The wedding photos, part 1
The Bloomsday wedding of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
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This is the first of a double post about a set of photographs that came to light in recent years, and investigates how new information about Ted Hughes since 2020 informs our perception of them. I am republishing these posts to take this new research into account, including a letter revealed to me in 2023 by the scholar Emily Van Duyne (see part 2).
It poured with rain on 16th June 1956, the day that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes got married at St George the Martyr Church in Bloomsbury, London. Plath and Hughes had chosen to marry on ‘Bloomsday’ to honour the Irish writer James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), which takes place on 16th June 1904, the date on which Joyce first walked out with his future wife Nora Barnacle.
Sylvia Plath loved the work of James Joyce and wrote her dissertation on him in her final year at Smith College in Massachusetts. In London in 1956, even the rain increased her wedding’s romantic and literary associations. She describes
standing with the rain pouring outside in that dim little church saying the most beautiful words in the world as our vows, with the curate as second witness and the dear Reverend, an old, bright-eyed man (who lives right opposite Charles Dickens’ house!) kissing my cheek, and the tears falling down from my eyes like rain - I was so happy with my dear, lovely Ted.1
It was a whirlwind romance. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had first met in Cambridge just four months previously, at a party to celebrate the first issue of the student literary journal St. Botolph’s Review. Plath was a published poet and second-year student of English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge; she had travelled from the Unites States to England on a Fulbright scholarship. Hughes was a former Pembroke College student who was doing various jobs in London to make ends meet and trying to get his poems published. At first they planned to marry after she finished her degree, when they would relocate to her home in Massachusetts and look for university teaching jobs. Getting married while still a student was risky, and likely to put her Fulbright funding in jeopardy.
Everything changed within hours of Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath arriving in England for a brief holiday on 13th of June 1956. Over supper, it seems, it was decided that the wedding would take place while Aurelia was staying in London. During the next two days Plath and Hughes got a special licence (“from the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less”, as she told her brother Warren) while mother and daughter dashed around the shops buying two simple gold rings and new shoes and trousers for Hughes. There was no time to try on wedding dresses, or any money left over to buy one, but fortunately Aurelia had packed in her suitcase exactly the right thing: “a lovely pink knitted suit dress”, as Sylvia later told her brother Warren, which “intuitively” Aurelia had never worn herself. So that was what Plath wore on her wedding day, with “a pink hair ribbon and a pink rose from Ted”. He wore his old corduroy jacket, “thrice- dyed black, exhausted” as he later recalled.
“Our only sorrow was that you weren’t there,” Sylvia wrote to Warren two days later (her letter brims over with such excitement that it’s hard to believe she felt any sorrow at all). Their marriage was “a huge and miraculous secret”, she warned him. No one outside the family must know about it. She and Ted were both “poverty-stricken” and they were worried that, if word got out, she might lose her scholarship and earn the disapproval of Newnham (“the Victorian virgins wouldn’t see how I could concentrate on my studies with being married to such a handsome virile man, the Fulbright, etc., etc.”).
So following Aurelia’s advice, they sensibly planned to live apart until June 1957, when they would have another, official wedding at the Plath family’s Unitarian Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, followed by “a huge reception for all our friends and relations who will be informed this fall that Ted and I are engaged”.
But things were about to change dramatically.
Their careful, deceptive plan for that academic year began to fall apart in October 1956. Plath and Hughes both felt miserable having to live apart, and she decided that she would take the risk of telling the authorities that she was married. Writing from her college room to her mother in Wellesley, Plath skitters between hesitancy and resolution. One day she suggests that her mother could tell friends and relations in America that “Ted got a job in London and we felt it ridiculous not to get married here and now”, but she is unsure about this and appeals for guidance: “Do help me through this with advice and opinions.” The following day she sounds more in control, telling Aurelia firmly that “We are married and it is impossible for either of us to be whole or healthy apart”. But she still craved her mother’s approval.
