5. Marriage and metalwork: gender and professional status in Edith and Nelson Dawson’s Arts and Crafts partnership*

Zoë Thomas

In 1895, two years after their marriage, the Arts and Crafts metalwork partners Edith Brearey Dawson (1862–1928) and Nelson Dawson (1859–1941) decided to put together a photograph album for Edith’s parents depicting their union. During this era, photography was becoming increasingly popular, used by growing numbers of middle- and upper-class Victorians to document family life. Edith and Nelson used photography to capture family gatherings, and later their caravan holidays and the childhood escapades of their daughters Rhoda and Mary.¹ But for the Dawsons photography also offered a useful new way to visually market their work and assert their professional roles as participants in the Arts and Crafts movement: to themselves, their family and the wider world. The album they composed is filled with images of them posing alone and together in front of their paintings and metalwork, experimenting with how best to represent themselves at their home at Wentworth Studios, Chelsea, London. These photographs, one of which can be seen in Figure 5.1, were intended to reassure Edith’s Quaker parents about her marriage to precarious, ‘penniless’ Nelson.² The metalwork on display functioned as a material emblem of their new-found success after they turned to work in the field together after marriage, while the fringed sign positioned between them with the words Laborare est orare (‘to work is to pray’) framed their dedication to their craft as a religious pursuit, something Edith’s parents would have approved of. The same photograph featured in an article about the Dawsons in the Architectural Review the following year, emphasizing the pervasive power of photography in enabling such individuals to assert these new artistic, professional roles – and to showcase their intriguing artistic home – to public audiences as well as to loved ones.³

Figure 5.1. Edith and Nelson Dawson in their Chelsea studio home, 1895. Private archive.

This chapter makes two key arguments. First, although scrutinizing formal educational and institutional hierarchies has positioned in sharp relief the class-based and gendered mechanisms shaping professional society (in the arts, several prestigious art organizations remained male only and resembled gentlemen’s clubs well into the 1960s), histories of work have not yet adequately explored the breadth of ways people attempted to navigate the amorphous cultural landscape of the professions. The Dawsons’ album, with its blurring of home, work and artistic commitment and its function as a domestic gift rich with affective and visual symbols, does not fit neatly within traditional narratives of professional society, which are instead routinely conceptualized as organized around education, training, institutions and financial stability, and assessed through analysis of institutional and published documents. But examining the Dawsons’ use of their camera to photograph themselves at work – among their wider range of independent professionalizing strategies, explored in this chapter through a cache of little researched materials, including daily diaries, love letters, business correspondence, exhibition records, newspapers, objects and paintings – is critical in fully fleshing out the composition of ‘professional society’ by the dawn of the twentieth century.

The second, interconnected, argument made in this chapter is to foreground the growing belief certain middle-class and elite couples had during this era of the generative potential of marital collaboration when trying to foster fulfilling working lives. This photograph album was a collaborative endeavour which embedded the Dawsons’ individual efforts to construct new working identities within an encompassing narrative about the productive role their partnership had played in achieving their aims. Scholarship has traditionally prioritized the histories of artistic women (usually painters) who became ‘veiled in mystery’ after marriage, although recently there has been a productive move to emphasize the activities of talented women artists who pursued work alongside their relationships to ‘great’ men.⁴ A wealth of insightful scholarship has accounted for the marriage of Mary Fraser Tytler to Victorian luminary G. F. Watts, and Mary’s efforts to carve out an artistic space for herself post marriage, turning from painting to work in ceramics, among other fields, to avoid direct comparison with her famed husband.⁵ Despite this, there remains a popular conception that ‘spinsterhood’ was the necessary life choice for women seeking professional lives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, marriage often made it impossible to maintain or further a professional role, especially in more formally regulated fields. But the focus on certain tightly regulated professions has led to an overlying assumption that marriage was uniformly restrictive in this regard, when in fact specific fields, including in the arts, held greater opportunities for women to attempt to continue working, and to potentially collaborate with others.

In the Arts and Crafts movement in England, Ireland and Scotland there were many married and same-sex partners who collaborated artistically at certain points. Several worked in the same field and did not always have to navigate such extreme differentials of age and status as better-known figures such as Mary and G. F. Watts.⁶ Gender hierarchies continued to shape the activities of these couples, but the intention in this chapter is to open up a dialogue where their hopes, ideas and experiences – here by focusing on the Dawsons – can begin to be more audibly heard. Such an approach is crucial in fully understanding how the Arts and Crafts, and professional artistic culture, developed across this era. In the survey histories of the movement which dominate the scholarship the Dawsons are usually briefly referred to as leading participants in the revival of artistic metalwork, although (unsurprisingly) it is not unusual for Edith’s contributions to be ignored, even in recent publications.⁷ Furthermore, Anthea Callen’s 1979 path- breaking account of women in the movement portrayed Edith as receiving little recognition in contrast to Nelson during their lives and eventually collapsing from overwork, something Edith’s daughter has since contested.⁸ As it stands, the Dawsons, who have an unusually extensive archive (Callen relied on the art press), deserve greater attention. By analysing this wide range of materials, this chapter complements the ongoing tendency to foreground what cultural representations – as assessed through print culture and artworks – tell us about married artists by more fully addressing the messiness and contradictions inherent in lived experience, the role played by emotional and affective ties, the individualized dynamics of historical relationships and the impact of these factors on professional artistic culture. This chapter brings to the fore a more sustained discussion of how men historically used masculinity to assert professional status and the interplay between the working identities of artistic women and men, topics which have received surprisingly little direct scrutiny.

The chapter begins by considering Edith and Nelson’s individual methods of professionalization before marriage, as they navigated financial precarity and sought to garner cultural respect. Then it turns to consider their efforts to work in the field of ‘artistic’ metalwork together after marriage. In so doing, this research illuminates the strategies the Dawsons carefully implemented to position themselves as professional and serious artists, so as to avoid being perceived as dilettantes or even worse, as trade jewellers, with the associated connotations of diminished cultural cachet, uncertain class status and troublingly commercial focus. Strategies included creating an ‘artistic’ home, exhibiting widely, publishing authoritative books and giving intellectually driven talks. Following this, the chapter assesses how the Dawsons’ partnership was influenced by expected gendered models of behaviour, how they articulated their positions to each other and to those around them and the ramifications of this. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how gendered archival processes across the twentieth century have further shaped the ways professional working lives have historically been memorialized or marginalized.

