Victoria Welby’s semiotics, significs and gender: through a modernist lens

1 Introduction

In The Portrait of a Lady (first published in 1881), the novelist Henry James focuses on the new class of late-Victorian middle-class public women who experienced both strict social scrutiny and new-found freedoms at the end of the nineteenth century. The paintings of Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee (1853–1928) oscillated between whimsical pre-Raphaelite heroines and fashionable society women (Pollock 1988). Dicksee’s portrait “The Builders” (Figure 1) depicts the Victorian woman philosopher Victoria Welby (1837–1912), planning the development of her aristocratic estate, while being steadied by her husband’s firm hands, balancing evenly on the table, as he looks down upon her.

Figure 1:

“The House Builders” (portraits of Sir W. E. & The Hon. Lady Welby-Gregory by Dicksee, 1880).

Yet Welby, as a woman semiotic philosopher, was not limited by shallow portraits of feminine identity. Conversely, she coined the concept of “mother-sense” around 1890 to illustrate female attributes that she believed were integral to the human condition (Petrilli 2017). Mother-sense was considered a radical idea since it proposed that female intuition was a valuable capacity of human thought, and available to both sexes. Moreover, her concept of Significs (1911) was developed as a theory of meaning and has correlations with the reflexivity of form in modernism. To historically contextualize the contributions of mother-sense and Significs, this study asks how can a modernist lens reevaluate Welby’s intellectual contribution to semiotics?

To begin addressing this question, the study will first discuss some of the challenges involved in reviewing Welby’s scattered philosophical works and almost forgotten intellectual contribution. Second, it will consider the notion of Significs, as a semiotic theory of meaning, which disrupts the imagined neutrality or veneer of realism assumed by language as tool of communication. Third, it will discuss Welby’s concept of mother-sense, as a distinctly semiotic portrait of gender, which prefigures the more explicit deconstruction of gender binaries by modernist feminists and later gender theorists like Butler (1990). Bringing these themes together, the study’s genealogical framework considers Welby’s contribution to semiotics and gender studies. In addition to summarizing the study’s limitations, it will suggest that the genealogical framework reveals that, although Welby’s works are proto-modernist in certain respects, they represent disjuncture with modernism’s formal experimentation and eventual coveted place within the artistic and intellectual academy.

2 Welbian genealogy

3 Genealogical framework

To reassess the diverse range of Welby’s works, the notion of a genealogical framework is developed to explore both primary, secondary, contextual, historical and philosophical sources.

A Welbian genealogical framework is developed to consider the following: (1) Welby’s historical context; (2) the study of Significs; (3) mother-sense and gender; (4) the relevance of Welbian semiotics as proto-modernist theory of language and gender. In terms of methods, it was developed through the collation of historical primary sources, including thematic analysis of Welby’s letters published by her daughter Cust (1931) in a first edition of Other Dimensions, and other academic texts including What is Meaning? (Welby 1903). Secondary sources include online collections of her writing, letters, lectures, and articles as well as art, photographs, and visual works. Welbian scholars, librarians, and curators who are working with Welby’s collections were also interviewed. Although these sources are broad in range, they are synthesized via thematic concerns with Welby’s semiotic views of language and gender and their correlation to modernism. The sources are summarized in Figure 2, to illustrate varying components of the genealogical data-set and as a guide for other Welbian scholars, particularly those interested in the development of historical semiotic research in the digital age.

Figure 2:

Welbian genealogy of sources.

In addition to philosophical works, this study was enhanced by empirical methods, including visits to the Lady Welby Library, at Senate House Library, University of London, and meeting with librarians overseeing the special collection. This provided the opportunity to engage with the librarian’s reflections on the collection and to discover that some of Welby’s works are available on site whereas others are stored elsewhere but catalogued centrally and accessed only via special request. I also interviewed Susan Kay Williams, Chief Executive and exhibition Curator at the Royal School of Needlework (RSN), which was set up by Welby as the School of Art Needlework in 1872.

As well as delving into Welby’s annotated readings, published works, pamphlets, writing, and lectures available across academic data-bases, Welby’s unpublished letters and materials were accessed online via the Lady Victoria Welby fonds, hosted by York University, Toronto Canada. Letters stored by Scotland’s University of Strathclyde, in the Welby Archives and Special Collections, were also examined. In view of Welby’s scattered collection, in addition to the gaps in scholarship surrounding her works, the genealogical framework was designed to facilitate wide ranging study, including consideration of the historical, literary, feminist, and artistic context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and emergence of modernism. This contextual matter helps to addresses the central question of the study which asks, how can a modernist lens reevaluate Welby’s intellectual contribution to semiotics?

4 Turn of the century

In terms of historical context, by the end of the nineteenth century, and Europe’s fin de siècle, there was a swirl of contrasting ideas, emerging disciplines, new social sciences, technologies, and frustration with the old ways of thinking about the world (Marshall 2007). In this era, more than any previous time, prose was an active and controversial participant within debates over morality, aesthetics, politics, and science, as Victorian certainties began to break down. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, and Olive Schreiner were some of the prominent writers and artists of the period who were challenging establishment values and producing a distinctive style of their own. These novel sensibilities were driven by an expansive urbanism, in which we see the rise of new public women, who were working in shops, bars, and public spaces of cities and towns (Evans 2018). This shifting atmosphere was also being depicted by French artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, in “Jane Avril Dancing” (c. 1892) for example, who viewed the Parisian city as a site of performance but also hardship for working women. Another French painter, Claude Monet, captures a hazy urban ephemerality when he visits London and paints his “Vues de Londres,” including Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament between 1899 and 1904. It is this shifting city-sensibility that gives rise to discourse about bourgeoise women’s rights to suffrage, education, and personal property.

