadt, were great favorites. The very sociable Laws (see Image 253) accepted Whistler invitations, and so the invitations by their “merry pastor”3 to dances held in his home every other week were in turn accepted, though reluctantly, by Anna Whistler, who did not approve of dancing. The Francis Bairds (see Image 275) seemed at first not to fare too well in their relationship with the Whistlers. Anna Whistler did not enjoy the Bairds’ wedding anniversary dinner. She did not like Mrs. Baird’s parents nor approve of the fact that Mrs. Baird and her family pretended to Mrs. Baird’s mother that the latter was not seriously ill. Eventually, she softened towards them. The Cazalets seemed not to fare at all well in their relationship with the Whistlers. They met at one of the Laws’ parties, but Anna Whistler declined Mrs. Cazalet’s invitation to a further meeting. Still, given the gaps in the diaries, some sketchy relationships may have been fuller than it seems. Major Whistler’s position could and may have won him social invitations from his Russian colleagues, but only a semi-official outing with them is recorded in the diaries. He became friendly with the English sea captain John Kruger, but in general he very reluctantly allowed himself to be separated from his family. The diaries chiefly record visits from his Russian colleagues to the Whistler home: Colonel Pavel Mel’nikov (see Image 247), who was overseeing the building of the northern half of the railroad; Mel’nikov’s brother Aleksandr, who held a court position, and his wife; the railroad contractor Major Trouvellier, and his wife; and Major Ivan Bouttatz, who had come to the United States to accompany Whistler to Russia, and for whom – with great affection – they named their last child. Captain Kruger also came by often. John Stevenson Maxwell, who became a dear friend to the entire family, was a frequent guest upstairs. Living with the Whistlers saved his life when he contracted typhoid fever. There were also many transient guests: the Bodiscos (see Images 283–285) and de Stoeckl (see Image 286) of the Russian diplomatic corps on home leave from Washington; Sylvanus Thayer (see Image 318), superintendent of West Point when Major Whistler was a cadet, traveling now for his health with Charles Parker (see Image 319), a young medical student; William Robertson, a recent West Point graduate; the Scottish painter Sir William Allan (see Image 320), whose comments on James’s artistic talent changed James’s life in St. Petersburg; Dr. Edward Maynard, the dentist and firearms inventor (see Image 329); the Bliss family, their Springfield friends, who visited them briefly while on the Grand Tour; and Rev. Robert Baird, along with reverends Brinsmade and Rankin, all Americans, who dined with them and preached in St. Petersburg before going off to the Evangelical Alliance Conference in London in 1846 and who were accompanied by a young lawyer named Beach. Eventually, Anna Whistler ventured out to shop in the elegant stores on the Nevskii Prospekt and adjacent streets, especially Bol’shaia Morskaia (see Image 109). Mr. Ropes and Mrs. Maingay (see Image 259), fluent in Russian, helped her make her purchases until her own children learned enough Russian to act as interpreters.

The Whistlers always preferred domestic life to what Anna Whistler called “dissipation,” and in their domestic life an unceremonious sociability appealed most to them, as it was “the truest hospitality and involves less anxiety.”4 “Dissipation” was her term for what she considered to be the empty social whirl that failed as well to honor the Sabbath. They entertained from Monday through Friday, but she was adamant that on Saturday afternoon all toys and amusements be put aside,5 in order “to make the last day of the week a day of preparation for the first.” This was the prelude to the Sabbath, on which no guests were received by them nor invitations accepted, for, “as you spend Sunday so will your work in all the week days prosper or not.” In time, even the worldly and the less pious accepted her requirement. Few exceptions were made: going to select a dacha one Sunday – the only day Mr. Ropes was free to join them and interpret – and on that same Sunday a drawing lesson from Mons. Vaney for James, to break the latter’s monotonous seclusion during an attack of rheumatic fever.

