Preface

The St. Petersburg diaries of Anna McNeill Whistler, which she kept from 1843 to 1848, while her husband, Major George Washington Whistler, was supervising the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway, are held in Special Collections in the New York Public Library. They have been consulted, cited, and analyzed by many scholars, but anyone who undertakes to deal with that period in the Whistlers’ lives has to know Russian and be able to work with Russian archival materials. Richard M. Haywood, who both knew Russian and was a railway enthusiast, was able to do that, and therefore left us archival-based biographical information about some of Major Whistler’s Russian colleagues in his book Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842–1855 about the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway. However, the authors of biographies of Anna McNeill Whistler and James McNeill Whistler – such as Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell, Kate McDiarmid, Elizabeth Mumford, Georgia Toutziari, and Daniel Sutherland – have not known Russian, and therefore could not go beyond pointing out and analyzing the valuable revelation in the diaries of Anna Whistler’s religious and pious character and her relationship with and own analysis of the other members of her family, of the St. Petersburg foreign and Russian community, and of persons met en route both to and from St. Petersburg.1

My decision to undertake editing and annotation of the diaries was based on the fact that I am fluent in Russian and have extensive experience in Russian archives and, like others such as Sutherland, while not an art historian, was drawn to my project partly by an interest in James McNeill Whistler: in my case to him as an artist of the ephemeral. I had in mind to produce an annotated edition that would enable scholars to deal with the Russian period in the Whistlers’ lives at a more profound level. I had hoped to do this by identifying as many as possible of the people and events that Anna Whistler mentions and by addressing James Whistler’s childhood in St. Petersburg, which he called “his cradle” as an artist, and about which almost nothing had been written or was erroneous. I have succeeded in researching both those projects. For example, I was able to consult young James Whistler’s record at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and discovered that the information supplied to the Pennells when they were writing Whistler’s biography was incorrect. I was able to consult the service records of Russians and foreigners in Russian service, whom Anna Whistler mentions and to put together biographies for them. I have also ascertained the identities of almost everyone in the diaries and, having worked directly or indirectly with documents in Russian, Polish, English, German, Latin, French, Italian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch, have created an Appendix of forty-seven biographies of individuals and family groups, about most of whom little has hitherto been known.

In order to be faithful in detail to the 1840s, I first consulted Russian printed materials of that period by researchers such as Bur’ianov, Grech, Pushkarev, and Tsylov, then moved on to the works of later eminent Russian cultural historians such as Kurbatov, Stolpianskii, and Lukomskii, and up into the twenty-first century with its explosion of detailed cultural historical materials – some of them annotated reprints – about St. Petersburg.

The same is true of images of St. Petersburg. I have sought to reproduce only illustrations produced in the 1840s. For example, at that time, policemen on duty in sentry boxes on the street ceased carrying a halberd; therefore, if only an image from the 1830s showing them holding a halberd was known to me, I explain that this detail would have been anachronistic in the 1840s.

Through the generosity of descendants of people in the diaries, I am able to present portraits of many of them, thus enriching the pictorial panorama of locations and events to more than 250 images.

Some endnotes are short essays in themselves. They, along with the introductory chapters and the biographies in Appendix E, constitute an attempt at an encyclopedia of the Whistlers’ lives in the 1840s. I preferred to supply readers with the information through quotations, rather than send them only to the sources and thus thin out their experience.

This annotated edition of the diaries, as well as being of interest to scholars and to descendants, will also appeal to art historians dealing with James McNeill Whistler or with Russian or foreign artists, such as Briullov or Dessain; to both specialists and lay readers of Russian history, of Black history, of women’s history, of historical travel journals, and of personal and eye-witness accounts; and to railway enthusiasts. Much of the archival material I am presenting has not been published before.2

This edition has been a labor of love, protracted by complexities of family and professional life and the “no stone unturned” bent of both myself and my chief researcher, Michael J. Welch.

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While Anna Whistler, James, Willie, and Debo were visiting in Preston, Lancashire, in August of 1843, Eliza (McNeill) (Wellwood) Winstanley, Anna Whistler’s half-sister, proposed that she keep a diary during the family’s St. Petersburg stay. She gave Anna Whistler a diary that she had herself intentionally kept of a brief trip to Edinburgh in June of 1843, meaning it to be a model for Anna Whistler.3 Exactly two months from the day of their arrival in St. Petersburg, Anna Whistler began to keep a diary. It is the journal of a very religious and pious Victorian woman, born in North Carolina, who spent her childhood after the age of ten and young womanhood in Brooklyn and New York, and her married life before going to Russia in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In it, she erratically recorded for some five years events of her family’s life in Russia.