Edith Brearey Robinson and Nelson Dawson married in their early thirties, long after they had individually decided to dedicate their lives to art. Both had undertaken the customary step of professionalization of gaining training and were trying to build their reputations as watercolour painters. Edith had been captivated by painting from a young age and had trained at the newly opened Scarborough Art School before becoming ‘drawing mistress’ at the Society of Friends’ Mount School, York. Nelson, meanwhile, had attended Stamford Grammar School, Lincolnshire, and then tried a range of jobs, including as assistant at an architect’s office. This led to him deciding to become a painter and studying briefly as an external student at the Royal College of Art.

There were noticeable similarities in Edith and Nelson’s circumstances and their consequent efforts when pursuing artistic roles before marriage. Both came from financially constrained families. The arts have always been difficult to pursue for those unable to access a steady trickle of family money, and Edith and Nelson faced an urgent need to prioritize moneymaking. Nelson, son of the chief baker in Stamford, Lincolnshire, was one of eight children, all of whom had to earn their own living from a young age. Edith’s painting was viewed as ‘somewhat frivolous’ by her ‘sober and pious’ Quaker parents until they realized she could make an income from it; then, it was welcomed due to her family’s ‘far from wealthy’ circumstances.⁹ Edith and Nelson’s courting letters reveal their growing sense of compatibility as they discussed, with increasing openness, their financial anxieties. Edith reflected on her sister Nellie’s forthcoming marriage to a local curate, writing that his family ‘are very conventional people – not at all like us – for one thing they have a good deal of money’.¹⁰ In this semi-private format artworks were openly ranked in terms of their potential to sell and popular subject matters were encouraged. In one letter Nelson hopefully discussed how: ‘Thy big oil will look well if it gets in + hung decently + should sell being a nice cheerful picture – summery + sunshiny.’¹¹

Edith and Nelson viewed the arts as offering the best way to make an income while simultaneously allowing them to construct a meaningful, creative lifestyle in an industrialized, capitalist society. Like many artists, they situated their strategies of artistic professionalization amid an encompassing vocational ethos which entailed cultivation of creative selfhood and maintenance of an immersive lifestyle which asserted absolute dedication to the arts. This was especially the case for those embedded in Arts and Crafts networks, where there was a pseudo-religious commitment to beautifying and reforming society through craft cultures. There was a deeply felt view, which permeated more widely in society, that artists should be motivated by innate calling and not by commercial aspirations. Moneymaking symbolized success but had to be discussed with a veneer of disapproval; when Nelson resorted to teaching art classes to aristocratic figures to make ends meet, he dramatically lamented, ‘I have at length sold my soul.’¹² Edith, Nelson and many of their peers spent their professional lives trying to navigate pressing financial needs while portraying themselves as ‘serious’, cultured artists unfettered by material concerns.

As a result, artists, especially those associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, rarely rhetorically positioned their activities as ‘professional’ and indeed often rejected certain processes of professionalization, such as overt regulation and a systematic approach, due to a concern that this dealt a crushing blow to creative expression and individuality. Nelson did study formally for a brief period, but he hated the stuffy life rooms and, like others, preferred to hone his skills by living a nomadic, independent lifestyle, meandering between picturesque coastal locations in the north-east and in Devon and Cornwall. Although the Dawsons focused on asserting their roles as artists (and later as ‘artistic metalworkers’), with the connotations of creativity, taste and serious dedication, the term ‘professional’ had considerable purchase for them and their contemporaries, and provides an appropriate frame when illuminating the wider world of the professions beyond the traditional fields that dominate historical enquiry. The strategies Arts and Crafts participants used to build their reputations relied on a model recognized in the contemporary milieu as loosely fitting within ‘professional society’, for example by engaging in processes of enclosure such as undergoing training and joining organizations.

In contrast to more tightly regulated fields, the arts offered greater potential for women to try to construct professional lives, and they participated in increasing numbers by the late nineteenth century. Edith is reflective of this trend. Her daughter Rhoda – who also became an artist and married an artist – later described Edith as ‘calmingly getting on with what seemed to be a career’ before marriage, making £100 annually through art lessons, selling work at exhibitions and in shops and painting for commissions.¹³

Yet artistic culture continued to be shaped by gendered, classed and racialized understanding of who should get to be an artist and what constituted art. Nelson’s professional identity and reputation were markedly influenced by his acceptance within several artistic brotherhoods across his life (or ‘the fraternity’, as he called his special network).¹⁴ He was a founding member of the Chelsea Arts Club and a ‘Brother’ at the Art Workers’ Guild. Both these organizations were strictly male only: the Art Workers’ Guild changed its policy only in 1964, and the Chelsea Arts Club in 1966.

Belonging to this fraternity consisted of more than simply attending meetings. The unmarried men participating in these networks often lived conveniently close to one another in neighbouring ‘bachelor’ studios scattered across west London. Nelson’s neighbours at Wentworth Studios, Manresa Road, Chelsea, in the early 1890s included Frank Brangwyn and Ernest Dade. Here, this ‘Chelsea group’ of men worked at their art while consolidating their bonds of bohemian, brotherly solidarity by engaging in heavy drinking sessions, smoking and game-playing sessions together (see Figure 5.2). Before marriage Nelson produced many different works (such as cartoons for the 1880 General Election), clearly experimenting creatively while also trying to piece together an income. But like Brangwyn and Dade, his favourite scenes to paint were maritime and coastal.¹⁵ All three men were enchanted by boats and by working-class figures, usually male, such as sailors or fishermen, who made their livelihoods at sea.¹⁶ Fishing communities, whose lifestyles were being threatened by the growing number of steam trawlers, had become the focus of considerable middle-class interest at this point. This way of life symbolized a world that was seen to be dying out, and this fed into a wider anxiety about the need to restore traditional cottage industries, romanticization of the countryside and curiosity about historic work cultures. Anglo-Welsh Brangwyn, who had worked briefly in William Morris’s workshops, produced oil paintings such as The Burial at Sea (1890), while Dade, who had been a deckhand on board an American yacht before training in Scarborough (at the same school as Edith), was painting works including The ‘Amity’ Leaving for the Fishing Grounds (1892).¹⁷ As Martin Danahay has argued more generally, this fascination with depicting working-class men at work was ignited by anxieties about the positioning in the popular imagination of middle-class male painters as effeminate.¹⁸ Sailors and fishermen offered a model of muscular, physically active, working-class masculinity that male artists were keen to valorize. Figures such as Dawson, Dade and Brangwyn could claim cultural and professional authority for themselves and reassert their masculine credentials by focusing on such topics.