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The Bobrinskii house (see Images 88–94), despite its flaw – to Western taste – that like all Russian houses it had too many rooms for show and receiving guests,6 was very comfortable. They had a carriage and a sledge. They had an icehouse. They had their own cow. Major Whistler kept canaries, most of which died, and presented his wife with pots of white roses and tuberoses, all expensive acquisitions from the celebrated English Magazine (see Image 108).7 Their life was made easier by the luxury of a staff of seven or eight servants, with that greatest of assets: an English-speaking cook. Whistler felt that servants “had claims next to children upon the heads of families for forbearance, kindness and watchful care, exercising control to keep them in the safe path of integrity, & encouraging them to do well, by evincing an interest in their conduct and concerns.”8 The Whistlers treated their servants “kindly and with confidence”9 and with a humaneness they would not have encountered in many Russian households.10 In instituting her Sabbath rules, Anna Whistler took the servants into consideration as well: they needed their rest, too, after six days’ labor. They paid their servants “better than they could expect,”11 and gave them wonderful gifts at Christmas. Realizing that Alexander, the footman, had spent far too much for an Easter egg he presented to the family, Anna Whistler saw to it that he was reimbursed for his generous extravagance. They trusted their servants and were “unaccustomed to lock up from [them],”12 although Whistler, who was careless about safeguarding his money, had already had a substantial amount stolen from his desk just before his family’s arrival.13 When the Whistlers returned from Debo’s wedding in the autumn of 1847, they were laden with gifts for the servants. Anna Whistler found them “so respectful and willing.”

Their outdoor–indoor man (see Image 362), called Feodore (as well as Fritz and Frederic in the diaries), a poor serf with a wife and child to support in the country, seemed unable to do his work properly or to keep himself clean. Still, when he cried at the news that he was being discharged, Major Whistler was so moved that he paid off the already-hired replacement and gave Feodore another chance. This kindhearted gesture proved to be a mistake, because after Christmas 1843, Feodore – along with the German footman, Maurice – was accused of stealing the Major’s flute and Anna Whistler’s writing desk. Under advisement, both were let go. Alexander, the previous footman, who had been dismissed for refusing out of pride to go behind the carriage, was reinstated and learned his lesson. Some of the other servants did not have such shortsightedness. When the Whistlers returned from Debo’s wedding, they found that the cook and laundress, who had been let go for the summer, had not sought another post but were waiting to return to their employ. The post of coachman seems to have had several occupants, for reasons unexplained. Even the last one loved his drink, and Anna Whistler recorded some lapses and remembered him with a Bible when she departed Russia. The sickly servant Parasha, who went away with her husband expecting to die, became instead a widow. When she reappeared in the servants’ quarters and recounted to Anna Whistler her plight and her plans to enter a monastery, Anna Whistler wept with her and no doubt helped her in some way. Many of the servants remained with the Whistlers until Major Whistler’s death, and, before Anna Whistler left for America, she tried to find new positions for whomever she could.

The Whistlers’ kindness and charity extended also to a beggar woman with a little boy, Andrea, whom Whistler had befriended before his family arrived, most likely because of the child’s resemblance to his own recently deceased Kirk Boott. Anna Whistler continued to help them, admiring the independent child but appalled at the cringing mother, who kissed her feet. She allowed the child to come into their home but not the mother, giving him a coin for her when he left. She indulged Andrea by seating him on the steps and paying an itinerant organ grinder to entertain him. Giving a coin gratis to Andrea’s mother, however, eventually proved too much for her Yankee work ethic, and she set her to scrubbing to earn the money. Anna Whistler’s assessment of the lower classes as lazy, filthy, ignorant, dishonest, and erroneous in their religious beliefs, who “seem to reflect no more than the dumb beast [sic] which perish,” never wavered, but her feelings echoed those of many foreigners encountering Russia.14 The entrepreneurs at Alexandrofsky were among the few who praised them, saying “the Russians were the best workers they had ever employed, there is no end to their patience, and they are very quick at imitation, and never think they know more than their employers.”15

The alcoholic Swedish draftsman, Hedenschoug, who performed his work in Whistler’s chancery in their home, received equally generous treatment. They were unaware he lied about his day of birth and bestowed gifts upon him on the day he had appropriated for himself. He married while in their employ and pretended he needed money to bury one of his children, though the child was not dead. Even when their silver began to disappear, they did not set about getting rid of him, for “father would not accuse him or any man without proof.”16 He cast suspicion on himself by ceasing to appear for work and had to be replaced.

