June 26th

June 26th, 1860, marks Blanche Glover’s suicide in the Thames. The date fixes a private crisis in the public record: Blanche’s body is recovered two days later, and the newspaper account makes her death a clue to Christabel LaMotte’s unknown whereabouts rather than a closed story.

Blanche’s death

On a night of driving wind and rain, Blanche plunged into the swollen Thames. Her body was not recovered until June 28th, when the receding tide left it on a gravel bank below Putney Bridge. The newspaper reported that several large, round stones had been sewn into the pockets of her genteel but not opulent clothing; foul play was not suspected. Its forensic particulars make the drowning legible as deliberate, while the stones give the act a stark physical specificity.

Blanche’s note frames the act through her spiritualist faith. She declares that death is not the end and trusts that, beyond the veil, she may speak, forgive, and be forgiven. Yet she also describes herself as superfluous in the present world, with capacities for love and creative work left unwanted and unused. Her hope of another life stands beside an account of profound exclusion in this one.

The public record and Christabel’s absence

The newspaper identifies Blanche as a spinster who had lived alone in a house once shared with the poet Christabel LaMotte. According to the recently dismissed parlourmaid, Jane Summers, Christabel had been missing for some time; the police were seeking her current residence. A message left in Mount Ararat Road sufficiently established Blanche’s intention to take her own life, but the report’s account of the death could not explain why Christabel was absent.

For Maud Bailey, rereading the note brings an unresolved interval into focus: what Christabel thought when she read it, where she had gone, and where Randolph Henry Ash had been between July 1859 and the summer of 1860. Roland points out that there is no record of Ash being away from home. He published nothing in 1860 and wrote few letters, dated from Bloomsbury as usual. LaMotte scholars had explained Christabel’s apparent absence at Blanche’s death as the result of a quarrel between the women; the new evidence changes the aspect of that explanation without resolving the mystery.

Narrative significance

June 26th turns Blanche’s death into both a personal ending and an archival hinge. Her own words present a woman who believes in reunion after death but feels unwanted in life; the newspaper converts that private despair into a public notice, complete with a date, a recovered body, sewn-in stones, and a police search for Christabel. Maud’s reading then returns the notice to the larger unanswered story. The date establishes when Blanche died, but it cannot establish where Christabel was or what passed between the two women.