Emperor Norton's Sister, Aficionado of Anemones

Family History and a Fascinating Hobby

Not the plants by that name — the animals! Sea anemones!

She had several. She regarded them as her pets. And, she wrote about these at some length.

But, that’s later in our story.

When Joshua Norton set sail with his family from Deptford, England, to the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, in February 1820, he was two years old and had just one sibling, Louis, who was three.

En route, Joshua’s mother gave birth to a third child, Philip. So, when the family arrived in South Africa, there were five of them: Joshua’s parents, John and Sarah, and the three boys.

Shortly after Joshua left South Africa in late 1845, both of his brothers died: Louis in May 1846 and Philip in April 1847.

But, his parents had nine additional children between 1822 and 1832. Two of these did not survive into adolescence.

If Joshua had contact with — or learned news of — any of his siblings after leaving South Africa in 1845, I’ve seen no evidence of it.

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ACCORDING to her headstone, Joshua’s younger sister, Selina Jane Norton, was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, on 6 April 1824, shortly after Joshua turned 6.

The details of Selina’s life are sketchy. But, it’s known that, in June 1843, Selina was married to Donald Hume MacLeod at St. George’s Church in Cape Town. (Selina’s Jewish parents must have viewed her Anglican marriage as a betrayal — or, at the least, lamentable).

MacLeod, born in 1806, was an officer in the 63rd Regiment of the British Army who had found himself in Cape Town en route from Australia back to Britain, having served in Australia as a colonial administrator.

Within a year or so, Selina and Donald had moved to Kent, England, where their first daughter, Emmeline, was born in Blean in July 1844 and baptized in Herne the following October.

They had three more daughters in quick succession: Louisa in 1846 (born in Herne), Lavinia in 1847 and Francis in 1850.

By 1847, the family was in Scotland, as the 1851 Scotland census lists Lavinia as having been born in Cadder, just north of Glasgow.

The Scotland census of 1851 lists the family as living about 10 miles to the east of Cadder, in Cumbernauld — which is where Francis was born. The family was comfortable enough to afford two servants. who were listed as members of their household.

By the time of the 1861 England census, the family had moved to the coastal village of Dawlish, in the English county of Devon. Emmeline is not listed — undocumented but detailed information at Ancestry.com indicates that she died in 1859, at 15, after a long illness — and the family had one servant.

Selina’s husband Donald died in Dawlish on 14 November 1861.

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IN DAWLISH on 4 March 1863, Selina married again — to James Hay Mackenzie.

Mackenzie — born in October 1809 and, like Selina, a widow — was a lawyer. Much more than that, he was a “Writer to the Signet” — James Hay Mackenzie, W.S. — which meant that he was a member of a special society of Scottish lawyers, founded in the late sixteenth century, that had special government authority, responsibilities and privileges from the crown. (The “Signet” in question was “Her Majesty’s” Signet).

Mackenzie was a person of some means. One measure of this: Just before marrying Selina, Mackenzie donated £3000 to endow a scholarship for classical literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Item on James Hay Mackenzie’s endowment of a scholarship for the study of classical literature at the University of Edinburgh, in the Scottish American Journal, 22 January 1863, p. 6 (reprinted from The Scotsman). Source: GenealogyBank

It is an index of Selina’s status and mobility that — living in a small town in Devon — she came into the orbit of, and married, a person of such prominence in Edinburgh.

Might Selina have met James while the family was living near Glasgow in the 1850s?

Whichever is the case, James did not last long. He died on 16 February 1865 and was buried in the graveyard of St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Edinburgh.

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BUT, IT’S SOMETHING that happened nearly four years earlier, in 1861 — when Selina still was living in Dawlish and married to her soon-to-be-deceased first husband — that brings us to the heart of our story.

What set me on the trail of Emperor Norton’s sister, Selina, was my stumbling upon a reference to her as an “aquarium hobbyist.”

What a curious phrase, I thought! — so, I had to learn more.

It turns out that Selina wrote an article about her “pet” sea anemones. This article, titled “Sagartia Anemones, or, My Drawing-Room Pets” and apparently credited to “Selina Jane MacLeod,” was published in July 1861, when Selina was 37, by a London-based magazine called Once A Week — subtitled “An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science & Popular Information.”

