The ‘mysterious’ Mrs Shapter no more

You have a hunch, it proves right, and your rejoicing and self-satisfaction know no bounds… Then you sit back and contemplate the chain of circumstances that led to it being ‘proven right’, and you realise the links were so fortuitous, so utterly subject to chance, that really your hunch was a guess. You can claim no credit for it!

When George Calderon went to the Head of Police’s office in St Petersburg on 22 October 1895 to obtain permission to put an advertisement in a newspaper advertising his services as an English teacher, the official who dealt with him ‘passed a neat compliment on my Russian style and accent’, as George wrote to his mother Clara that day, and asked who had taught him. He replied: ‘A Russian lady.’ The official tried to extract the name of this lady from him, but George would not tell him — or us.

As I said in my biography (p. 105), it’s quite obvious that an experienced linguist like George would have started teaching himself (after he left Oxford) from a good grammar, and he might even have pursued a correspondence course run by the eminent Russian-teacher Ivan Nestor-Schnurmann, who had a connection with Rugby, George’s old school. But equally evidently, George had to have lessons in spoken Russian, and preferably from a native speaker. So who was that person?

Very early on in my research, i.e. around 1990, I plumped for a ‘Mrs Shapta’. Well, actually hers was the only name featuring in George’s correspondence around 1895 that looked vaguely Slavonic. George had had an introduction from her to at least one person in St Petersburg, so that perhaps suggested she had lived in the city. Moreover, only a week before leaving for Russia he mentions ‘Mrs Shapta’ in a letter to his mother, in a way that might suggest a connection. I researched the name ‘Shapta’ and found no Slavonic equivalents and no plausible British candidate of that name.

Some years later, when I knew George’s handwriting better, I realised the name was really ‘Mrs Shapter’. I trawled the Net for Mrs Shapters, but found very few, and none with a stated Russian background. So in my biography she became ‘the mysterious Mrs Shapter’. I hypothesised that she was ‘a Russian married to a Briton of that name’…

Now for the first incursion of Chance. On 31 December 2018, following up his comprehensive essay on my book in East-West Review, inestimable Russianist Michael Pursglove emailed me: ‘Apropos of Shapter: the name rang a bell from my time in Exeter’. Contingently, as it were, Mike was once a Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages at Exeter University. He serendipitally remembered that Dr Thomas Shapter (1809-1902) was a famous figure in Exeter’s history, having twice been its mayor and written the classic History of the Cholera in Exeter in 1832. ‘Shapter’ is in fact a Devon name, derived from the Anglo-Saxon for a shaper of garments.

At the same time, Michael Pursglove found on the Web an advertisement offering five letters to ‘Miss Shapter’ written between 1871 and 1897 by…Philip Hermogenes Calderon, George’s father! Mike had searched on ‘Shapter’ between my doing my own regular trawls for Calderon material, and struck gold. He surmised: ‘I imagine Mrs Shapter may be, say, a sister-in-law of this Miss Shapter. Thomas Shapter, I think, had at least one son. Alas, I can find no link with Russia!’

Little did that matter, as it turned out. I went straight to the advertisement myself, and there were two distinct images: 1) a letter from ‘old P.H.’ at Burlington House clearly beginning ‘Dear Miss Shapter’, 2) an envelope clearly addressed by him ‘Mrs Shapter’ and giving her address in London. Dynamite. I immediately put my brilliant genealogical research assistant, Mike Welch, on the job, and he found that living at this address at the time of the 1881 and 1891 censuses were a Mrs Mary A.J. Shapter and her daughter Mary G. Shapter. Miss Shapter, the census forms told us, was born in Bloomsbury, but Mrs Shapter was born ‘Russia — British Subject’. You can imagine my reaction.