Figure 5.2. ‘A Chelsea Group, 1887’, from P. Macer-Wright, Brangwyn: a Study of Genius at Close Quarters (London, 1940), p. 56.

Figure 5.3. ‘Nelson Dawson, the Seaman’, Christian Science Monitor, 18 November 1924, p. 5.

Nelson’s interest in the sea not only influenced his painting but also his self-presentation and the manner in which he tried to assert his status before marriage and during the rest of his life as he continued to paint among such communities across Britain and Europe. Alongside several, expected, photographs of him in bohemian guise, clutching a paintbrush and wearing a creased artist’s smock, he dressed as a ‘Seaman’ and again posed for the camera, as can be seen in a relaxed image, where he stands hand on hip on board a boat, looking out to sea (Figure 5.3). This photograph featured several years later in the Christian Science Monitor, in an article about the sale of an extensive collection of maritime objects Nelson had amassed – including ship’s models, telescopes, globes, scrimshaw whale’s teeth, carved figureheads – and was used to advertise his long-established authority and commitment to art and maritime cultures.¹⁹

Elsewhere, Nelson presented himself in line with established markers of middle-class masculine professional authority. He photographed himself wearing a suit and standing by a writing desk with a serious, contemplative expression and was depicted in a similarly commanding manner in an 1892 oil painting by John Cooke (now held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London), who worked in studios near to Nelson.²⁰ Formal, symbolic portraits of noteworthy men were prized in Victorian society. In this one, Cooke captured a solemn, heavily bearded Nelson in three-quarter profile, his status assigned through the slice of paint demarcating his white shirt and dark suit alongside the quasi-heraldic device of two paintbrushes and a metalworker’s hammer overlaid with an ivy leaf in the top corner. It was at this point, shortly before marriage, that Nelson was experimenting with metalwork.²¹ Cooke’s portrait was probably produced to bolster Nelson’s status as a metalworker, painter and middle-class ‘gentleman’ at a moment when he had considerable concerns about his financial precarity and artistic reputation. This appears to have been well known in his ‘fraternity’; in his memoir the painter George Percy Jacomb-Hood, who similarly lived at Wentworth Studios, discussed how Nelson was ‘painting excellent water-colours, without, I fear, much financial success’.²² Indeed, many of the men living there, although feeling that they ‘stood on the threshold of a new world’, also faced ‘a battle against poverty and disappointment’, often failing to sell pictures and being reliant on potatoes and bread for sustenance.²³ In the painting, Cooke sought to take advantage of the cultural capital that could be garnered for his bohemian ‘brother’ through the established prestige of portraiture, alongside motifs, dress and Nelson’s embodied masculinity. These were symbols recognizable to their peers and to wider society and, as such, the portrait emphasizes the opportunities available to artistic men such as Nelson, via multiple guises, to attempt to position themselves as figures of professional authority.

Figure 5.4. Edith B. Dawson’s 1888 sketchbook. Private archive.

Creative friendships played a similarly significant role in the construction of Edith’s artistic life and sense of selfhood pre-marriage. Her sketchbooks from this era contain several watercolours and sketches of groups of women painting together out of doors in picturesque rural settings, as can be seen in Figure 5.4. But these youthful female relationships did not have the same generative potential to solidify her status as an accepted participant in bohemian culture as those between Nelson and his male friends did for her future husband. Furthermore, although Nelson went off on peripatetic, independent adventures to capture seascapes, it was much more difficult for women to access such opportunities, due to anxieties about respectability and the belief that men were innately more suited to portraying such scenes. This very probably shaped Edith’s decision to paint cottage gardens and flower arrangements.²⁴ These were topics women were encouraged to focus on, although Edith’s considerable skills should also be accounted for, as should her lifelong interest in gardening and nature and her evident satisfaction in depicting such environments.

Another difference between Edith and Nelson’s pre-marital activities was Edith’s avowed commitment to Quakerism. Her position at the Quaker Mount School, York, allowed her to reaffirm her commitment to religion and art on a regular basis. This was a gendered role: a girls’ school, it is testament to the way in which women’s professional activities were funnelled into feminized spaces and roles. Yet working there may have been a formative experience for Edith as the school was run by female superintendents who were passionate that women should receive the same education as men. Edith’s religious beliefs would have made her receptive to Arts and Crafts tenets, as they resonated with the restrained living at the heart of Quaker thinking. The linkages between Quakerism, Arts and Crafts and professional status played out even in Edith’s clothing. Although her plain Quaker bonnet and simple style of dress would have been viewed as unfashionable by many, dressing in a restrained, austere manner was a strategy for many women artists and professional ‘pioneers’ as they sought to demonstrate their commitment to ‘serious’ work through dress and self-presentation, materially eschewing what were perceived to be the vapid ornamental trappings of modern society.

Before marriage, then, Edith and Nelson separately engaged in strategies of professionalization which fit within recognized narratives, including receiving training. They were both influenced by prevalent norms which encouraged gendered models of professionalization, socialization and production and shaped the differing opportunities available to men and women. Scrutiny of these activities elucidates the wide range of tactics artists needed to engage in to try to avoid financial and cultural precarity; Edith and Nelson embraced a vocational ethos and rhetoric, exhibited, dressed the part and established artistic friendships, but they were also guided in their efforts by personal interests and motivations, be this a fascination with men’s lives at sea or religious devotion.

The strategies Edith and Nelson implemented before their marriage continued to shape their professional activities throughout their lives, but marriage opened up several new opportunities for them both. Although they had primarily worked in watercolours before this point, they quickly turned their focus to establishing a metalwork business together, although they by no means gave up painting. Nelson did much of the designing, Edith the enamelling, and several workmen made these objects, which included wrought-iron and steel, gold, silver and enamel ornaments, jewellery, altar plates, architectural fittings, railings and gates, lamps and memorial tablets.

Metalwork enabled the Dawsons to situate themselves within a flourishing Arts and Crafts culture and to work on creative projects together – in fields less restrictive than the hierarchical landscape of the fine arts – researching their craft across the centuries and becoming experts in cloisonné, champlevé and Limoges enamelling techniques. They began their collaboration with Edith moving into Nelson’s ‘bachelor’ rooms at Wentworth Studios, where the two ‘camped out’; Edith bought their bed, due to Nelson’s poverty.²⁵ In many ways, this turn to metalwork was implemented because they urgently needed to make money. Metalwork offered the potential to secure a more stable income than that from watercolours in an era when there was considerable interest in purchasing handcrafted artworks for the home, as the middle classes expanded and sought to show off their cultured statuses by purchasing objects demonstrative of their rejection of mass commerce.

