June 9, 1812

Camilla Crosland (born June 9, 1812 ) was an obscure Victorian novelist, but she has an authentic claim on our attention, if for no other reason that she was the author of Landmarks of a literary life 1820-1892 (1893). These memoirs offer an interesting glimpse of a middle class world wherein a woman writer managed to support herself with her books. Herein she complains about how fast traffic is, now that people can hire carriages to go about in the city. She details the Waterloo battlefield where entrepreneurs removed the teeth from cadavers since the English dentists were a ready market for such. At the other end of her life, she has a memorable picture of living on after people one knows, keep "falling into graves."

So Camilla Crosland sketches a familiar world, with enough startling detail to engage the reader and scholar. We both recognize and are shocked by her description of socially dropping Rose Myra Drummond. Drummond came from a respectable family and had that refinement which made her a sister to Crosland. Drummond however had married beneath herself, to someone who had enlisted in the army as a private soldier. Crosland reports that Drummond refused to hide her husband's social status:

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.. "My husband was not a gentleman; he is one of five sons, peasant-born." And I am nearly sure she added, "they are all in the army." The old pride was quite as rampant as ever. .... She seemed thoroughly aware that a woman could not raise her husband's social position, though a duke might raise any virtuous girl to his own. ...The next thing I heard was that Mr. Pointer had left the army, and, in conjunction with his wife, had taken up photography and settled at Brighton. At Brighton, I believe, the artist died, to be followed to the grave in a few months by the husband, who, it was said, loved her so well that he died literally of grief for her loss.

What Mrs. Crosland does not mention is that the husband here, Harry Pointer, was the photographer who started a fad for cats photographed in various anthropomorphic poses. They were sold as postcards, with messages printed on them, and Pointer's series of "Brighton Cats" included about two hundred photos of cats. Tired of cat pictures on the web? Pointer started it all.

Here's a picture of Camilla Crosland as a youth. This novelist and editor was observant and creative. But she could not grasp someone marrying for love alone.