Your loving auntie & God mama, Julia Cameron

Written almost immediately upon her return from her 10 years in India, and probably at her temporary residence, Ephrahim Common, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, this note is a typical example of Mrs Cameron's effusive, loving style. The letter dates from a time 15 years before Julia Margaret touched a camera, and it is to her niece Julia PrinsepJackson, who was then only two years old. She was a god-daughter to Mrs Cameron, and later her most frequent model. Indeed, Julia Jackson (1846–1895) became one of the most beautiful of 19th-century women. Her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, died in 1870, and eight years later she married Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Two of her children became famous: Vanessa Bell as a painter, Virginia Woolf as a writer. Julia eventually wrote the DNB entry (from ‘personal knowledge’) of her eccentric aunt, who was renowned for her taste in shawls, her generosity in giving them as presents, and for fixing the images of certain 19th-century great men for all time. The ‘two Hardinges’ refers at least in part to Julia Margaret's son Hardinge Hay Cameron, godson of Lord Hardinge, the recently-retired Governor-General of India

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