As it happened, world events in the autumn of 1956 helped Plath to resolve what she called her “private crisis”. On 1st November she wrote to Aurelia about “the huge crisis aroused by Britain’s incredible and insane bombing of Egypt”. Reading in The Guardian about the international conflict over access to the Suez Canal made Plath boil with anger. “The British arrogance - that old, smug, commercial colonialism - alive still among the Tories, seems inexcusable to me,” she wrote. Soon after this, Plath made the decision to stop following a carefully choreographed pattern to please her family and safeguard her funding. She knew that she would have to take a risk in order to live the life she wanted.
As it turned out, the problem was resolved quickly. Plath’s Newnham tutor Dorothea Krook-Gilead turned out to be not at all the easily-shocked Victorian virgin that Plath had feared, but warm and understanding. Even better, after a brief interview the Fulbright Commission Board in London accepted Plath’s new situation as a married woman.
The couple’s financial worries also eased considerably when Hughes got a job teaching at a boys’ school in Cambridge: Coleridge Secondary Modern School for Boys on Radegund Road. He found them a small flat to rent at 55 Eltisley Avenue, near Grantchester Meadows in Newnham, where they would live together from December 1956 (see my previous post below).
Sylvia Plath at Home
Because Aurelia was disappointed about not celebrating her daughter’s wedding in Wellesley, Plath agreed to have a set of studio photographs taken of herself and Hughes. “Thanks for the money,” she told Aurelia briskly towards the end of November 1956, “we’ll have a good picture taken this vacation, you may be sure”.
With no entry in the society column in the London Times to impress her mother's friends with, there would instead be a set of commemorative photographs taken by the prestigious firm of Ramsey & Muspratt. Aurelia Plath was prepared to pay for the best.
But a few weeks later, when they saw the proofs, neither Plath nor Hughes were happy with their wedding photos. On 20 December 1956, Sylvia sent her mother a Christmas card along with a contact sheet of the black and white portraits. “Well, here are enclosed a few of the best of the grisly proofs,” she told her.
Ted and I really don’t like them, considering ourselves much more beautiful --- these are more like passport shots without imagination or sensitive lighting; in fact Ted hates them all. But I am sending them on to you until we have something better done, which we will do soon --- this lady was an expensive crook.
The “expensive crook” that Plath was so cynical about was Lettice Ramsey, one half of Ramsey & Muspratt, a successful partnership of two women photographers based in Cambridge and Oxford.2
Although their portraits were famous, by the 1950s university graduations, weddings and christenings had become Ramsey & Muspratt’s “bread-and-butter” work. There was an art to taking a successful wedding photograph, however. “Wedding photos are easily spoiled by keeping the couple posing far too long,” as Helen Muspratt recalled. For Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes there was, perhaps, too great a gap between their impulsively romantic Bloomsday wedding and the rather stiffly posed black and white studio photographs taken in a cold Cambridge studio by Lettice Ramsey six months later.
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But perhaps there was more to Plath and Hughes’s dissatisfaction with these ‘grisly’ wedding photographs than first meets the eye. In The Wedding Photos Part 2 I’ll unravel the mystery of why these wedding photographs were hidden away for over fifty years and how they eventually came to light; and what this tells us about the couple in these first, fragile months of marriage.
All letter references from The Collected Letters of Sylvia Plath, ed. Peter K Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, two volumes (Faber & Faber 2017-18)
Lettice Ramsey and Helen Muspratt established their photography business in Post Office Terrace, Cambridge in the early 1930s. Sixty of their perceptive portraits of Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, the “Cambridge Spies” and others are now held by the National Portrait Gallery.
Is Coleridge School the same Coleridge as today? (With the addition of girls!)
This is tantalizing! I can't wait to learn more about these photos. The photo you chose certainly seems telling, as you and others here suggest. Thanks for digging into this--
(and BTW I did not get this in my inbox, though subscribed. Is anyone else having that problem?)