Mike Welch quickly ascertained that Mrs Shapter was Mary Ann Jane Shapter, born in St Petersburg on 16 August 1817 and christened at the British Chaplaincy there on 19 September 1817. Her parents were Dr Harry Leeke Gibbs and Mary Ann Angliss (which may look like a Russified form of ‘English’, but is a bona fide English surname). Mary Ann Jane Gibbs was the last of five Gibbs children born in St Petersburg since 1808. She married John Shapter QC (1807-1887) at Dawlish on 11 July 1839 and they had five children, of whom ‘Miss Shapter’ was Mary Gibbs Shapter (1842-1921).  John Shapter, it turns out, was an elder brother of the Exeter epidemiologist. But what was Mary Ann Jane’s father Dr Harry Leeke Gibbs doing in Russia and how long did she stay there?

At this point, we were truly engulfed by good luck, because we traced the great-great-grandchildren of Mrs Shapter and discovered that they not only know their own family history well, they are currently engaged in researching it most professionally and thoroughly.

They quickly informed me, to my astonishment, that Mrs Shapter’s father Harry Leeke Gibbs (1782-1858) was an English physician who first practised in London, then moved to Russia where he became Surgeon-in-Chief to the Russian Fleets and Hospitals in the Baltic and a Councillor of State! This was under Alexander I (Tsar 1801-25), who awarded him the Order of St Anne in 1820. He appears also to have had a private role as a doctor in royal circles. I cannot do better than direct you to a full illustrated history and discussion on a website recommended to me by Mrs Shapter’s descendants: http://european-miniatures.blogspot.com/2006/04/zatsepin-mikhail-portrait-of-dr-gibbs.html

The highly informative entry on Dr Gibbs in the Royal College of Surgeons’ Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows, to which I was also kindly directed by his descendants, tells us that he died ‘in retirement at his residence, 19 Southernhay Place, Exeter, on September 27th, 1858’, and he is recorded living there with his wife and middle daughter Sophia in the census of 1851. When did he leave Russia and what took him to Exeter, home of the Shapter family?

Presumably he was present at the marriage of his youngest daughter Mary Ann Jane (aged 21) to John Shapter in 1839, when Dr Gibbs would have been fifty-seven, and she must have been with her father and mother in Exeter long enough to meet John Shapter, so let us guess that the Gibbs family left Russia in at least 1837. They might have left far earlier, because Russia under Nicholas I was a nastier place than it had been under his predecessor and possibly Gibbs’s patronage was blown away. Although the census of 1851 tells us he did his M.D. at Aberdeen, he was born in Hampshire; not that far from Exeter, then. But the possibility exists that he was somehow a colleague of the Shapter, Thomas, hero of the 1832 cholera outbreak, because Plarr’s Lives also tells us:

During his residence in Russia Dr Gibbs published various papers and observations on the cholera when it made its appearance in St Petersburg during the summer of 1831.

We are able to say, then, that ‘Mrs Shapter’ grew up in Russia in a Russian-speaking environment and therefore was quite possibly bilingual. However, she probably left Russia before she was twenty, and when she started teaching George she was at least seventy-four! But she taught him, on the evidence of the St Petersburg police, very well. So how did she keep her Russian up? Did she know Russians in Britain? Did she go back to St Petersburg at some point? Did she read Russian literature? Here be mysteries still.

There are many possible reasons why the Calderon family, based at Burlington House, were acquainted with John Shapter QC and Mary Ann Jane Shapter at 7 Clarendon Place, Hyde Park Gardens. By the end of 1891 George was training to be a barrister himself, had decided he wanted to learn Russian, and had probably started. As one of Mrs Shapter’s great-great-grandchildren, himself a retired judge, has suggested to me, George may have met John Shapter whilst reading for the Bar, and then learned that his wife spoke Russian. Alternatively, Philip Hermogenes Calderon had a vast London network and he may have known the Shapters first. Then again, Miss Mary Gibbs Shapter was an accomplished artist and may have been a student of old P.H.’s at the Royal Academy. But all of the Shapters seem to have been art collectors, and one of P.H.’s three letters to Miss Shapter responds to her request for advice about restoring and cleaning paintings.

