fall under your fingertips, so that their painted surfaces seem to leap out at you. And hanging on the walls are more framed embroidery samplers, pen-and-ink drawings by Chinese artists and watercolor landscapes by Western hands, but again of Chinese scenes.
This was a room in which you could hear the breathy whisper of opulence. Even the thick, silk curtains—the material shipped over on great rolls from Shanghai—were as pale as the walls, their richness one that you felt as your arm brushed past a surface firm from the sheer weight of the fabric. This was a room in which Alice intended to make it quite clear to Ernie and his family that the Eckfords were not just colonial traders whose daughters could be picked up and dumped at will, but a force to be reckoned with. Little did she realize just how impervious to her efforts her daughter’s in-laws would be.
Socially, the Howells were as deeply conventional as they believed they were not. They may have mingled with scientists on the cutting edge of change. They may have foreseen the cataclysmic political changes of the twentieth century, pointing out in their letters that “things cannot continue as they are” and discussing the likely collapse of “that wonderful house of cards which we call our Indian Empire”—even when that meant the end of the very traditions, the old order, that had nurtured them. They may have held strikingly liberal views on women’s education—it was quite extraordinary that in the 1880s and 1890s, when few women were educated at all, the family had not just allowed, but encouraged, Laura and Barbie to go to Cambridge. And, of course, each of them may have felt that their experiences in India had given them a worldly-wise perspective from which to judge. Nonetheless, on social issues, they were the puritanical sort of small “c” conservatives whose sympathies and aversions had long sustained the British class system: When it came to family pedigree, the longer the better. And on this point, they chose conveniently to ignore the fact that until Papa’s grandfather had ventured up to London and made a fortune shipping stores out to the British army in its various wars, the Howells had simply been the local butchers in Oswestry, a market town on the Welsh border. Instead, they focused on the achievements of Papa’s father, Sir Thomas Howell, who had been knighted for sorting out the shambolic logistics—or lack of them—that had left the British army without enough boots during the first bitter winter of the Crimean War.
A couple of exceptionally procreative generations—Papa was one of thirteen and appears restrained in having only six children himself—had now subdivided the family money to a pittance. This left the short-of-cash Howells deeply suspicious of other people’s fortunes, particularly those that were newly made, as the Eckfords’ money was in China. It was an unspoken but fundamentally held belief among Lilla’s in-laws that the pursuit of riches resulted in a neglect of more high-minded endeavors. “They must be fairly well endowed with this world’s goods,” wrote Papa Howell after meeting Andrew and Alice Eckford for the first time, implying that they lacked the nonmaterial, intellectual assets that were worth more.
There was certainly an element of jealousy in the Howells’ snobbery. Like Ernie, the rest of the men in the Howell family were perpetually moaning about a “shortage of funds.” When translated into English pounds and prices, Indian Civil Service and Indian army salaries were not generous. The mess bills, the uniforms, the cost of employing a valet could easily make an army officer’s career an expensive luxury rather than a gainful occupation. Ernie and his siblings, even their parents, were incessantly calculating how to live the lifestyle that they had been brought up to expect on the combination of salary and the tiny private income that each of them had. And while they whinged about the
This was a room in which you could hear the breathy whisper of opulence. Even the thick, silk curtains—the material shipped over on great rolls from Shanghai—were as pale as the walls, their richness one that you felt as your arm brushed past a surface firm from the sheer weight of the fabric. This was a room in which Alice intended to make it quite clear to Ernie and his family that the Eckfords were not just colonial traders whose daughters could be picked up and dumped at will, but a force to be reckoned with. Little did she realize just how impervious to her efforts her daughter’s in-laws would be.
Socially, the Howells were as deeply conventional as they believed they were not. They may have mingled with scientists on the cutting edge of change. They may have foreseen the cataclysmic political changes of the twentieth century, pointing out in their letters that “things cannot continue as they are” and discussing the likely collapse of “that wonderful house of cards which we call our Indian Empire”—even when that meant the end of the very traditions, the old order, that had nurtured them. They may have held strikingly liberal views on women’s education—it was quite extraordinary that in the 1880s and 1890s, when few women were educated at all, the family had not just allowed, but encouraged, Laura and Barbie to go to Cambridge. And, of course, each of them may have felt that their experiences in India had given them a worldly-wise perspective from which to judge. Nonetheless, on social issues, they were the puritanical sort of small “c” conservatives whose sympathies and aversions had long sustained the British class system: When it came to family pedigree, the longer the better. And on this point, they chose conveniently to ignore the fact that until Papa’s grandfather had ventured up to London and made a fortune shipping stores out to the British army in its various wars, the Howells had simply been the local butchers in Oswestry, a market town on the Welsh border. Instead, they focused on the achievements of Papa’s father, Sir Thomas Howell, who had been knighted for sorting out the shambolic logistics—or lack of them—that had left the British army without enough boots during the first bitter winter of the Crimean War.
A couple of exceptionally procreative generations—Papa was one of thirteen and appears restrained in having only six children himself—had now subdivided the family money to a pittance. This left the short-of-cash Howells deeply suspicious of other people’s fortunes, particularly those that were newly made, as the Eckfords’ money was in China. It was an unspoken but fundamentally held belief among Lilla’s in-laws that the pursuit of riches resulted in a neglect of more high-minded endeavors. “They must be fairly well endowed with this world’s goods,” wrote Papa Howell after meeting Andrew and Alice Eckford for the first time, implying that they lacked the nonmaterial, intellectual assets that were worth more.
There was certainly an element of jealousy in the Howells’ snobbery. Like Ernie, the rest of the men in the Howell family were perpetually moaning about a “shortage of funds.” When translated into English pounds and prices, Indian Civil Service and Indian army salaries were not generous. The mess bills, the uniforms, the cost of employing a valet could easily make an army officer’s career an expensive luxury rather than a gainful occupation. Ernie and his siblings, even their parents, were incessantly calculating how to live the lifestyle that they had been brought up to expect on the combination of salary and the tiny private income that each of them had. And while they whinged about the
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