The entries are dated according to the Gregorian calendar (New Style, or NS), used in the West, but occasionally she also refers to the date according to the Julian calendar (Old Style, or OS), used in Russia, which lagged behind the Gregorian calendar by twelve days in the nineteenth century and eleven in the eighteenth century. It makes sense to supply both dates in describing the Whistlers’ Christmases, New Years, and Easters in Russia, because they celebrated each twice. Certain important events in the life of the Imperial family and in Russian history (such as the date of death of Alexander I and accession of Nicholas I to the throne), or Russian holidays (such as the first of May), receive similar treatment.

Part I of the diaries is dated 28 November 1843 to 27 September 1844 (Anna Whistler’s birthday). It actually covers the period from 16 August 1843 to 27 September 1844, and records their voyage from Boston to St. Petersburg, with a stopover in England to see relatives and friends, travel by coach through Germany to Hamburg, the sea journey from Travemünde to Russia, and their life in St. Petersburg and on the Peterhof Road, with day trips to Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk, and Peterhof. It was brought to a close on 27 September 1844, so that John Stevenson Maxwell, secretary of the American Legation in St. Petersburg, who was departing Russia permanently, might send it home in his luggage. Part II is dated March 1845 Ash Wednesday – Old Style –, which means Ash Wednesday, 28 February / 12 March 1845 and runs to September 1848.4 It illuminates their life in St. Petersburg from 28 February / 12 March 1845 to 11 August–September 1848, with day trips to Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof, and two extended visits to England: from June to mid-October of 1847 and from June to September of 1848. Also recorded here are travel through Germany in 1847, a stop in Copenhagen on the trip to England in June of 1848, and another stop in Copenhagen on the journey back to St. Petersburg in September of 1848.

There are two major gaps in Part II: from 28 September 1844 to 12 March 1845, and from sometime after 1 January 1848, until 25 April 1848. The second gap is to some extent illuminated retroactively by the entry of 25 April 1848. The gap between 28 September 1844 and 2 March 1845 is not illuminated retroactively. This is particularly disappointing for those interested in Whistler the artist, because it is precisely in this five-and-a-half-month period that James began to take formal drawing lessons from Aleksandr Osipovich Koritskii, a student at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. There are, as well, periods where Anna Whistler wrote daily entries and times when she wrote only one entry per month.

In addition to the gaps, the dating of individual entries contains numerous errors. While usually knowing what day it was, Anna Whistler sometimes did not know what date it was, but there were moments when she recorded the wrong day. Most of her errors can be corrected by using a perpetual calendar and the memoirs of others, but, for example, a week in February of 1844 and some of the dating of their visit to the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1848 cannot be untangled. In addition, while she did not write in her diary on Sundays, she sometimes wrote an entry dated Sunday on a Monday and then another entry dated the same Monday for Monday itself. Other times she wrote a single entry on a Monday, giving a record of Sunday’s churchgoing and other activities before passing on to Monday’s events. Occasionally an entry date covered months of events.

Anna Whistler was often laconic, but the letters and journals of two American diplomats who served in St. Petersburg and established close ties with the Whistlers supply much additional information. The long, loquacious, and calculatedly detailed letters of John Stevenson Maxwell, intended for sale later to Harper’s but diverted instead into his book The Czar, His Court and People (1848), expand her diaries the most. While embellishing chiefly on the period from 24 November 1842 to 27 September 1844, they supply details of the Whistlers’ life even after Maxwell’s departure from Russia, through his responses to Major Whistler’s letters to him, as some of the latter are not extant. Also helpful are the journals kept from 17 May 1847 through 1 July 1848 by Colin McCrae Ingersoll, who was secretary ad interim of the American Legation at St. Petersburg, while his father, Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll, served as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary.

In addition, the extensive extant correspondence of the Whistlers in the 1840s, found in three major collections – the Whistler Collection at Glasgow University Library, the Swift Papers at the New York Public Library, and the Pennell–Whistler Papers at the Library of Congress – sheds light on their Russian sojourn. The extensive extant correspondence from Russia of two of the three contractors making the locomotives and rolling stock for the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway – Joseph Harrison Jr. and Andrew McCalla Eastwick – is also very helpful. Harrison corresponded mainly with his family in Philadelphia, with his wife’s family in Philadelphia after she and their children joined him in Russia, and with Anna Whistler after her husband’s death. Eastwick corresponded with his family, friends, and relatives in the United States, England, and Germany.