By collaborating together, the Dawsons reached greater heights of success than they ever received alone. By the mid-1890s, their names featured in newspapers and the art press to an unprecedented extent and they received many significant commissions, including for the trowel and mallet used by Queen Victoria to lay the foundation stone of the Victoria and Albert Museum, for a casket presented to the King of Norway by the London Fishmongers’ Company in 1906, and for another casket, given to President Woodrow Wilson when he visited England en route to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.²⁶ But despite this, Edith and Nelson were still faced with the need to repeatedly assert their artistic positions in society, to maintain their incomes and their reputations. Unlike other fields of work, where professional pathways could be more clearly structured, the Dawsons had to continuously think up designs that would come to be renowned for their ingenuity, produce charmingly crafted metalworks and engage in a performative process of asserting their artistic relevance, taste and expertise. This was enhanced by the fact they were working as pioneers in the field of Arts and Crafts metalwork; there were greater suspicions about the class status and reputations of those working in the applied rather than the fine arts. As such, figures like the Dawsons were under additional pressure to assert the refined ‘artistic’ nature of their work. Moreover, at certain moments, such as during and shortly after the Great War, finances continued to be a topic of fraught concern.²⁷

Their home played a central role in enabling Edith and Nelson to reaffirm their cultural authority. After marriage, this space became far more significant in the construction of their professional artistic lives. By 1896 they had relocated to the Mulberry Tree, Beaufort Street, Chelsea, approximately ten minutes’ walk from Wentworth Studios, a move which enabled them to remain embedded within the bustling artistic milieu of west London and was indicative of their growing prosperity. They later lived at houses including Swan House, Hammersmith, close to Arts and Crafts couples such as Phoebe and Harold Stabler. The Dawsons’ homes and workshops became popular venues for parties and exhibitions, discussed in rapturous letters from fellow artists and in the press.²⁸ These venues offered ample potential to mix socializing and the assertion of cultural authority with moneymaking. Nelson had held ‘at homes’ in his studio before marriage (he had to put a label on the door stating ‘friends only’ to stop ‘a stream of people … that one never saw before + would wish never to see again’).²⁹ But despite this, he still viewed the marital home as opening up possibilities unachievable as a bachelor. To Edith he lamented the appearance of his studio, writing that it ‘wants doing up really + some money spending on it, which I certainly shall not do’, unless it ‘were our rooms Edie dear our home we wd not let things go like that’.³⁰

The Dawsons’ home was used by the art press to materially validate their status, which highlights the necessity of inhabiting such spaces and the difficulties which ensued for those artists unable to do so. In the late nineteenth century the rapidly expanding press was including ever more detailed interviews with celebrated artists – routinely male – conducted in their homes and studios, emphasizing the growing importance of print culture in the making of professional artistic reputations and the belief in the power of descriptions of the home to unveil key insights about those living there. Much was made of the fact that the Dawsons lived in an ‘old house’ with ‘beautiful old furniture’ (although their daughter later claimed that these pieces had been selected because they were cheap).³¹ Such compliments were part of a wider positioning of the couple as figures ‘patron-princes of the Middle Ages’ would have commissioned work from.³² Their location in artistic, semi-rural, historically renowned Chelsea, ‘surrounded by the studios of the Chelsea painters and sculptors’, away from the hustle and bustle of central London, was proffered as a marker of their taste by the Architectural Review. The Mulberry Tree, with the Dawsons’ workmen hammering away in a workshop nearby, approvingly described as ‘so close that [the Dawsons] are able to watch the progress of their work’, was contrasted to ‘the pseudo-art of the big emporium’, deemed incompatible with the environment necessary in creating ‘true Craft’, which needed the ‘quiet, extended patience’ so clearly present at this artistic home.³³ The Studio similarly sought to provide an immersive experience for readers, assuming complete captivation with the art on display: ‘In the hall your eye is attracted by delightful and ingenious appliances in wrought copper, while the reception rooms … are full of more fascinating experiments in all sorts of metal.’ The journalists’ voyeuristic gaze functioned as a discreet but effective marketing device, enabling readers to fantasize about how these artworks would look in their own homes.³⁴

Such articles demonstrate the emergence of an increasingly recognizable Arts and Crafts rhetoric in the late nineteenth century, used by artists and journalists alike. What is most noticeable is the ongoing balancing act required to accrue and maintain respect. There was much emphasis on the horrors of capitalist society, the moral deficits of trade and the bad-quality products masquerading as art. Journalists liked to inform readers that the Dawsons had become a remarkable success story in a short period of time and were having to turn away customers, but this popularity had to be carefully navigated. Becoming too popular could mean ‘selling out’ and losing these cultivated credentials; as the Architectural Review warned its readers, ‘The Arts and Crafts Revival has been a wayward child, not above being petted by pretty, gilded toys.’³⁵ Having a tasteful ‘artistic’ home and participating in this powerful rhetoric, which required continual assertion of ‘serious’, ‘honest’ intentions, was vitally important for the Dawsons and their peers and in the eyes of the artistically minded public.

Their home helped fortify their artistic, professional and social lives, but this was by no means the only way the Dawsons sought to present their collaboration to the world. Histories of artistic collaboration have prioritized the home as the key site in enabling creative partnerships, but for Edith and Nelson exhibitions played a critical role in widening knowledge of their endeavours and enabling them to position themselves as dedicated ‘artistic’ workers. They showed their work several times at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which held its first exhibition in 1888. Nelson had already shown metalworks there in 1893, including a ‘bright hammered steel sconce’.³⁶ By 1896 Edith and Nelson were both members of the society and had exhibited enamels, a trowel, a christening casket, a cup and a triptych.³⁷ At the 1899 exhibition they presented a loving cup, a platter and an electric-light pendant.³⁸ In a similar way to the rhetoric being deployed to describe their activities in the press and the artistic environment at their home, the society’s exhibitions enabled the Dawsons to downplay any commercial motivation and underscore their commitment to the movement. During this era prices were not listed in the catalogue and enriching lectures were given by prominent men such as T. J. Cobden-Sanderson on ‘Art and Life’ and W. R. Lethaby on ‘Beautiful Cities’.³⁹

As well as this, the Dawsons exhibited regularly together elsewhere in Britain and internationally, at prestigious venues like the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, and at regional shows in galleries, halls and shops.⁴⁰ In 1900, the couple held a major exhibition at the Fine Art Society, New Bond Street, London, which included over 200 paintings and metalwork items and was widely praised as ‘thoroughly artistic’.⁴¹ They also showed their work together at venues such as the International Art Society in 1901, the Dowdeswell Galleries in 1903, the Leeds Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1904 and the Leicester Galleries in 1906, among others.⁴² In so doing, Edith and Nelson introduced many new audiences to ‘artistic’ metalwork, played a central role in fostering an appreciation of enamelling as an art form, sold their work far and wide and projected their alternative model of artistic creativity to the world. This was a model which eschewed the dominant tendency to foreground individual exceptionalism and instead promoted the productive role marital collaboration could play in creative processes.

