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she was six years old she had an early opportunity to support her father’s reproach of local morals. In 1843 a penniless young artist called George Frederick Watts arrived in the city. Quite by chance, he had met Edward Ellice’s brother on the boat from Marseilles, who at once effected an introduction to the Hollands. The policeman of society and his little sausage-curled lieutenant soon learned that Watts was the son of a man who had fallen so low as to be a piano tuner. To their complete amazement, Morgan and Georgina saw Watts being taken up by the Hollands, commissioned to paint portraits by the fabulously rich Demidovs; and the darling of all who met him. While this may have secretly impressed Georgina as a striking example of how fame worked, Morgan had not come to Florence to have anything to do with art. The adoration of Watts, who was not only thin but unutterably gloomy and, to many outsiders, effete in the extreme, left him speechless. Augusta Holland commissioned a portrait by the artist in which she wore a chapeau de paille – ‘some lady having in a joke put one of the country hats on her head’, as a smitten Edward Ellice reported to Lady Holland in London. On New Year’s Day, 1844, Augusta presented the gangly Watts with a gold watch, specially commissioned from Geneva, murmuring, as she placed the chain around his neck, ‘We not only bind you to us, we chain you.’ It was immediately interpreted as the sign of a liaison. Morgan fingered his own Warwickshire timepiece from Messrs Vale and Rotherham and reflected bitterly on the levels to which society had sunk.

      The reason her father gave for fleeing London – his wife’s ill health – was a common euphemism for poverty. If Georgina ever was worried about her mother, events were soon to calm her mind. At the Villa Capponi Louisa had another three children in quick succession – Emily, Florence, and the baby of the family, Apsley. Though the heat did not suit her and she never adapted successfully to having such a quiverful of children, she was as healthy as a horse. She lived to be eighty-three, and was on this earth longer than her husband or her eldest daughter. More sociable than Morgan in her timid haphazard way, Louisa made the best she could of Florence. When Georgina was old enough, she took the child with her to the Cascine Gardens, where every day the bon ton gathered to gossip while the more gallant and amorous gentlemen threaded through the mass of carriages bearing messages and making their salutes. This morning concourse was, Georgina learned, to be compared favourably to Rotten Row or the Bois de Boulogne. When the weather was douce enough for walking, Louisa might descend from her carriage and stroll with her daughter under the trees by the banks of the Arno. There she would point out, not without envious longing, the roofs of the great houses on the opposite bank.

      From May onwards the town would be refreshed by new faces, birds of passage making the Grand Tour. They were eagerly welcomed by the expatriates. What was happening in London? Was it true that rain and a hundred thousand special constables had turned back the revolutionary Chartist mob – and was Mr Gladstone truly one of those who was sworn in? Was it also true that railway speeds now regularly touched forty miles an hour, without hurt to the internal organs of the passengers? And plum – was that really a colour a lady of fashion might adopt? Sometimes the tedium of the daily corso would be broken by the distant sighting of some scandalous liaison in its early stages, or whispered news of ruination in some other form, like gambling. These intrigues Georgina dutifully reported to her father. She showed an aptitude for similar detective work all her life – not much given to self-analysis, she was a master of the dossier method of investigating others. It was exciting and she was seldom short of material.

      To a small girl groomed by her father to find outrage in everything, there was the additional frisson of the Austrian occupation. One afternoon an Italian lawyer absent-mindedly spat on the ground while a patrol passed. The Austrian officer at once dismounted and, having the culprit pinned to the wall, ordered his troopers to line up and, one by one, spit in the unfortunate man’s face. In 1851 there was an even more shocking case. Two young brothers called Mather were following an Austrian military band and darted across the road between it and the accompanying troop of horse. Two officers spurred their mounts and cut one of the brothers to the ground. This was the sort of story to set Morgan bristling with indignation. Yet there was a diminishing return in feeding her father such titbits. She gradually understood what it meant to be part of his police force. The fate of Charles Mather raised disgust and indignation all the way back to the floor of the House of Commons. However, Morgan’s contempt for other people was quite unspecific – he was not minded to like the unfortunate Mather any more than the man who had struck him. In his eyes, the whole world was out of step. When Georgina was very young, her father’s vanity reinforced her own childish sense of superiority. To be a Thomas was to be a thing apart, not different from but better than all the rest. As she grew up, the unwelcoming house and the lack of invitations from others gradually began to cast doubt in her. The possibility existed that there was something seriously wrong with them all.

      She was given tutors – a long roll call of them, not one of whom made any great impression or sowed the seeds of inspiration. Georgina learned to play the piano and completed a conventional and undemanding schooling in reading and writing. She once remarked, ‘I am sure if I had but studied Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing I should have made a great artist.’ There is not the slightest nod here to the treasure house of art Florence was. She was intelligent but unlearned. The one gift she did possess she had been born with – a quite remarkably clear soprano voice. It was said in later life that her mother took special interest in her singing. This may have indicated to some that Louisa herself was musical but this was not the case. Every girl child of that time was taught to sing, in the same way that she was taught to brush her hair, or show deference to her elders, or any of a hundred other little things. Singing was a way of moving from the schoolroom to the drawing room and a young girl’s voice was merely a further expression of the taste exhibited in the family’s choice of furniture, its display of pictures and china. The role a well-mannered girl had in a family was almost too obvious to mention. A boy might, within reason, do as he liked and go where he would. No one expected much sense from a boy. For that he was sent away to school. His sister was domesticated as soon as was practicable. Singing was an outward demonstration of her complicity in the affairs of the family. She was in that sense her mother’s child, an expression of her mother’s taste and sensibility.

      What is striking about Georgina’s childhood is its extraordinary tedium. The pleasures a young girl of her class might take for granted in an English setting simply did not exist for her – like picnics, visits to relatives, parties, river excursions or a trip to the seaside. She had some idiosyncrasies that stayed with her all her life. From her youngest days she exhibited a mild mania for collecting. She cut out armorial bearings from magazines and pasted them into books. She was among the earliest collectors of stamps. She made lists of Important Things. She kept a diary and recorded the uninspiring events of her day in scrupulous detail. This suggests a secretive and lonely child, but it is more likely that the Villa Capponi days were simply very long. We know from more famous Florence residents – from the Brownings, for example – that in the three summer months that began in June, the heat became enervating and a torpor settled over everything. Even a shaded garden became too hot to endure and those families who could afford it moved up into the hills for air and the chance of a breeze. Once there, improving sightseeing and visits to hilltop monasteries were scheduled for five in the morning. So, to be a child in the stiflingly hot summers, even with siblings, became a little like being the inmate of a prison. Morgan had nothing to say to any of his children – they in turn were terrified to open their mouths in his presence. The rooms of the villa were extensive, there were servants in plenty, but nothing much to do. The only outdoor pleasure Georgina shared with her father was his passion for gardening, which he undertook in the winter months. She showed early on a very un-Latin enthusiasm for pets, especially dogs, treating them as little people, more loyal and certainly more loving than the two-legged inhabitants of the Villa. Late in life she put this feeling into a letter: ‘I feel a horror for exaggerated love or friendship. It’s just too well demonstrated to me that when the moment comes that one asks for something, or has need of something, the response is not worth a biscuit.’

      As she grew into womanhood, she became nothing like the submissive little miss of the conventional fashion plate. Nor was she modelled on the enigmatic girls who decorated Leech cartoons in Punch with their smooth wings of hair and ultra-straight noses. The air of obedient calm required of young

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