Also helpful is the correspondence of members of the Ropes family in St. Petersburg in the 1830s and 1840s – particularly the letters of Mary Tyler Ropes Gellibrand –to their family members in Massachusetts. Of some help also is the journal of a trip to St. Petersburg via New Orleans and Cuba kept by Henry K. Fettyplace of Salem, Massachusetts, who was a schoolmate of George Henry Prince, a family member of the St. Petersburg firm of William Ropes and Company. Fettyplace spent the month of July 1848 in St. Petersburg and devoted some 60 pages of his 142-page journal to his stay there. The journal documents moments in Major Whistler’s lonely life, without his wife and sons, who were in England.

Anna Whistler readily put down her pen at the sound of her “gude mon’s” footsteps. Perhaps his return home is the answer to the unexplained events that caused her occasionally to stop writing in mid-sentence. Her description in May 1847 of St. Nicholas Day and of the opening of the only portion of the railway that Whistler was to see completed and in operation breaks off suddenly and is followed by an entry recorded in England. Much more disconcerting is the similarly interrupted concluding sentence of Part II, when we are left bogged down in retrospective trivial details of the summer of 1848 in England. A disrupted sentence about the smallest church in England brings the diaries to a close, as the family’s life in St. Petersburg moves unrecorded toward Major Whistler’s imminent attack of cholera and his death from heart failure. We should be grateful, however, that the diaries were preserved at all. When Anna Whistler wished to send them to her friend, James Gamble, to read in 1858, her search turned them up finally in the lumber room of her house.5 Luckily, they later escaped the fate of piles of family correspondence, which her step-niece, Emma Palmer, on instructions from Anna Whistler, burned at the latter’s death.6

* * *

While Anna Whistler’s diaries are, as is usual, a record of her life and resemble the predominant tone of Eliza Winstanley’s diary, they depart from that model by showing the depth of the religious beliefs that guided her life. One of her overriding preoccupations was death and our preparedness for that “last great change.” Had the diaries been continued until Anna Whistler’s departure from Russia in May 1849, we would see more clearly that the Russian sojourn opens and closes with a death. The family’s arrival in St. Petersburg is preceded by the death on route of the child, Charles Donald, while their departure from St. Petersburg is the result of Major Whistler’s death. In between, several deaths that occurred during their stay are contemplated, like cameo memorials, at greater length than any other kind of event in the diaries. Many pages are devoted to the process of Miss Hirst’s dying of cancer and her fortitude supported by religion. Old Mrs. Leon’s death is the occasion for a lengthy narration of her interesting biography, showing the fortunes of a nineteenth-century woman alone in the world and poor, one of their own whom her British compatriots did not abandon. The young woman, Emily Hall’s, precipitous death while on a visit from England to the Ropeses is the impetus for a contemplation of preparedness in the young for death and a glimpse into the upbringing of the Ropes children in a pious Victorian family. The last seven months of the life of Grand Duchess Aleksandra Nikolaevna, youngest daughter of Nicholas I, run like a red thread through the entries of 1844: her marriage, immediate pregnancy, the diagnosis of terminal galloping consumption (which is only alluded to through details supplied by Anna Whistler),7 her husband’s licentious behavior, a prematurely born son, and the death of mother and child on the day of its birth. And, finally, the death of thirteen-month-old John Bouttatz Whistler, the St. Petersburg baby, the third of Anna Whistler’s five biological sons to die within a four-year period, evokes pages of grief from a mother for her own child, while awakening memories of the other two, all only “lent” her by God. The generally held consoling thought of death as the protector from sin, especially in the young, appears throughout the diaries.

There are also many briefer references to death: the deaths of friends at home (Charlotte Canda; Fanny Peabody; Lucy Nichols; Major Whistler’s brother James; the infant son of Major Whistler’s niece, Eliza [Hamilton] van Vechten; the young Babcock daughter; and the young Ripley daughters); the deaths of members of the congregation of the English Church (old Mr. Thomas Drury, admirals Hall and Greig of the Russian Navy, and the Hodgson baby); the deaths of members of the Russian aristocracy (Countess Sofia Vladimirovna Stroganova, whose grandson, the young Count Aleksandr Sergeevich Stroganov, had been traveling with the Whistler family on the boat from Cronstadt to St. Petersburg in 1843; and Prince Illarion Vasilievich Vasil’chikov, uncle of the young Count’s fiancée); and deaths in the Imperial family (Grand Duchess Elizaveta Mikhailovna, niece of Nicholas I).