To further validate their positions, Edith and Nelson gave talks and wrote books about their art, which connected them with a wider intellectual culture that was theorizing and historicizing the social implications of art for modern society. In 1896, they gave a talk together at the Friends’ Meeting House, York, titled ‘About Metalwork and Enamels’, complete with lantern slides and metalwork ‘specimens’. Nelson offered a history of ironwork from ‘the earliest known period’, after which Edith educated the audience about enamelling.⁴³ Having refined these ideas further – often by giving separate papers – they later wrote books for Methuen, who published works by figures such as Oscar Wilde and Marie Corelli. Edith published Enamels in 1906; Nelson published Goldsmiths’ and Silversmiths’ Work in 1907. By cultivating press interest, establishing an ‘artistic’ home, exhibiting widely and engaging in intellectual cultures, the Dawsons managed to largely move away from their earlier, precarious statuses and to firmly position themselves as leading lights in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Clearly, then, marriage and metalwork offered the Dawsons new professional opportunities together, but how did gender hierarchies shape their collaboration and how their relationship was understood, and their contribution to the arts valued more widely? Surveying print culture – local, national and international newspapers, the women’s press, art journals and books – reveals that the Dawsons were written about in a wide range of ways, reflective of the contested manner in which women’s and men’s creative activities were being debated more widely in society. As readers may expect, Edith’s role was ignored or presented as subsidiary in several articles, for example in the New York Sun, where her worth was first ascribed to her marital status and association with Nelson, before she was briefly complimented. She was referenced simply as ‘his wife, who is a clever enamellist’, in contrast to the rapturous descriptions of Nelson’s visionary artistry.⁴⁴

Edith was positioned as noteworthy due to her status as the wife of Nelson in numerous ways. When Enamels was published in Methuen’s Little Books on Art series, which included ‘miniature’ histories and outlines of artistic topics by well-known figures, the small number of married women involved were all listed by their husband’s names, with the prefix of ‘Mrs’ (Edith was ‘Mrs N. Dawson’). Male contributors had their names listed in the initial, surname style, as did unmarried author N. (Neta) Peacock, expert in Greek art. During this era, it was the custom to refer to married women in this way, and many women chose to write their names like this, perhaps because they had no apprehensions about doing so or because they preferred to focus on issues of greater concern to them. Maybe they revelled in signalling their connection to their husband and the respect this could conjure, particularly if they were married to a renowned figure whose class status and reputation could reinforce notions of their own social worth. At the same time, marital naming practices and anxieties about the effacement of married women’s professional contributions were topics being discussed with increasing fervour in suffrage and artistic networks.⁴⁵ After Enamels was published, Edith’s friend, the Irish artist Josephine Webb, wrote to her in dismay that Edith had been presented as ‘Mrs N. Dawson’.⁴⁶ Scrutinizing the hierarchies embedded within language, and the use of titles and taken-for-granted customs, paints in richer detail the continual reinscribing of ideas about gender difference in public life which could lead to a diminishing of the role played by married women in creative and intellectual cultures.

There are, however, many examples where the duo were considered on more equal terms. As the Globe newspaper told its readers in 1903:

These works … illustrate well the accomplishment of two artists who have done much to help … the present-day movement which aims at improving the standards of design and craftsmanship in jewellery and ornamental objects … They have sound taste as designers, and they know perfectly how to treat combinations of materials so as to produce a general effect which will be, in the best sense of the word, artistic.⁴⁷

The Manchester Courier discussed ‘their superiority in silverwork’ and ‘invention, refinement, and technical skill’, while the Graphic stressed that they, alongside Hubert von Herkomer and Alexander Fisher, had been centrally responsible for reviving interest in ‘artistic’ metalwork.⁴⁸ In many of these newspaper articles ‘the Dawsons’ were positioned as jointly responsible for their work and ideas – ‘They have sound taste’, ‘they know perfectly’ – rather than emphasis being placed on the creative elements they had been personally responsible for. This contrasted with the elite art press, which tended to offer longer, more specific descriptions, usually focused on Nelson, with individual works clearly labelled.⁴⁹ As such, within newspaper cultures Edith and Nelson often received credit for creative processes they may not have been specifically involved in but which offered a better portrayal of their overall efforts and accentuated the generative potential of collaboration for them both.

Despite their commitment to collaboration, Edith and Nelson have left behind very few (surviving, at least) accounts detailing the creative model they constructed. Neither do they appear to have written about whether they felt women and men were best suited to specific professional and marital roles, or about the gendered hierarchies permeating the arts. One reason for this is because – before their marriage, in any case – there is little to suggest that either Edith or Nelson felt especially concerned about the impact of marriage on their professional aspirations; their financial situation and zeal for creative expression made it clear that they would both contribute. Edith and Nelson did perhaps discuss this topic in person but, if this were a considerable issue, they would surely have addressed this in their letters, as they were regularly parted for considerable lengths of time. Instead, the lack of any sense that they perceived it to be unusual that they would both continue to work deserves acknowledgement. Doing so offers rare insight into the perspectives of a couple who did not come from the same social background as the more elite women artists (usually painters) who have dominated scholarly interest and for whom paid work appears to have been a topic of greater concern.