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James and Willie were tutored at home, except for the autumn of 1846, when they were boarders at Monsieur Jean Jourdan’s school (see Image 27). They got sick so easily at Jourdan’s, from which Anna Whistler felt a wholesome moral life with the other boys was missing, as well, that she persuaded Whistler not to send them back after Christmas. A series of tutors and a mademoiselle passed through their lives, about most of whom even less is known than about the servants. Like the servants, they were the recipients of kind treatment and gifts. James and Willie could soon chatter quite readily in Russian, which they simply picked up, although the few Russian books in the family’s extant library suggest some formal study of the language. When James was left in England in the autumn of 1848, Willie attended Baxter’s Commercial School until he left St. Petersburg. There, he formally studied Russian because it was necessary for instruction in the sciences at Baxter’s. James and Willie studied French and, like Debo, German. Their father now set them English pieces to recite lest they should forget their native language. To the same end, they each read to their mother almost daily. Starting in late 1844, James took private drawing lessons on Saturdays. In addition, starting in 1845, during the week, he erratically attended a drawing course at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (see Images 154–157), across the river from their apartment on the English Embankment. They put on evening shows for family and guests, where they exhibited a newly acquired educational toy or gave a recitation, sometimes in French. Debo helped tutor the boys. Persuaded not to participate in the frivolity of Carnival, they were given instead the opportunity to ride sleds pulled by reindeer brought into town by Lapplanders (see Image 347) or to attend the puppet theater.

The pedagogical principles of the long-deceased English cleric, Rev. Legh Richmond (see Image 189), whom Anna Whistler so respected, seemed in part to guide her in the children’s home education. This is perhaps why they were given a magic lantern and a kaleidoscope, like Richmond’s children, and assigned Richmond’s verses on the solar system to commit to memory: the infusion of “piety … into every enjoyment or pleasure”17 as much as possible. They came to know Richmond’s famous Annals of the Poor and were attracted because of them to cottager Jane’s grave during their summer idyll on the Isle of Wight in 1848 (see Image 492). Anna Whistler was selective about which of Richmond’s principles she accepted. In some instances, they may simply have come to the same ideas independently. Like him, she disapproved of dancing and of theater with live actors (puppets were acceptable) or too many pleasures in one day. Like him, she objected to “a taste for public exhibition of any kind”18 and “accomplishments acquired only to gratify pride and vanity.”19 Like him, she was adamant about family privacy on Saturday and Sunday, but in their family they were not otherwise so strict as in Richmond’s family. Richmond went so far that he would not allow his children to be with other families, not even with relatives, lest they be subject to influences other than those of their parents. While, as in Richmond’s family, the Whistler family members each wrote the birthday celebrant a letter and gave gifts, Anna Whistler gave her children a party. She also permitted them to attend other children’s parties, except for those given by Mrs. Baird. She “always refused Mrs. F. Baird’s children’s parties … because they were after the model of her” grown-up parties.20 She felt, however, that James and Willie’s education was quite haphazard.

General Konstantin Chevkin of the Railway Commission (see Image 245), to whose son Monsieur Lamartine had been tutor before coming to work for the Whistlers, urged Major Whistler in 1847 to leave both James and Willie to be educated in England after Debo’s wedding. Major Whistler thought “they should profit of my stay in [Russia] to learn the languages.” Chevkin countered his opinion by asking, “is it worth the sacrifice of the more solid and proper education that England will afford and which our very atmosphere seems to reject?” While Whistler felt there was some truth in Chevkin’s statement that “the young men who have many languages here know nothing else, and these languages serve only to make them conceited and useless – they think because they know something that others do not that they are superior in everything,” he nevertheless brought his sons back to Russia and further home education. James was left in England only in 1848, when the state of his health made it imperative, but his parents clung to Willie and brought him back to Russia, placing him once again in a private school.21

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The house resounded with music every day. Major Whistler played the flute, and Debo was accomplished on the harp and piano. Debo often accompanied her father at their musical evenings, but she was the star. In the morning, she practiced. Ellen Ropes, organist at the British and American Congregational Church, whose husband’s family owned the only American mercantile establishment in St. Petersburg, began to come by early in the Whistlers’ stay on Galernaia Street to play duets with Debo. Other female acquaintances did the same. The first recorded mention of Debo’s lifelong friend-to-be, Emma Maingay (see Image 263), is a musical encounter. The Whistlers’ musical evenings drew many guests, including Russian colleagues, who had their own tradition of music in the home.22 Colonel Mel’nikov brought his brother, who, totally enchanted, proposed bringing his wife another time. Major Trouvellier’s wife, also a talented pianist, participated in performances. Mr. Curtis, an English contractor, would travel any distance to hear Debo play. Outside their home, Colonel Todd (see Image 278) provided a piano when she came to his birthday party. She was frequently the accompanist at the dances held by the Laws. One day James would paint At the Piano (1858–1859), portraying her playing (see Image 18), and many other works of his would bear titles combining colors and the names of musical forms. Debo also sang, but almost exclusively within the family circle, and charmed both Maxwell and Emma Maingay’s brother, William Bonamy (see Image 260), with a repertoire in several languages. Almost all the music was secular, which saddened Anna Whistler, but, while wishing for religious music to be performed and unable to play any instrument herself, she preferred this kind of evening to any other. Debo also gave piano lessons to James and Willie, and Anna Whistler hoped that if they attained any proficiency they might “contribute to the praise of God in public worship.”