The impetus for such concentrated attention on death stems less from a reaction to the appalling mortality rate of the times than from Anna Whistler’s concern over whether the souls of those who had died were pure enough to appear before her vengeful God, who would mete out immediate justice. It was her adamant belief that everyone appears before God immediately after death for a reckoning, based on how they have lived, with no second chance. This philosophy requires that we constantly try to be and to do good, and explains her lack of sympathy with the idea of Purgatory in Russian Orthodoxy, a period of forty days during which the soul of the deceased wanders and undergoes a review of its life before a decision as to its fate is made by God.8

The other important aspect of her religious beliefs, which is referred to frequently in the diaries, is “the re-union of glorified spirits,” “the last great change” that occurs at death, making the newly dead recognizable to and able to recognize those who have gone before and resulting in the unspeakable joy of being together forever.

* * *

The diaries touch on an extensive range of topics from life in the 1840s: the building of the St. Petersburg–Moscow Railway; railroads in England; Anna Whistler’s family in America and England; her American friends in Russia and at home; her British friends in Russia, England, and America; members of the Imperial family; serfs; servants; the Irish and Scottish famines; political events in Russia, America, England, the Sandwich Islands, and Europe; the Temperance movement; clerics she met and/or heard preach; military conscription in Russia; the Chartist movement, the Cotton Lords, and worker unrest in Preston; travel by coach, train, and boat; the weather; flowers and plants; fashion; cuisine and drink; outdoor and indoor games; educational equipment; sports; books she read alone or with family members; works James and Willie read or memorized and recited; diseases and medical treatment; foreign doctors; English governesses; foreign tutors; private schools; Bible Society work; James’s art lessons at home and at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts; temporary art exhibits and the permanent collection at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts; comments on interiors in the Imperial summer residences; a fête given by an enlightened agrarian aristocrat for his peasants. The notes, introductory chapters, and biographies in Appendix E provide extensive detail about these topics, supplying an illuminating panorama of the period.

Political events also find their reflection in the diaries, but her reaction was more to the personal and homely than the political. In America, the War with Mexico alarmed her because her husband’s brother and nephew, both in the United States Army, were called up for active duty. The controversy over the Oregon Territory made her anxious because she loved both America and England deeply and did not wish to have her allegiances challenged by the possibility of having to make a choice between them. Events in Russia she understood less well but reacted to similarly. She alluded to the war in the Caucasus in terms of the burdensome length of the conscription period on the common soldier. She seemed unaware of why Nicholas I traveled to England in the summer of 1844, but responded to the fact that as a father he returned immediately when summoned because of the terminal illness of his youngest daughter. The revolutions of 1848 she responded to by copying out from the newspaper the French version of the emperor’s speech to his people, the only version she could understand, and mentioning that he and the empress appeared frequently in public with many changes of costume, and presenting her servant, Matvei’s, reaction to the emperor’s speech. Queen Pomare’s appeal to Queen Victoria elicited from her and the other ladies taking tea at the Whistler home the simple hope that she “might not be deserted in her need by Queen Victoria.”9

* * *

Because Anna Whistler found little time to keep her diaries, the entries were often written hastily and not re-read or corrected. They thus appear for our perusal with nouns or verbs inadvertently omitted; with consistently idiosyncratic spelling, such as “the” for “they”; and the persistent spelling “Britian” for “Britain.” There are unintended humorous slips: for example, the frequently appearing given name of her half-sister, Eliza Winstanley; her niece by marriage, Eliza van Vechten; and her brother William’s daughter, Eliza McNeill, is substituted for that of “Elijah” the prophet in what is intended to be a serious passage. As her pen raced, she left blanks for things she could not recall but never went back to fill in: for an Old Style date, for a reference to a chapter or verse in the Bible, for the surname of Clara Schumann and the given name of Sir Robert Ker Porter. She mangled a good number of Russian words, but had learned many of the distorted forms from her new English and American friends, whose long residence in Russia had not corrected their malapropisms and mispronunciations: for example, “Alargna” or “Alargon” for “Elagin” Island. Indeed, some of this usage may have been based on someone’s charming infelicitous mispronunciation that became an “in-joke.” Four years after her arrival, another newcomer, Colin McCrae Ingersoll, in turn put some of the same standard garbled Russian into his journal.