Here’s an earlier cover of the magazine, from October 1859:

Front cover of Once A Week magazine for 22 October 1859. From Simon Cooke, “‘The Kindly Fruits of the Earth’: The Materiality of the Cornhill Magazine (1860),” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [online], 84 Automne, 2016 (online since 1 November 2016). Source: Open Edition Journals

Here’s how the first page of Selina’s article looked in July 1861 (starting at the bottom of the first column). (See caption for links to complete article.)

First page of Selina Jane MacLeod, “Sagartia Anemones, or, My Drawing-Room Pets,” Once A Week, series 1, volume 5, 6 July 1861, pp. 46–50. Full article here (images and HTML text), here (HTML text) and here (images). Sources: Wikisource and Internet Archive

Introducing her article, Selina writes that

Marine Zoology rises year by year like a growing child, and in the microcosms of our rock pools, nestling rocks, and sandy nooks, we find that life there has its pleasures and its pains, and that there are beings, who, in spite of having once puzzled writers whether to consider them “as a superior rank of vegetables or the humblest order of the animated tribe,” are replete with vivacity and animation, sensible of the summer sunlight and the winter cold, and day by day developing to our minds the fact that they have instincts, will, and disposition, as full of interest and amusement as their forms delight us, each in its own kind by their beauty, their varying hues, and their peculiar and most wondrous construction.

Although Selina confesses that her “experience [with sea anemones] boasts of little more than a year,” she provides a finely observed account of eight different species of the genus Sagartia that were among “the lovely inhabitants of my two or three glass vases — Aquaria.”

She seamlessly blends naturalistic description with anthropomorphizing rumination that verges on the philosophical, even theological. Emperor Norton was not the only writer in the family.

I’ve yet to find other published works by Selina. But, given that she clearly has skill and a voice as a writer by the time of this piece from 1861, it stands to reason that she already had found some way of cultivating that. Perhaps she kept nature journals and/or journals of a more general, wide-ranging scope?

If so, for how long did she keep these journals? Did she ever write about her long-lost brother, Joshua — the Emperor of the United States? Does such a journal still exist as a family heirloom?

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SELINA JANE Norton Mackenzie died at 45, on 15 November 1869.

Death notice for Selina Jane Norton Mackenzie. Source: 1820Settlers.com

Selina’s belatedly filed death notice from the Cape of Good Hope lists her last residence as “77 North Street, St. Andrews, Fife, North Britain” — which is to say, Scotland.

This is of personal interest to me, as I spent four beautiful years in St. Andrews, 1986–1990, at the end of which I earned a Master of Arts from the University of St. Andrews.

City directories for Edinburgh show that Selina — listed as “Mrs. J. Hay Mackenzie” — continued to live in the city for a few years after her second husband’s death in 1865.

The 1867 Edinburgh directory lists her at 21 Alva Street; the 1868 directory has her at 35 St. Bernard Circle.

Listing for Selina (“Mrs. J. Hay”) Mackenzie in New Edinburgh, Leith, and County Household Directory, 1867, p. 138. Source: Internet Archive

Listing for Selina (“Mrs. J. Hay”) Mackenzie in New Edinburgh, Leith, and County Household Directory, 1868, p. 145. Source: Internet Archive

Reflecting Selina’s status as a “gentlewoman” — as her death notice classifies her — both of these addresses were large, wide, two-story townhouses in centrally located neighborhoods near Edinburgh Castle.

Based on these listings and the fact that Selina is not listed in the 1869 Edinburgh directory, it appears that Selina will not have moved to the North Sea coastal idyll of St. Andrews — about 55 miles northeast of Edinburgh — until sometime in 1868 or 1869.

Most likely, 77 North Street was in the building shown here — which is adjacent to the 15th-century university chapel and the university quad.

Most likely, it was in part of this large 3-story neoclassical building (adjacent to the turreted building) on North Street, St. Andrews, Scotland, that Selina Norton Mackenzie lived in 1868–69. Source: Google Street View

As the chimney pattern suggests and 19th-century maps of the city confirm, this building, when Selina was in St. Andrews, was divided into four separate properties, each with its own door and walled garden in back.

Directories for “the Kingdom of Fife,” the county where St. Andrews is located, suggest that, for most of the 1860s, the building was a mix of private residences and boarding houses.

Documents from the period of Selina’s marriage to James Hay Mackenzie — the 1861 census and the Fife directories from 1862 and 1866 — indicate that 77 North Street, St. Andrews, was a boarding house run by a Mrs. Elizabeth Patterson. This would seem to rule out the possibility that 77 North Street had been a weekend or summer getaway for the Mackenzies.