The Dawsons clearly recognized the benefits of them both being artists. The majority of married women in the Arts and Crafts movement had married artistic men and the outcome for those who married individuals working outside of the arts tended to be more professionally stifling.⁵⁰ As such, Nelson’s artistic commitments, alongside his investment in Edith’s work, would have offered her reassurance. It is unlikely they would have become acquainted, let alone engaged, had they not both been artists; they met through the headmaster of Scarborough Art School, who introduced Nelson to Edith as a known local artist.⁵¹ Their early letters to each other focused on painting as the expected topic of conversation. This offered the justification for communicating, was a source of considerable joy and enabled them to assert their artistic dedication. Nelson wrote exuberantly that he had been revelling in ‘thinking of thee slaving away all this week – a coarse apron on, finger marks on thy dear face + tously hair’. He encouraged her to send him her watercolours in the post, praising her and offering suggestions and telling her of the compliments he had received about her work from figures such as Walter Sickert and ‘Watson’, ‘a very clever w. colour man’.⁵² Nelson, too, benefitted from Edith’s investment in him. He reached a higher degree of recognition when he collaborated with his wife and appeared more emotionally fulfilled. Before marriage, his letters were littered with anxieties about the fraught intensity of preparing work for exhibitions and the fear it would be rejected. Channelling his spare time into writing to Edith appears to have given him a greater sense of self-worth, which bolstered his masculinity and offered a respite from his efforts to make a name for himself.⁵³

Among Nelson’s enthusiastic scrawls about Edith’s work and his concerns about his own artistic position there is one letter which stands out in the rare glimpse it offers of the awkward way Nelson addressed gender hierarchies when the topic was accidentally stumbled upon. Writing about his enjoyment in attending meetings at an (unnamed) artistic club which had become ‘a decided success’, he appears to have remembered – with what reads as a jolting sense of realization – that Edith would not be able to participate. Nelson skirted around this, avoiding any direct discussion of how this would affect Edith’s strategies of professionalization. He instead informed her that members of the club had been considering holding an occasional ‘ladies’ evening’, ‘but it is in embryo at present owing to the difficulty of preventing the men bringing models, who may be very nice people really, but still it is handling the thing’.⁵⁴ The formal writings produced by the newly established men’s artistic groups which flourished during this era routinely avoided discussing why they would not allow women to participate. They instead focused on proclaiming their supposedly meritocratic intentions to encourage radical new artistic ideas to blossom. The offhand remarks expressed in Nelson’s private letter to Edith are therefore important in revealing the anxieties his peers felt about the need to maintain male-only spaces of artistic association, and the concerns when it was suggested that artistic women may, even occasionally, be allowed to participate. Furthermore, although Nelson’s artistic ‘brothers’ were undoubtedly influenced in their attitudes by wider societal classed and gendered notions of respectability, the fact that they appear to have been happy for women to attend as artists’ models (a position which tended to be performed by working-class women) but would not accept middle-class women’s participation as professional artists, speaks volumes.

After marriage, the Dawsons, hard at work building their reputations, continued to have inchoately expressed perspectives about such topics. Nelson’s focus on designing the majority of their works, alongside managing their workmen and apprentices, while Edith often made the enamels in a separate room at home, is suggestive of their adherence to expected gendered codes to a certain extent (through the spatial segregation of these tasks, the dominant assumption that women were ‘naturally’ suited to making men’s designs and Edith’s focus on enamelling, seen as requiring the supposedly feminine attributes of nimble fingers and patience). Although Edith did contribute some designs – and surely made suggestions – certain other married women active in the ‘artistic’ metalwork scene overturned gendered norms to a greater extent. Charlotte Newman, for instance, was married to fellow designer Philip H. Newman (and similarly had two children), but it was she who established and managed the famed jewellery business ‘Mrs Newmans’ and produced the designs.⁵⁵ Still, Edith wrote joyfully in Enamels about having her own ‘workroom … seated at a table spread with the implements of the enameller’s craft’.⁵⁶ This domestic workroom was conveniently positioned so her daughters could visit each morning after breakfast and ‘Reading’ (the equivalent of family prayers).⁵⁷ Furthermore, she confidently asserted that ‘Enamelling must be taken seriously’, and took this approach into her everyday working life.⁵⁸ In a letter to silversmith Harold Stabler – one of several which reiterates Edith’s involvement in the smooth running of the business – she confidently informed him, ‘I am sending the enamel for the mason’s jewel as before, it’s only just done and is wanted by March 6 punctually … If in doubt about anything please refer to me.’⁵⁹

In these ‘business letters’, of which carbon copies survive in the Dawsons’ stock and letter books, Edith used a wide range of approaches when presenting herself.⁶⁰ She often signed off as ‘Mrs ED’ but occasionally simply scrawled her name as ‘Nelson Dawson’, eradicating ‘Mrs’ entirely and writing as though she were her husband (even though to those who knew them, their handwriting was noticeably different). Her approach was undoubtedly shaped by prevalent patriarchal currents, upon which it was taken for granted that the husband would be the dominant partner. Edith probably sought to utilize the established kudos associated with Nelson’s name by this point. Perhaps this approach offered an element of gender play, as she discreetly signed as him, unbeknown to the recipient. But it seems Edith did not feel concerned that it was Nelson who had greater name recognition, especially as he was often responsible for the more mundane management tasks in their business.

Edith’s focus in Enamels on the considerable skills needed for her craft and the Dawsons’ notable silence on circulating debates about ‘sex difference’ were themselves strategies of professionalization. Despite the scholarly tendency to focus on women ‘devoted to using the feminine virtues of selflessness, purity and empathy for social ends’ during this era, it is important to delineate more closely the language different women used to express their desire to work.⁶¹ Edith’s book is devoid of the heightened maternalistic or feminized rhetoric typically associated with women’s justification for working. It is noteworthy that Edith did not mention Nelson in it, even though she discussed contemporary metalwork, suggesting that the book was a space she wanted to reserve for asserting her own expertise. She did, however, dedicate the book to her two ‘gems’ (her daughters), offering a fleeting signpost to readers of her role as parent as well as artworker. Nelson implemented a similar approach elsewhere in print culture, including in his own book (which had no dedication), although when journalists excessively focused discussions on him, he did attempt to change the narrative. In the Studio interview he emphasized Edith’s involvement, stating, ‘My wife and I work together in this’, while in a speech for the Croydon Art Society he informed his audience how fortunate he was to work with Edith as she was ‘very artistic’.⁶²

Figure 5.5. Edith and Nelson Dawson’s beaten copper cup with a cloisonné lid. ‘Nelson and Edith Dawson’, Architectural Review, 1 December 1896, p. 36.