The family participated as well in some of the rich musical life of St. Petersburg. Concerts were given most of the year, except summer. They were often charity events, some drawing more than two thousand people. But the main concert season took place within five weeks of Lent, from the second week up to Passion Week (see Images 378–379), while the theaters were closed, and sometimes several concerts would be given in one day. The Italian Opera performed in the fall and winter, and 1843 through 1845 were its legendary seasons.23 When the season ended, the singers stayed on for the Lenten events. There were also university concerts in the form of musical mornings.24 The St. Petersburg Philharmonic gave two or three concerts a year.25 Harp concerts were probably not given while the Whistlers were in St. Petersburg; harp performance had descended from the concert stage to the amusement park and tavern restaurant, alienating the upper classes.26 Concerts were not performed in Orthodox churches, but rehearsals of the Court Choir took place on Fridays and were open to the public.27 The choir of the German Singakademie also had rehearsals one could attend every week.28 The Liedertafel gave public concerts in the Lutheran Church of St. Peter (see Image 129).29 Organ concerts were also held there.30 Of the great composers who came to St. Petersburg while the Whistlers were there, Robert Schumann visited with his wife on her concert tour in 1844 (see Images 199–200), and Berlioz performed in March and April of 1847.31 Liszt played in 1842 and 1843, but while Major Whistler was in Russia without his family he lived a solitary and lonely life and, when they arrived in the fall of 1843, their grief and poor health isolated them as well.

The enjoyment of this wealth of music was at times endangered by the religious caveats of Anna Whistler and her preference for sacred music and for a life withdrawn from the world, as well as governed by considerations of Debo’s health. Anna Whistler was moved most by the unnerving singing of the choristers at the rehearsals of the Court Choir. It carried her off to the realms of the dead, where she hoped one day to dwell with the little sons she had lost. At Easter 1844, she went with Mr. Ropes “to hear the mass so beautifully sung” in the Catholic Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria (see Image 127). Living on the Peterhof Road she appreciated the “chaunting” of the monks during the service at the Trinity-Sergius Monastery (see Image 397). Only in her own church did she not like the singing, which was performed by a choir of German boys. She attended no public musical events, except for one Imperial charity evening, where the Italian Opera greats Viardot-Garcia, Tamburini, and Rubini sang without impressing her (see Images 196–198).

The fact that Debo wished to attend secular public musical events even in Lent was a bone of contention between them, but Debo, the professional musician, would not budge and went to hear Clara Schumann twice. She attended The Barber of Seville by the Italian Opera troupe at the end of its first glorious season – with Anna Whistler’s reluctant approval – and Anna Whistler’s letters show that she went on to attend other Lenten performances over the years. She went to rehearsals of the Singakademie, because she was a member of the chorus. They sang only sacred music, and Anna Whistler – and sometimes Major Whistler – went too. Debo’s study of German drew her to some of the other German performance venues. She probably went to the organ concerts at the Lutheran Church of St. Peter, and therefore was interested in hearing a new organ tested one evening. She seemed to react less emotionally than Anna Whistler to the singing of the Court Choir, exchanging impressions with Emma Maingay, while Anna Whistler wept.

Beyond the concert halls and churches, there was music everywhere: the workers singing their melancholy songs while they built the new bridge; the peasants singing on the Peterhof Road, whose songs Emma Maingay told Debo contained low words; Sir William Allan’s niece singing Scottish and Spanish songs, whom Debo went to hear at a private home; the powerful singing voice of Mrs. Ropes penetrating the walls of their adjoining apartments; the vocal and instrumental performances of hostesses and their families at the dachas they visited; the organ grinders in the courtyards; the street musicians; the bands and orchestras at Ekateringof, the Summer Garden, the Pavlovsk Vauxhall (pleasure garden), and the islands of the Neva (see Images 406, 149, 384, 105).