I was able to buy the five letters for the Calderon archive. The first, dated 27 December 1871, is to Mrs Shapter concerning a private view. Numbers two to four are to Miss Shapter. That of 13 July 1894 (when she was fifty-two, incidentally) is the very professional one about restoring and cleaning. The next, dated 14 August 1894, begins: ‘You consulted me, a few weeks ago, as to brightening your charming copy — may I consult you as to brightening my own delapidated self?’ His doctors ‘seem to think the bracing air of Broadstairs might do me good’, but Clara could not find suitable lodgings there so he asks Miss Shapter ‘as a constant visitor’ whether she knows of ‘a decent place wherein we may shelter for a while’. The last letter, written on 4 May 1897, reads in its entirety:

My dear Mrs Shapter
How good and kind of you to remember this poor animal’s birthday! — You and I have had a bad time, but I trust we may be spared to have many a pleasant stroll on dear Broadstairs gay parade later on in the year. — With kind regards to Miss Shapter believe me ever, Yours sincerely
Philip H. Calderon

George was in Russia. His father had cancer and less than a year to live. These letters demonstrate that he and Clara knew Mrs and Miss Shapter well. The Shapters were clearly amiable, sociable women, who appreciated his art. To have mixed with P.H., they must also have had a good sense of humour.

But the most interesting letter of the set — and the reason I decided to buy them — is the second one, which is to Miss Shapter and dated 7 December 1891. It concerns this picture:

Image © Tate, released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

I have dealt with the subject at length on page 91 of my biography, so the details are there. The painting is entitled ‘St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation’, was finished by P.H. in 1891, and caused outrage amongst British Roman Catholics because there was no evidence whatsoever that St Elizabeth literally stripped naked when she took her vows. The painting also, of course, offended Victorian propriety. A furore ensued in the Press and Parliament. Apart from a slippery letter to The Times, however, P.H. seems to have kept his counsel. I knew of no other instance of his defending this picture or responding to the public outcry. Until now. For this particular letter to Miss Shapter does respond to it, and in a significant way.

The Shapters, we gather from the letter, have American friends visiting Europe who are anxious to see the picture that all the fuss has been about, and Miss Shapter has asked P.H. where it can be seen. ‘My much-abused “Elizabeth of Hungary” is now exhibiting at the annual autumnal Show of Pictures of the Liverpool Corporation’, he replies, whence it is going ‘by special request’ to Leeds, then sometime in the Spring

it will take its place, with the other Chantrey pictures, at Kensington, provided infuriated (but badly ignorant) Roman Catholics do not succeed in their attempt to ‘burke’ [i.e. smother, suppress] the picture.

The Americans, then, may have to ‘be content with the report of the “row” about it, without seeing the cause’. Nevertheless, P.H. continues,

If […] they should in their travels chance to pass a night at Amiens (on their way to their Earthly Paradise, Paris) they can see almost the same thing, in the very heart of the glorious Cathedral there — or (to go no further than Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury) they can see the mother of Thomas Becket being baptised, on the exquisite Royal MSS in the British Museum.

I haven’t been able to identify what P.H. is referring to in Amiens Cathedral, but the reference to the figure of Thomas à Becket’s mother in the Royal MSS is totally irrelevant, as the image is clearly emblematic, she is merely topless in a font, and there is every difference between P.H.’s interpretation of St Elizabeth’s self-abasement and a normal medieval baptism. This feeble defence corroborates my belief that the picture was a deliberate attempt to create a sensation and titillate Victorian men. The fact that it was bought from P.H. for a large sum by the Chantrey Trust on the recommendation of a Council of Royal Academicians, when P.H. was himself Keeper of the Royal Academy, has always struck me as another unsavoury aspect of the so-called historical painting.

I owe everything I now know about Mrs Shapter to Michael Pursglove, Michael Welch, and Mrs Shapter’s great-great-grandchildren. I cannot thank them enough for their enthusiasm, initiative, time, and readiness to share their hard-won knowledge for the cause of George Calderon’s biography. If George really was the first modern British Russianist, it is surely important to know who taught him to speak the language. And now, I think, we know. It was Mary Ann Jane (Gibbs) Shapter.

It would be very good to have a portrait of the lady. We are working on it.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.