Perhaps it was frustration at the effacement of Edith’s contributions in certain articles, joy at their collaboration, or greater ease in using art to convey meanings than writing, that led to the Dawsons creating a beaten copper cup with a cloisonné lid in the mid-1890s, inscribing it with the words ‘Nelson Dawson and Edith his wife made me’ (Figure 5.5). This cup was selected for purchase by Queen Victoria and was shown at the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society exhibition. It exemplifies the impossibility of neatly categorizing the Dawsons’ collaborative efforts. The object functioned as a celebration of their partnership and its physical marking with both their names ensured Edith’s recognition for posterity, although this was unevenly framed around Edith’s position as ‘his wife’, with Nelson positioned centre stage.⁶³ However, the Dawsons also devised a design to use as a signature that portrayed their collaboration on more balanced terms. It took various forms although always included their names enclosed within separate, symmetrical sycamore leaves on the branch of a tree, evidently intended to symbolize the mutually beneficial nature of their partnership. (Intriguingly, some of Nelson’s watercolours include his initials next to a lone sycamore leaf.) Their joint ‘signature’ featured as the frontispiece of the photograph album for Edith’s parents and printed versions featured in the Studio and the Architectural Review (Figure 5.6). Offering this image for inclusion in the art press was strategic; it was an eye-catching visual reminder of their collaboration – to a Victorian audience who delighted in such symbolism – even within articles where the journalists dwelt little on Edith’s contributions.

Figure 5.6. Edith and Nelson Dawson’s design depicting the collaborative nature of their activities. ‘Interview with Mr and Mrs Nelson Dawson’, Studio, vi (1896), p. 178.

So far, this chapter has focused on Edith and Nelson’s artistic efforts. However, unlike their joint investment in their metalwork, Nelson was very much economically in control of their lives, as was customary in married relationships of their era. He gave Edith a set amount for household management and on special occasions such as her birthday and their anniversary.⁶⁴ This could cause Edith considerable difficulties, as is revealed in one fraught letter she sent to him in 1919 when he had been away for some time on a sketching trip. She despairingly wrote: ‘I am so poor … We came home to find the gas just going to be cut off, I hope they don’t come to do it tomorrow … I am sorry my dear I am very hard up indeed. Please at least send the gas money. I have never been in such straits … hope thou will get some good sketches.’⁶⁵

On top of this Edith had the daily task of the domestic management of their household and overseeing the care of their children to deal with. Nelson occasionally undertook tasks such as interviewing servants and some manual domestic duties, but this was usually when Edith and the servants were away.⁶⁶ These pressures of domestic management – in particular Edith’s never-ending quest to find a ‘cook general’ – became a consistent feature of her letters to Nelson after their marriage. Edith wrote several letters to her friend Josephine Webb on the topic, too, and Webb responded, sympathizing that these household duties ‘must take a large share of your thoughts and energies – and you can have only a limited amount of time for Art’. Despite her disapproval at Edith being described as ‘Mrs N. Dawson’, as discussed earlier in this chapter, Webb ultimately felt that in regard to the division of artistic and domestic labour ‘you can’t be quite equal’.⁶⁷ Furthermore, although Nelson rarely spoke of his family in ‘business letters’, Edith’s offer telling clues as to the ongoing pull of the domestic and the impossibility of neatly dividing the professional and personal sections of her life. When informing the painter Alfred Rawlings about their new jewellery stock in 1912 she moved fluidly between discussing this and his wife’s illness and lamenting that she needed a ‘cook general badly have been without so long’, a point she underlined out of evident frustration.⁶⁸

Middle-class women rarely expected husbands to participate in domestic labour, even within progressive households, during this era. Still, the persistency with which Edith discussed domestic pressures after marriage – with Nelson and those in their network, if not in publications – indicates that this was her way of raising awareness of the issue. The difficulties Edith felt in trying to balance work and family life come across clearly in one reflective letter she wrote to Nelson when she was away with their first daughter:

I have just got Rhoda off to bed … We spent yesterday afternoon at the Peak … but it brought my thoughts to five years ago when thou + I were there + I couldn’t help longing for the old days back again when we could look about and sketch with no burdens in the way of houses + workshops and Marthas and people. But it was only just the sight of the old place + I don’t wish for those days back as a general thing for really we are much happier now.⁶⁹

This final sentence, where Edith effectively shut down the topic, demonstrates how guilt and a deep sense of familial responsibility shaped how she thought about and ventured to momentarily discuss these issues. This feeling of unease about not being grateful – complicated further by the romantic ties the Dawsons felt for each other, which constituted a prominent part of their letters – clearly influenced the professional decisions she and other contemporary women made, and how they justified and reconciled their various life choices.

Scrutinizing the hierarchies at play in the maintenance of the Dawsons’ home reveals that they are by no means the only figures to consider. Edith and Nelson relied on a cast of different working-class participants who appear as shadowy figures in surviving archival materials but whose labour was crucial in enabling them to position themselves as ‘artistic’ metalworkers and participants in elite creative cultures. Although they began with only one servant, a ‘boy’ who cooked them kippers on their studio stove, across the early twentieth century their employees included a clerk, a ‘general help’, a nursemaid, a nanny, workmen and an ‘old goldsmith who lives close by making fresh stuff for us’.⁷⁰ Grace Cherry, whom the Dawsons employed as a clerk and who lived with them for a period, also offered support in multiple areas. As well as helping with paperwork, she assisted Edith with enamelling and performed domestic duties. In one letter Nelson wrote to Edith he jokingly remarked that he had seen ‘Grace making bread in the kitchen – I only hope there may be no cloisonné or other deleterious material in it.’⁷¹ In another, asking Edith to send ‘the enamel when ready’, he reminded her that ‘We ought not to let anyone except ourselves + G.C. touch these things’.⁷² There is little to suggest that these contributions were ever publicly acknowledged. Elsewhere, the Dawsons maintained a spatially and rhetorically gendered and classed approach in the employment of their staff. They made much of the authenticity of unnamed working-class male labour (such as the ‘old goldsmith’ and the ‘decent set of chaps’ in the workshops), as was common in the Arts and Crafts movement, but the female domestic labour that ensured that their home life ran smoothly – which was vital to their professional success – was discussed in more frustrated terms.⁷³ Despite their positioning as an artistic duo, their statuses were maintained through a much wider range of collaborative efforts, which as well as working-class labour included familial support, with their daughter Rhoda helping in the workshop from the age of sixteen.⁷⁴

Nelson, like his fellow artistic ‘brothers’, especially benefitted from these social norms, as they gave him the vital space and time to pursue his artistic ambitions. This, alongside the persistent cultural assumption that artists were men (in contrast to the differentiated ‘lady artist’) and the formal institutional hierarchies which barred women’s participation, meant that the opportunities for Nelson to flourish were persistently greater in all the different areas where the Dawsons together sought to make their reputations. He was asked to give far more talks for prestigious art organizations across Britain, and it was he, not Edith, who was chosen to join the Committee of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1899 after they had both exhibited there in the 1890s.⁷⁵