Apart from music, other aspects of Russian cultural life in St. Petersburg were essentially non-existent for them. They began to attend exhibits at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts only when James became a student in the drawing courses. The literary scene is not mentioned. They seem not to have known that the great fabulist, Ivan Krylov (see Image 186), whom General Destrem (see Image 246), Major Whistler’s colleague, had translated into French, died in November 1844. Poor People, the first novel of the young, still-unknown Dostoevskii (see Image 187), a literary event in 1846, passed unremarked. If Anna Whistler knew that the governess, Miss McLean’s, employer, Mrs. Olenina (see Image 306), was the daughter of the recently deceased president of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (see Image 307), we are not made aware of it. Lack of knowledge of Belinskii’s death in June 1848 (see Image 188) might be excused because Anna Whistler and the boys were on their way to England. Even William Ropes’s brother, Joseph Samuel, who had received a Russian education, graduating from the Third Gymnasium and St. Petersburg University, was deeply interested only in translating and distributing tracts in Russia until he left permanently in 1847.

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Now, besides celebrating George Washington’s birthday, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and their own birthdays, they had two Christmases and two New Years, the second ones coming twelve days after the Western ones, and two Easters, if this movable feastday did not coincide with their own. They were not allowed two birthdays, but much was made of the one they had, especially James’s tenth. Besides the Blessing of the Waters at Epiphany followed by the celebration marking the opening of navigation (see Image 349), other Russian celebrations were the Carnival festivities preceding Lent and renewed just before Easter; the first of May promenade at Ekateringof;32 and Whitsunday (usually Whitmonday) with its matchmaking that some foreigners likened to Valentine’s Day.33 There were also the official holidays that freed James and Willie from their lessons: the day of Alexander I’s death and Nicholas I’s succession to the throne; the birthdays or namedays of Imperial family members; numerous church holidays, with their folk counterparts; and feast days (see Images 375–382 for icons of some Russian holy days). Easter was the greatest holiday for the Russian Orthodox Church and for Anna Whistler, for whom Christ was the center of her life. Many pages of her diaries are devoted year after year to both the religious and the secular aspects of the Easter season.

Their friends fluent in Russian, members of the American Legation, and Major Whistler’s colleagues kept them informed of important internal events, such as Russian court life and the cholera. The special Imperial occasions during their stay in Russia were the marriages in 1844 of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Nikolaevna (see Images 434–435, 444–446) and of her first cousin, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Mikhailovna (see Images 441–442), when Debo was a spectator at the dinner and ball held for the latter and Maxwell regaled the Whistlers with stories of the functions he attended as a diplomat until he fell seriously ill; the tragic decline of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Nikolaevna from tuberculosis and her death after childbirth that same year (see Images 447–460); the death of Grand Duchess Elizaveta Mikhailovna the following year also in childbirth; the marriage in 1846 of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (see Images 420, 432–433), when the Whistlers attended the public festivities at Peterhof, with Colin Ingersoll (see Image 280) filling them in on the private marriage ceremony; the betrothal and marriage of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich (see Images 436–438) in 1847; and the births and christenings of numerous Imperial grandchildren.

Anna Whistler was made aware of all the phases of the pregnant Grand Duchess Aleksandra Nikolaevna’s fading life and her death. Friends reported and Anna Whistler witnessed personally that the revolutions of 1848 in Europe resulted in greater public appearances by the emperor and empress with many changes of costume in the course of the same day. The French edition of the official Russian newspaper contained public statements that she could understand and even copied into her diaries. Her Philadelphia friend Henriette Halbach, who in 1848 may have been living permanently in Germany, commented on the revolutions of 1848 in a letter cited in the diaries. With the appearance of the cholera, friends informed them that the populace was stirred – as in 1830–1831 – to seek its scapegoats in Russia’s old political enemy, the Poles, who were accused of poisoning the food, and in foreign doctors, some of whom were being killed.

They were aware of major political events in America chiefly through family correspondence. American newspapers were expensive to receive; moreover, they arrived “mutilated with ink, and pumice stone, where the Govt Censors had erased objectionable matter.”34 Sometimes Major Whistler went to read them uncensored at the American Legation in Tsarskoe Selo. The main topics of interest for the little American colony were the Mexican War and the possibility of hostilities over the Oregon Territory (see “Maps”). The Mexican War had an extremely personal aspect. It meant that Major Whistler’s eldest brother, William, and William’s son Joseph (see Images 34–35), both in the army, had been called up for active duty. Captain William G. Williams, a West Point acquaintance, was killed. The possibility of hostilities over the Oregon Territory was personal as well: Anna Whistler did not wish to see America and England at war, because she loved both countries and had close relatives and good friends in England as well as English-born friends in America.