Rather, it appears that, sometime in or after 1866, the 77 North Street property was sold and converted into a private residence, with Selina moving there in 1868 or 1869.

Did Selina move to this seaside spot to recapture something she’d been missing since living in seaside Dawlish several years earlier? Did she move here for her health?

One piece of evidence, in particular, suggest that the move could have been health-related.

The 1871 Scotland census shows all three of Selina’s surviving daughters — Louisa, Lavinia and Frances — living at 77 North Street.

1871 Scotland census listings for sisters Louisa MacLeod and Lavinia MacLeod (bottom of top sheet) and Frances MacLeod (top of bottom sheet) living at 77 North Street, St. Andrews. Source: National Records of Scotland

The 1877 directory for Fife shows “M’Leod Miss Louisa” living at 77 North Street, St. Andrews. Possibly, only Louisa is listed in the directory, because — as the eldest — she was regarded as the head of the household.

Listing for Louisa MacLeod at 77 North Street, St. Andrews, Scotland, Worrall’s Directory of the North-Eastern Counties of Scotland, 1877, p. 274. Source: Internet Archive

The census of 1881 has Louisa and Lavinia still living at 77 North Street, with two servants.

Frances was not listed at number 77, because she had married John Dundas in 1877. But, the family still was together as could be. Frances and John just moved next door, where they were lodgers

Was it the three sisters who took care of their mother, Selina, in her last days — with the sisters continuing to live in the house their mother willed to them?

Louisa died and was buried in St. Andrews in February 1888, and Frances’ husband John died in 1890 in Dawlish.

The fact that the 1891 England census had Lavinia and Frances living together at another spot in Devon suggests that Louisa’s death marked the end of the family’s residence in St. Andrews, with Frances and John, together with Lavinia, decamping afterwards to the sisters’ previous home of Dawlish.

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SELINA is buried alongside her second husband, James, at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. There are three plaques of equal size mounted on a graveyard wall, with James in the center, his first wife Janet Wedderburn on the left and Selina, memorialized as “Selina Jane Norton,” on the right. Each is engraved with a Christian cross.

Grave marker for Selina Jane Norton (right) in the graveyard of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh, Scotland. Source: Find a Grave

Is this as Selina would have wished?

What, if any, role(s) did her daughters or other family members play in her funeral and burial arrangements?

Of her Sagartia rosea, Selina writes [emphasis mine]:

The light and warmth from heaven are grateful to its senses, the roar of the waters and the battling of the waves are sweetest music to its ears, and soothingly tranquilising to its comfort in activity or repose. The waifs and strays that fall to its share by the wayside strengthen its vitality, add to its stature, and clothe its whole frame in a thanksgiving to Him “who is I AM, even in the uttermost parts of the sea.”

Later, when describing her Sagartia bellis, she notes that

the Weymouth Bellis, in yellow wainscot-hued column and black, white, and grey freckled disc, and the Cornish, love to congregate in the slimy mud. Here they and their enormous families of little ones grow sleek and fat, laughing at care and its sister evils, for “He who made all things for His glory” provideth for them.

So, clearly, Selina had a religious sensibility that she brought to her writing. But, was she someone who, like her brother Joshua, came to wear the Judaism of her birth and childhood more lightly — as part of an integrated Judeo-Christian faith?

To be sure, the relative Christianization of “the siblings Norton” of the Cape of Good Hope is a subject for its own article.

But, Selina Jane Norton: What a fascinating enigma!

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A POSTSCRIPT to make you go “Hmmm”…

Selina married Donald Hume MacLeod in Cape Town in June 1843 and was living in England within a year — possibly within as little as 6 months.

For Selina, was the promise of getting out of South Africa part of Donald’s appeal? Did she view her marriage and subsequent move as an escape plan?

Equally significant: Did Selina’s older brother Joshua see it that way and start planning an escape of his own?

This much we know: Less than 2½ years later, in late 1845, Joshua left Cape Town on a ship for England, where — in Liverpool, February 1846 — he boarded the Massachusetts-built ship that landed him in Boston in March.

Was it Selina who planted the seed for that journey and who — for Joshua — put it within the realm of possibility?

When Joshua arrived in England in early 1846, Selina still was in Kent.

Did she and Joshua see one another before he left for Boston?

Did Selina help with Joshua’s travel arrangements?

Did she see him off in Liverpool?

Hmmmmm.

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