Island Life Magazine Ltd November/December 2005 | Page 22

FEATURE

Dimbola Lodge
“I turned my coal-house into my dark room and a glazed fowl house I had given
to my children became my glass house... the society of hens and chickens was
soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in
turn have immortalised this humble little farm erection."
Julia Margaret Cameron
Annals From My Glass House

Nowadays, the West Wight is best known as a holiday
destination, family friendly, a place of quiet beaches and
countryside walks, a backwater where people come to relax,
and switch off their minds, rather than to be at the cutting
edge of contemporary culture. A place seemingly still in
thrall to its glorious past.

Darwin, Gladstone, GF Watts, Thackeray, Longfellow,
Christina Rossetti, Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll, Benjamin
Jowett: all walked these quiet green lanes, and down to the
sea. Hester Fuller later wrote that "Freshwater in the time of
Tennyson has been compared to Athens in the time of
Pericles, as being the place to which all the famous men of
the reign of Queen Victoria gravitated".

For here during the two decades between Tennyson moving
into Farringford in 1853 and Julia Margaret Cameron leaving
the more modest dwelling of Dimbola for Ceylon in 1875,
the scattered cottages and seaside villas drew together many
of the leading figures in the arts, philosophy and science.

And it was the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron
who organised them, fed them, flattered them, and captured
their very essence through the messy and painstaking
method of wet collodion. From the chaotic household at

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