They learned also of the many accidents in which steamers both international and local – still the major mode of domestic travel in those early days of the railroad – burned or exploded or were shipwrecked or were delivered when death seemed inevitable. Anna Whistler had experienced such a loss personally: years before, a sister had died by drowning, along with her husband and two children, when they could not get out of their cabin before their capsizing steamer flooded.35

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Geographically, the family’s life was quite circumscribed. When Major Whistler was not in St. Petersburg, he was traveling between St. Petersburg and Moscow with his superior, Count Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmikhel’ (see Image 243), to inspect the progress of the work on the route of the forthcoming railway. Anna Whistler and the children spent their Russian sojourn entirely in St. Petersburg and its environs, with the sole exception that in June of 1848, Willie accompanied his father on an inspection trip.36

Major and Anna Whistler did not see eye-to-eye about the Bobrinskii house. He wanted to keep renting it “because of the respectability of its situation and character,” but she thought “it too large and expensive,”37 as he refused to have any tenant but Maxwell in the rooms the latter was presently occupying. Maxwell, however, expected to be leaving Russia. In early 1844, they began to consider taking a dacha,38 as their family physician, Dr. James Rogers of the British Legation, had told them “it [was] necessary for the health of the boys to be in [the] country during the 4 months of Summer.”39 Possibilities were the nearby Peterhof Road, which ran along the shore of the Gulf of Finland, where some of their friends and acquaintances owned or rented dachas, or a bathing place on the Baltic Sea. The Major did “not like the miserable country and country houses in the vicinity,”40 but it was impossible for him to leave his work and accompany his family to the Baltic seacoast, so the Peterhof Road was chosen. Anna Whistler prevailed, and they gave up the Bobrinskii house permanently on 13 May 1844. They moved their household goods in carts to “a delightful country house looking just [then] like the banks of the Potomac,”41 belonging to Thomas Drury, Senior, a bleach manufacturer. It was located “about 3½ miles from the city barrier,”42 a short distance Whistler could easily travel every day. Here they passed May to September 1844. They frequently visited the hospitable Gellibrand dacha, where the Ropes family spent their summers, with Mr. Ropes, like most exchange merchants of the First Guild, remaining in town all week and coming out on Saturday. Mrs. Gellibrand (see Images 266–267) was deeply devoted to distributing religious tracts to the Russian troops who traveled the Peterhof Road back and forth between St. Petersburg and Peterhof. She found willing helpers in James, Willie, and Anna Whistler, who were advised to pitch the tracts from a distance lest the recipients, in their eagerness, knock them down. Mr. Drury had several houses on his estate, and they came to know the occupants of his other dachas: Mrs. Norman in one and Mr. Drury’s son, William, with his wife and ten children in another. Anna Whistler held Sunday School at the Whistler dacha, where James and Willie were joined by the Norman, Drury, and Handyside children. The family branched out and accepted invitations to the Baird and Anderson dachas, where Anna Whistler particularly enjoyed the music. They went on excursions to the Aleksandrofsky Head Mechanical Works (see Images 223–225), where the Harrison (see Images 226–227) and Eastwick (see Images 233–238) families lived in a house on one side of the Works (see Images 239–240) and, in a house on the other side of the Works, Thomas DeKay Winans (see Image 229) had bachelor quarters until his marriage in the summer of 1847. The Harrison quarters “had a home look,” with their rocking chairs and their “portraits of Washington and Franklin on the walls.”43 There, they attended Sunday services held for the mechanics in the schoolroom by Rev. Thomas Ellerby (see Image 256) of the British and American Congregational Church of St. Petersburg and were taken to the works to see locomotives, passenger cars, and wheels being made. James and Willie rode the Eastwick boys’ ponies. They traveled back into St. Petersburg for Sunday morning services at the English Church (see Images 110–111) and for an excursion in Ekateringof Park with its old wooden palace, serpentine walkways, and amusements (see Images 405–406). They went up river to the factory run by General Alexander Wilson, where linens and playing cards were made (see Images 241–242). They long anticipated and perhaps finally took an excursion to Lake Ladoga (see Image 404). The adults went to the famed Trinity-Sergius Monastery on the Peterhof Road (see Image 397) to hear a service, but especially for the singing. The Gellibrands took them (without James and Major Whistler, who were at Aleksandrofsky) to the neighboring estate of Count Grigorii Grigorievich Kushelev (see Image 302) to witness the annual fête he gave for his peasants. James celebrated his tenth birthday, thrilling his mother with a poem avowing his love for her, albeit borrowed from Thomas Moore. Aunt Alicia (see Image 39) came that summer for a visit and stayed for over a year that culminated in the birth of John Bouttatz Whistler.