Like her husband, Anna Whistler was not able to learn a foreign language well. Beyond the mispronounced words that were standard in her English-speaking circle, like most diarists she attempted to spell the pronunciation of Russian words based on what she heard. She did not hear the rolled “r” at the end of some Russian words: “samovar” she rendered as “sumavaa.” She put an “r” into words that did not have one: the name of the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, for example, was sometimes rendered as “Olgar.” She used an English word that sounded like a specific Russian word, and added an English plural: a fur-lined kaftan-like garment called a “shuba” was rendered as the English word “shoe” plus “be” (pronounced “buh”) and for the plural the English “s” was added, thus producing “bes” (pronounced “buzz”). For the most part she used the nominative case of this inflected language instead of the correct oblique case: instead of saying to their coach driver “na dachoo” (“to the dacha”) (pronounced “nuhdahçchoo”), she said “na Dacha” (nominative case) (prononouced “nuhdahçchuh”).

On the assumption that most readers of Anna Whistler’s diaries do not know Russian, but do know English, every effort has been made to be reader-friendly in the handling of Russian words and sources. Russian words in the text of the diaries are transliterated, translated, and their pronunciation presented in a way that is, hopefully, comprehensible to the reader. This is done through the use of English words or sounds that approximate the Russian sounds and with indication of which syllable is stressed by placing an accent mark after it. For example, the word for “oarsman” is transliterated as “pirosvoshchii” and the pronunciation given as “peerossvawçshchee.” The “h” supplied in some syllables is not pronounced; it is intended to show the length of the preceding vowel. For example, in the word for “samovar,” transliterated as “samovar” and pronounced “suhmahvarç,” the “h” in “suh” and “mah” indicates that the “u” is pronounced “uh” and the “a” is pronounced “ah,” as in English.

In the case of printed sources, in the Notes the transliteration is given, followed by the English translation; in the Bibliography, only original languages – in transliteration if necessary – are used. Archival sources are omitted from the Bibliography, but appear in the List of Abbreviations.

The idiosyncrasies of the text of the diaries (omission of words; personal spellings; unfinished, faulty, and incomprehensible sentences; omission of letters in words caused by hasty writing) have been retained throughout, to preserve the flavor of the diarist’s style; errors in others’ letters and diaries mentioned in the Notes, however, have been noted using [sic]. Words omitted by Anna Whistler will be supplied in the Notes, as will corrections of ludicrous errors, such as using the verb “charged” instead of the noun “charge” when speaking in grief of her then-youngest deceased son. Editorial conjectures arising from Anna Whistler’s tiny and cramped writing (see Image 6) and mispronunciations in foreign languages will also be corrected in the Notes.

The choice of which biographies appear in Appendix E is based on several factors: the importance in the diaries; the person’s interesting life; or whether earlier scholarship has illuminated them correctly, let alone at all. For example, of the two unrelated Prince families, to whom Anna Whistler refers frequently, only the Prince family that intermarried with the Ropes family will be discussed in detail (Ropes, Gellibrand, Prince, Hall in Appendix E), because George Henry Prince, who appears throughout the diaries, has been dealt with only sketchily in previous scholarship, as has his brother Benjamin Prince.

Notes identifying a specific person presented a challenge. If a name appears six times in a single diary entry, it seemed excessive to identify it six times. Instead, I chose to identify a specific person as fully as necessary the first time their name appears, but in subsequent notes to group together the names of all in the entry who have previously appeared and present their various identifications within that note. Thus, Mr. William Hooper Ropes is identified with his dates and his employment is explained the first time he appears. In subsequent notes, it is explained that “Mr. R,” “Mr. Ropes,” “William Ropes,” and “my neighbor’s husband” are the same person, and usually his relationship to other family members of his appearing in those notes is pointed out. Beyond that, the reader can consult the extended biographies in Appendix E. Immediate family members in St. Petersburg – i.e., Major George Washington Whistler, Deborah Whistler, James Whistler, Willie Whistler, and Mary Brennan, their servant – are not identified after their first appearance unless information given in an entry requires further clarification of that person’s identity.

In the introductory chapters and in Appendix E, the use of five asterisks indicates a change in topic (or family) within a biography. The use of three asterisks indicates a change of examples (or members of a family) in a topic within a biography.

All responses to this edition, addressed to me in care of the publisher, will be gratefully received and answered. Hopefully, some responses, in addition to supplying constructive criticism and corrections, will offer the announcement of further primary sources.