Reading kinship: intellectual influence, authorial formation, and the father-daughter relationship of Hensleigh and Julia ‘Snow’ Wedgwood

The renowned philologist Hensleigh Wedgwood and his eldest daughter, the novelist, biographer and critical essayist Julia ‘Snow’ Wedgwood, were prominent members of the mid-to-late nineteenth century Wedgwood-Darwin dynasty. Both father and daughter made valuable intellectual contributions to the conversation and collaboration in their extended familial and friendship networks and both were instrumental figures in the contemporary origin of language debate. Yet their contributions have been overshadowed by the ‘celebrity’ of Hensleigh’s cousin and brother-in-law (Julia’s uncle) Charles Darwin. In the century following the great naturalist’s death, the emerging discourse presented Hensleigh as a benchwarmer to his own mimetic origin of language theory, with Darwin as the spearhead and Julia as an addendum. Concurrent with this Darwin-centric dialogue, a narrative on the relationship between Hensleigh and Julia began to surface in biographical sketches of the Wedgwood family. Viewing the lives of father and daughter through the filter of Victorian domestic ideology, existing scholarship reprimands Hensleigh’s fathering behaviour and asserts that he ended his daughter’s literary career with an unfavourable critique of her second novel. Presenting Julia as a passive participant in the relationship, prevailing accounts also sympathize with (what they perceive as) a daughter forced to acquiesce to her father.

Framed within a wider discussion of the Wedgwood-Darwin network, the threefold aims of this thesis are to interrogate accounts of the father-daughter relationship, identify the nature of Hensleigh’s legacy in Darwin’s work, and examine the extent of the collaboration between father and daughter on the origin of language debate. Drawing extensively on unpublished personal correspondence and material objects in the V&A Wedgwood Collection, I argue that narrow readings of the father-daughter relationship as profoundly fractured are misleading. I suggest that although Julia respected the family hierarchy, she was capable of making autonomous and informed intellectual decisions about the direction of her writing career. I argue that from his central network position of influence, Hensleigh was the innovative force behind Darwin’s decision to endorse the former’s mimetic origin of language theory. I further suggest that Hensleigh’s intellectual footprint pervades Julia’s two articles on the origin of language but that the second, in which the definitive authorial voice is Julia’s, was more effective in the dissemination of her father’s theory.

Incorporating theoretical strands from a number of disciplines, this thesis contributes to the literature on Victorian social networks, father-daughter relationships in intellectual dynasties, nineteenth-century linguistics, Victorian ideals of masculinity, and the burgeoning field of assembled album scholarship. The thesis proceeds in two parts. Part One (‘Reading Kinship’) reframes the maligned father-daughter relationship of Hensleigh Wedgwood and Julia Wedgwood. It defines three key stages of fatherhood negotiated by Hensleigh and demonstrates the ways in which Julia navigated Victorian womanhood as a female member of social networks dominated by male intellectual giants. In its exploration of the channelling and diffusion of intergenerational mentorship and familial collaboration, Part Two (‘Reading Familial and Intellectual Networks’) establishes the significance of Hensleigh’s contributions to Darwin’s thinking on the origin and evolution of language, and it illustrates Julia’s role in circulating these ideas.