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Living on the Peterhof Road, they made day trips to the Imperial summer-residence towns of Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof (see Images 383–394, 400–403). “The country beyond the city, and in the direction of Moscow, is flat and unattractive”44 and occupied by factories, while on the road to Peterhof, with its very attractive dachas, Imperial residences, and the monastery (see Image 397), one encountered overpowering clouds of dust in the summer heat, unless it rained, and then the dust turned to thick mud.45 Mosquitoes were also plentiful. Living in the country, they experienced the curious phenomenon of a watchman on each estate beating during the night with a pair of sticks on a board nailed to two posts in order to warn thieves away and indicate to his master that he was carrying out his job.46

They had already visited Tsarskoe Selo, where Colonel Todd lived, in early May of 1844, when they were still tenants in Bobrinskii’s house, invited by Maxwell, who sought to repay them for saving his life. They traveled then for the first time on the first and only railway line existing in Russia, which ran from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo and then three kilometers further to Pavlovsk (see Image 383), and found it primitive by American standards. The perfect neatness of quiet inland Tsarskoe Selo, uniform in its layout, with macadamized roads and carefully kept gardens, where trees were washed and paths looked like parquet floors, enchanted Anna Whistler. She did not see it, with Colin Ingersoll’s eyes, as “built with the same regularity and uniformity – in a straight line – like a body of Russian soldiers drawn up for Review.”47 They visited only the Great Tsarskoe Selo Palace (also called simply the Catharine Palace; see Image 385), able to do so because the heir apparent was not in residence. She recorded the opulence of Catherine the Great’s apartments and skeptically regarded the arrangement of Alexander I’s study as an attempt to create the illusion that it looked just as it had in his lifetime. James said he would have liked to know more about the paintings in the espaliered main gallery. On that trip, they had also visited Pavlovsk, going by carriage from Colonel Todd’s house. They visited only the pleasure garden pavilion – the terminus for the train (see Image 384) – on the private property of the emperor’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich. In the pavilion, one could take refreshment, dine, and dance. A military band and an orchestra played alternately. It would not have appealed much to Anna Whistler, and there seems to be no record that they went there again.

From their dacha, they traveled by carriage to Tsarskoe Selo again in August of 1844 with Aunt Alicia. Anna Whistler described in the diaries in some detail the collections of the Armory, the grounds of the Alexander Palace, where Nicholas I resided, and the Chinese bridge with its lifelike figures in the Alexander Park (see Images 388–394).

That same August, they visited Peterhof (see Images 400–403), where Nicholas I resided in the Cottage and the heir apparent in the Great Peterhof Palace, which precluded visiting either residence. Peterhof, in contrast to Tsarskoe Selo, resounded with the rumble of jetting and cascading water, creating a light spray of shimmering moisture, forming a transparent vault over the spacious central basin, transforming broad steps into crystal staircases with glasslike cloches, turning quivering droplets into diamond dust, and producing rainbows.48 Anna Whistler recorded their impressions of the central fountains in front of the Great Peterhof Palace in the Upper Garden, the bath house, and Peter the Great’s favorite palace, Monplezir, in the Lower Garden. James was most taken by the Samson fountain and the athletes and serpents shooting streams of water. He was moved to laughter in the Peterhof Hermitage (Little Monplezir) by paintings of birds produced by Peter the Great’s own hand, but Anna Whistler felt they should be “most highly prized” for that very reason.49

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In September of 1844, they moved into a spacious ten-room apartment with a balcony on the third floor of a house on the English Embankment belonging to a merchant named Ritter. They had a view from their living room of the Neva in all its seasonal transformations and of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts opposite (see Images 154–155). As the landing for the Cronstadt steamer was located near them, from their balcony they could observe the animated arrival and departure of its passengers.50 At the start of spring, for a brief while, the crowds shifted from the muddy sidewalks of the Nevskii Prospekt to the wide, clean, and dry granite pavement of the English Embankment (see Images 101–104).51 Here they promenaded from two to four in the afternoon until Bright Week, the week after Easter, when they abandoned the English Embankment for the Summer Garden (see Image 149).52 During the three months of summer, from six o’clock every evening until late into the night, elegantly dressed musicians gave “Petersburg serenades” on horn and wind instruments from boats floating past the English Embankment.53

