DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Mr. and Mrs. Cross with the Artist John Wharlton Bunney in Venice, June 1880

Authors

Sarah Bunney

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

The dramatic incident in Venice on the morning of 16 June 1880, when the newly married John Walter Cross jumped into the Grand Canal from his hotel room's balcony, has attracted much curiosity and speculation. Understandably Mrs. Cross (George Eliot) was reticent about the happening in her journal and letters, and also wrote little about her stay in Venice before and after the event. But there is another source of information about the couple's Venetian experiences - the personal recollections and correspondence of the English artist John Wharlton Bunney (1828-82).

Bunney, described by Marian as 'an excellent painter and an interesting man' in a letter to her husband's sisters Mary, Eleanor, and Florence on 13 June,' had lived with his family in Venice since June 1870. He received the Crosses at his apartment in Castello, showed his pictures, lent his copy of Ruskin's Stones of Venice, and also left his work to escort them round some of the city's delights. There surely would have been other excursions if the canal incident had not happened. Bunney pointed out several things that 'we should not have seen without his aid', Marian told her sisters-in-law.

Bunney noted a conversation with Marian at her hotel on 22 June, the day before she and her husband left Venice for Verona on the next stage of their honeymoon, but discreetly left unrecorded anything he knew about John's jump. So nothing Bunney wrote in his journal sheds new light on what triggered John Cross's extraordinary behaviour that hot day more than 130 years ago. But the artist's recorded conversations with Marian, before 16 June and on the twenty-second, certainly enlarge the story of the Crosses' time in Venice, as also do four letters - one each from Marian and John Cross to Bunney in Venice, one from Marian to Bunney's wife Elizabeth from Baden in July 1880, and a fourth from John to Bunney from London in March 1881, all previously unpublished and generally unknown.