By the early twentieth century, Edith and Nelson were pursuing their own artistic agendas to an increasing extent. They continued to produce metalwork together but, like many artists, their interests were pulled in a range of creative directions. Among other crafts, Nelson became interested in etching and Edith in weaving.⁷⁶ As well as travelling regularly to find artistic inspiration – often without Edith – Nelson pursued projects such as fitting a workshop at the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society (a Christian society that helped seafarers and their families), so that ‘classes for arts and crafts’ could be held there and objects made and sold.⁷⁷ Edith, meanwhile, became preoccupied with several women’s art organizations that sprang up during this era. In a milieu where women continued to be barred from many prestigious groups for men, women’s networks played a formative role in constructing the wider infrastructure of a professional life. Her daily diaries show she was a member, committee member, attendee, exhibitor and speaker at groups such as the Women’s Guild of Arts, the Women’s International Art Club, the ’91 Art Club, the Lyceum Club and the Halcyon Club. Furthermore, she participated in the Society of Painters in Tempera, the Society of Gravers-Printers in Colour, the Caravan Club and Quaker meetings. Edith’s frenetic engagement across this range of organizational activities – alongside artistic parties, ‘at homes’ and trips abroad for holidays and to consult artworks and historical monuments – evidences her enjoyment of her life and her sense of growing professional opportunities at the dawn of the twentieth century. It is important to acknowledge this, even while recognizing the stifling institutional and cultural sexism she and her female peers faced.

Within women-focused environments Edith appears to have been more prepared to voice her opinions about the gender inequalities permeating the art world. She was part of a large group of women at the Women’s Guild of Arts who wrote a joint letter raising concerns when the guild formed the category ‘associate members’ to include men, to encourage mixed-sex interactions, and, even worse, made this membership free (female members had to pay). Edith ultimately resigned in protest along with several others, including tempera painter Mary Sargant Florence and Edith’s good friends, illustrator Alice B. Woodward and her sister the metalworker E. C. Woodward.⁷⁸ The women voicing their frustrations tended to be involved in suffrage campaigning and their activities demonstrate the growing overlap between the professional and the political for some artistic women at the time. This was a model Edith appears to have increasingly aligned herself with as in the years leading up to the protest at the guild she faithfully marked in her diary the activities of both militant and constitutional suffrage groups.⁷⁹ Moreover, she bound together her religious and political interests by becoming involved in the Friend’s Council for Women’s Suffrage and later the Friend’s League for Women’s Suffrage. Such examples show how suffrage groups enabled certain women to explore their views about gendered hierarchies within nurturing environments and to self-actualize politicized outlooks which would go on to permeate their professional activities.

Considering Edith and Nelson’s activities before and during marriage in this chapter has revealed that rather than simply becoming ‘professionals’, the Dawsons had to continuously engage in a wide range of cultural activities in order to construct and then maintain their artistic professional reputations throughout their lives. Indeed, both continued to pursue artistic opportunities until their deaths, Edith’s in 1928 and Nelson’s in 1941.⁸⁰ But what has happened to understanding of their collaborative partnership and professional lives since this point? Across the mid to late twentieth century, Rhoda Bickerdike sought to keep knowledge of her parents’ activities alive by donating their archives to collections across England. Their ‘business records’ (including account books, lecture notes and photographs of their art) and their artworks and designs were deposited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, many of Nelson’s art works went to Lincolnshire Archives, and items of Edith’s clothing were gifted to the Museum of London.

In contrast, a substantial array of materials deemed more personal were not donated: the Dawsons’ love letters, many of their photographs of each other – including the photograph album which opened this chapter – Edith’s letters from friends and professional acquaintances, her daily diaries and her pre-marital sketchbooks. Bickerdike left most of these materials to female family members, who, since her death in 1992 have spent considerable time organizing and transcribing them, even sending Edith and Nelson’s letters back and forth through the post, allowing other descendants to explore the intriguing history of their bohemian, artistic relatives.

Such an approach has been common across the twentieth century and has led to public institutions being more likely to hold substantial collections detailing the professional activities of men, while ‘private’, family collections – and attics – often contain hidden treasures relating to women’s creative, personal and professional lives. Although this is clearly testament to an ongoing, gendered understanding of the relative worth of different archival materials, exacerbated by the fact that many public collections have historically refused to accept women’s collections, deeming them insignificant, that is not the whole story. Bickerdike felt strongly about her mother’s professional role; she wrote an article for Apollo about their ‘equal partnership’.⁸¹ She may have intended for these archives to end up in public collections after they had first been read and enjoyed by family members. The decision made here does, however, speak to an understanding that ‘private’ letters and documents hold the potential to elicit a greater emotional response, which family descendants in particular may wish to enjoy, and a sense that Edith’s letters, daily diaries and sketchbooks are of a curiously social, domestic nature, rather than artistic and professional.

The archival division of the Dawsons’ activities has undeniably shaped the historiography, reifying the perspective that the Arts and Crafts movement revolved around the activities of a small corpus of exceptional men and the positioning of artistic women as cloaked in mystery after marriage. In their ‘business’ records, donated by Bickerdike to the Victoria and Albert Museum and largely catalogued in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Edith appears as a rather subsidiary figure in the partnership.⁸² Although traces of her activities can be found – as shown in this chapter through her letters confidently discussing her enamelling and her exasperated hunt for a ‘cook general’ – Nelson’s public, professional persona features far more prominently. Thankfully, another family descendent donated a discrete collection of Edith’s letters and daily diaries from 1914–18 to the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. This enabled me to make contact with the family, who generously allowed me to consult the much wider wealth of Edith’s ‘private papers’ gifted to them by Rhoda and spread between descendants living in Birmingham, Surrey and London.⁸³

As a result, this chapter has been able to include valuable new insights from Edith’s daily diaries and sketchbooks, from the Dawsons’ photographs and from their letters to each other, and to assess them in conjunction with the Victoria and Albert Museum papers. Together these materials reveal more fully Edith’s expansive, multi-faceted role in their partnership, through her artistic skills, domestic labour and general support. They also offer a pertinent reminder of the wider network of working-class and familial labour which facilitated the Dawsons’ collaboration. This ultimately gives a richer sense of the range of restrictions and opportunities Edith negotiated upon entering her partnership with Nelson, the breadth of ways their partnership was discussed and the need to take account of the affective, emotional ties which have historically played such a central role in shaping men and women’s entangled professional and personal life decisions in modern Britain.