They lived here for four years and eight months. The Ropeses moved from the Galernaia and became their neighbors across the landing. In the summer of 1845, they remained in St. Petersburg, where John Bouttatz Whistler, the last child, was born. After his birth, Debo left St. Petersburg to spend a year with the Winstanleys in Preston, Lancashire. In 1846, Major Whistler prevailed: they did not take a dacha again. That summer, they frequently traveled from St. Petersburg to visit friends who continued to summer on the Peterhof Road. In July, afraid of a possible mishap on the water, they hired a coach to take them and the Crufts – visiting Americans consigned to their care – all the way to Peterhof to join in the public festivities celebrating the marriage of Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna and His Highness Prince Karl of Württemberg (see Images 420, 432–433). The crowd was limited to the grounds of the Upper and Lower Gardens, and it was the illuminations and the milling mass of people that Anna Whistler concentrated on recording. In August, they visited Tsarskoe Selo again. It had been approximately two years since the death of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Nikolaevna, and Anna Whistler devoted herself to viewing the oratory created in her memory in the room where she had died in the Alexander Palace, as well as other monuments to her within the Alexander Park (see Images 450–457). In October of 1846, the Whistlers suffered their own loss: John Bouttatz died. His body was sent to Stonington to be buried with his brothers.

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James’s attack of rheumatic fever in 1847 made Dr. Rogers advise them to shift the summer location for Anna Whistler and the boys to England. Although such separations were commonplace for the foreign community of St. Petersburg, this was the beginning of the family’s breakup. In the summer of 1847, they lived with the Winstanleys and enjoyed the rural beauty of England. On this visit to Preston, they were introduced to at least one of the Cotton Lords of the town, Charles Swainson, at whose home in Walton-le-Dale, Cooper Hill (see Image 464), James celebrated his thirteenth birthday. Anna Whistler became aware of the unrest among the unemployed mill workers or at least recorded it for the first time. Debo, who had traveled separately through Europe to England with the Blisses, announced, on joining her family, that a young English doctor named Francis Seymour Haden (see Image 20) wished to marry her and with no delay. Deeply unhappy over the impending marriage, Whistler took his second leave from Russia to be present at their wedding in October, which was marred by his depression. He and Anna Whistler and the boys returned to St. Petersburg in late October.

In June of 1848, James had another severe attack of rheumatic fever, and the cholera began to rage with full force. Europe was rife with revolutions. Dr. Rogers, who was himself leaving Russia temporarily because of the epidemic and possibly because of the scapegoat killing of doctors, advised everyone he could to leave. Anna Whistler took the boys to England again. They lived with the Hadens, who were expecting their first child in December. She managed finally to visit her old friend of eighteen years before, Georgina Shaw (see Image 486), who ran a school for girls in Clapham. In July, they traveled to the Isle of Wight for a holiday of several weeks. They lodged in the village of Shanklin, where they made the acquaintance of a family named Phillips and encountered other escapees from the cholera in St. Petersburg, some of them Russian. Mrs. Morgan read from her husband’s frank letters about the devastation being wreaked by the cholera epidemic, while Major Whistler’s reports were calculated not to distress his family. They made daily excursions, often in the company of the Phillipses, to popular sights: within Shanklin and to its chine, Bonchurch, Ventnor, Culver Cliffs, Appuldurcombe, Blackgang Chine, St. Lawrence, and Rev. Legh Richmond’s Brading (see Images 489–496). James drew to his heart’s content. Debo and the Winstanleys visited them. They saw members of the well-known naval family of Napier and had a conversation with an intriguing “Lady D.” James’s health remained frail: he was not permitted to bathe in the sea and had to ride a donkey when they traveled any distance. At the end of the summer, Anna Whistler made the decision to leave him in England. She decided to leave Mary Brennan, too, to be of assistance to the pregnant Debo. She and Willie returned to St. Petersburg to find Whistler changed for the worse by the illness he had suffered over the summer. In November, he contracted cholera. Anna Whistler nursed him back to health, but his heart began to fail and, in April of 1849, he died. The Russian sojourn was over.54

Notes