curtains and even upholstering furniture. Richard kept apart from all the hustle
and bustle, burying himself in his own work. An idealist who was hopeless at
any kind of manual task, he wandered around his new surroundings, admiring
his wife’s efforts with the frequent comment, ‘I am a helpless creature!’; even
the carving of the Sunday joint he handed over to her.^17 When guests came to
dinner, Emmeline dressed the table with pretty arrangements of gauze and
flowers. Her skill at sewing was evident in the feminine clothes she made for
herself and for the children. She never liked the ‘rational’ dress that some
radical women advocated, such as the short skirts and short hair that Annie
Besant sported or the trousers worn by Helen Taylor, step-daughter of the great
Liberal MP John Stuart Mill who, during the parliamentary discussion of the
1867 Reform Act, had supported the women’s cause by moving, unsuccessfully,
that the word ‘man’ should be replaced by the word ‘person’.^18 For Emmeline,
who never went outdoors without her veil, feminine dress was regarded as indis-
pensable for public work, an aspect of her character that in Sylvia’s view made
her mother ‘a woman of her class and period’.^19
But Richard was enchanted. ‘Not the bitterest critic of Mrs. Pankhurst ever
suggested’, noted that perceptive observer Rebecca West, ‘that her husband did
not find her, from beginning to end of the nineteen years of their marriage, a
perfect wife.’^20
Their house at 8 Russell Square soon became a centre for political gatherings
of a wide array of social reformers – socialists, Fabians, anarchists, suffragists,
free thinkers, agnostics and radicals. In order to draw an audience, such At
Homes invariably included some form of entertainment, such as a recitation,
but above all it was the elegant and beautiful Emmeline Pankhurst, in a trained
velvet dress, the hostess who made her guests welcome and occasionally sang in
her moving contralto voice, who impressed the visitors. One remembered her as
‘a living flame. As active as a bit of quicksilver, as glistening, as enticing. ... She
looked like the model of Burne-Jones’ pictures – slender, willowy, with the
exquisite features of one of the saints of the great impressionists.’^21 In addition
to William Morris and Annie Besant, visitors to these gatherings included
Florence Fenwick Miller, journalist, lecturer and popular educator; Tom Mann,
a socialist and trade union activist; the Russian refugees Kropotkin, Stepniak
and Chaykovsky; American suffragists and abolitionists, such as Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and William Lloyd Garrison; R. B. Haldane and Jacob Bright, both
Members of Parliament and supporters of women’s suffrage; James Bryce, British
Ambassador in the United States; Alice Scatcherd; Mr. Hodgson Pratt, a
worker for international peace, and Emmeline’s hero from her Paris schooldays,
Henri de Rochefort, living in exile in London.^22 The regular visits of Rochefort,
who had refused to learn English on the grounds that it would ruin his native
tongue, revived in Emmeline her old passion for all things French. She declared
that Richard, who spoke French ‘with punctilious exactitude, his love of the
precise word causing a frequent recourse to the dictionary’, must have some
French blood in his family background; he was so unlike the typically stolid
POLITICAL HOSTESS