Josephine's Early Years

(Continued from Josephine's Page... )

Josephine's parents were working middle class stock and their home and income, while modest, were still comfortable and more than sufficient to meet their needs. Sophie taught general subjects at the local school and Jonathan taught history as a visiting professor at Strasbourg University. With two teachers for parents, Josephine grew up with a love of books and learning, developed a keen and inquiring mind, and her parents indulged her in those areas. She received a fine education from her mother at home, learning to read and cipher her sums before the age of five. Sophie took care of her daughter's domestic education as well, teaching her the arts of cooking, cleaning, and sewing. While Josephine never came to love these skills, she nonetheless became proficient in them, being dexterous and clever with her hands.

During her childhood in Strasbourg, family discussions at the dinner table would run the gamut from politics to natural history to current events at home and abroad. The talks would be further augmented during long walks in the evenings and weekends with her father as she followed him on his 'rounds'. Jonathan liked keeping himself informed of events in his city and surrounding countryside, going out regularly in all seasons and weather. People quickly became accustomed to seeing the tall aquiline man and his dark-haired daughter conversing with their neighbors or taking in the talk at the local public houses and markets. Under her father's guidance during these walks, Josephine received a different kind of education, the sort one cannot absorb from books, and it would stand her in good stead in later years.

Josephine's mother died of sudden illness in the autumn of 1848. It was the year of revolutions and war and turmoil throughout Europe but it mattered not to Jonathan and his daughter. Heartbroken, Jonathan returned to England after nearly 15 years of living abroad, taking his daughter with him. He returned to his vacant post in Oxford and continued with his research and his papers and presentations. Though her father had hired a kind and educated governness for his daughter, these years were lonely ones for Josephine, bereft of her mother and the familiar friends and environs of Strasbourg. Her long jaunts with her father became infrequent as he buried himself in his work to assuage his grief, but Jonathan found other ways to nurture his ties with his daughter. His presentations had him traveling often, sometimes for several weeks at a time, yet he always cabled Josephine of his activities and progress and always returned with stories and sometimes gifts from abroad. Therefore when he left for a trip to the Continent to attend a conference, she did not think anything would go amiss.

His cables and letters ceased suddenly that spring of 1856 and when several weeks went by with no news and no one at Oxford able to tell Josephine of her father's whereabouts, she took it upon herself to find him. She slipped away from her governess in the middle of the night in June and by degrees made her way to his last known location. Find her father she did, but not in circumstances she'd anticipated and not for long. They parted company near the Württemberg/Switzerland border that October, he to parts unknown, she to spend the next 10 years of her life travelling the globe with an acting/acrobatic troupe of his acquaintence. Josephine saw many lands, met many people, and managed herself through many a scrape and squeaker--to say nothing of learning the lines of all the plays and skits in the troupe's repretoire and such odd skills as needed by supernumeraries of the stage: swordplay, sleight of hand, disguise, costuming, prop and stage mechanics and more.

It was an odd Bohemian life, filled with both windfalls and hardship, and it bestowed upon Josephine an experience of the world few young women of her class were fortunate to possess. The troupe had long since become her family, a surrogate for her father from whom she received no word since that October morning a decade ago, and when word came for her to return to England post haste in the August of 1867, Josephine was devasted. But the order came from a source she dared not disobey and return to England she did. Without preamble, she found herself commanded to attend a dinner party of one Lady Katherine Fleming, and it is then that Josephine's life took yet another unexpected turn ...

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