Born into the late nineteenth century, Welby had an unconventional upbringing, as a member of the British aristocracy who never attended school and travelled extensively in her youth, to Syria, Spain, North and South America, which is documented in her journals that were published by her daughter (Cust 1928) in The Wanderers. In addition to these formative cosmopolitan experiences, Welby was writing at a time when the so-called “woman question” was emerging due to debates surrounding Anglo-American bourgeoise women’s shifting social status, intellectual advances, and struggle for suffrage (Hurley 2022; Seigfried 1996).

In novels, these issues had long before been written into female characters’ quests for marriages that would facilitate financial, intellectual, and spiritual union. This theme carried over from the nineteenth century works of female writers like Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës or the French Romantic women writers like Madame de Stael or George Sand. These narratives explored modernity’s social upheavals in correlation with the often-tragic consequences of women who make the wrong choice in matrimony, having been seduced by the charms, wit, or lack thereof, of suitable husbands. At the crux of these stories is the critique of women’s subservient role, as well as an awareness that inappropriate marriages condemn female protagonists to unhappy lives, while damaging their children’s prospects. Much earlier, in Austen’s (1813) Pride and Prejudice, for example, the giddy-feminine teenager Lydia Bennet is viewed as a product and mirror image of her mother’s lack of education. In Eliot’s (2006) Middlemarch, published in two parts in 1871 and 1872, “Dorothea is an earnest intelligent woman who makes a serious error in judgment when she chooses to marry Edward Casaubon, a pompous scholar many years her senior” (Kuper 2023).

Male authors were also fascinated by the dilemmas being faced by modern women (Evans 2018). In James’s (1996 [1881]) The Portrait of a Lady, the twist of the novel is not merely that the potentially brilliant Isabel Archer marries the cruel and narcissistic Gilbert Osmond, but, that Madame Merle – not Isabel – is revealed as Pansy’s “true” mother. Isabel and Pansy are a couple trapped in patriarchy who must endure the torments of a dilettante father. The theme of women’s liminal gender identities, caught between childhood and adulthood, was developed in more self-conscious ways by modernist writers and artists in the early twentieth century. This is not surprising considering that early twentieth century Europe, America, England, and London in particular as a colonial capital, was brimming with social hybridity, multiplicity, and liminality (Evans 2018). The figure of the new public woman was undoubtedly the embodiment of these concerns, which epitomized the changing sociological landscape, an increasing commercialism, and intractable patriarchal values. In A Room of One’s Own (2022 [1929]), the modernist author Virginia Woolf seeks not only to claim a quiet space where women can write, as an isolated sanctuary, but also to venture down paths less travelled while gaining access to great libraries, unchaperoned by male guardians and keepers of patriarchal order.

In late-Victorian Britain, Welby also represents a new type of respectable public woman. As a British aristocrat, she was among the first of her class to venture into public intellectual debate, philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and linguistic research. She participated in epistolary dialogue, the new field of journalism, debates, lectures, reform, and campaigns for improving women’s lives. In addition to her epistolary circle of male intellectuals, she had a network of female contemporaries, including Mary Everest Boole (mathematician and philosopher of algebra); Mrs. Dallas Yorke (Winifred Anna Cavendish-Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, the British humanitarian and animal welfare activist); Lucy Clifford (authoress and children’s fiction writer); Christina Rossetti (authoress and poet). In a letter to Rossetti written from Welby (1881), she says: “You will see thus what the Beckoning hand seemed to imply as to woman’s function in these days of ours strengthening light, in which surely we should use our own significant way for fresh light.” This extract highlights the (Christian) interest that Welby held in woman’s potential, or “significant way for fresh light” as well as her belief that they might reimagine thought and life beyond the confines of androcentrism. Similarly, many other letters articulate Welby’s sense of female solidarity and collegiality with women scholars, authors, and poets.

In addition to the increase of respectable public women, the turn of the century gave rise to the new artistic and literary modernist movement. Historians and writers in different disciplines cannot agree on a single definition of the modernism project and have proposed various dates for its starting point(s) (Levenson 2011). Some theorists consider it as beginning with Baudelaire’s (1857) Les Fleurs du Mal and Flaubert’s (1857) Madam Bovary. In the arts, it was defined by the rise of Impressionism, a school of painting that was created outdoors (en plein air) that seemed to capture the living world, nature, and human sentiments as if in motion. Impressionism served as a springboard for many artistic movements of the early twentieth century, including Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Pablo Picasso’s (1907) “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is often the work considered as the seminal influence on the subsequent trends in modernist painting (Levenson 2011). But modernist women artists, such as Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, and Marianne Werefkin, were also breaking artistic conventions, producing probing self-portraits, androgenous depictions of gender, debates about motherhood, racial and ethnic identity (Cumming 2022).

Simultaneously, modernism is also not an exclusively western movement, although it is often perceived as such. However, Asian, African, and Arab modernist artists, writers, and image makers were influential. For instance, Middle Eastern modernist artists, like Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1957) and Omar Onsi (1901–1961), as well as expanding Middle Eastern modernism, exhibited works in the Parisian salons. Although modernism is difficult to define, at broad levels it can be summarized as an avant-garde movement in literature and art. It departed from ordinary social values, realist conventions, and initially resisted commercialism, although it was eventually subsumed by the market (Levenson 2011). During the proto-stages of modernism, Welby was also striving for a new forms of semiotic meta-language, eager to break-away from conventional thought, and develop language that could keep pace with the accelerating technologies of the early twentieth century. The next section will turn to Welby’s Significs to consider it through a modernist lens.

5 Significs and the reflexivity of language

In What is Meaning, Welby expresses her frustration with language’s outdated capabilities. She says:

It once seemed that we could never send news quicker than a horse could gallop or a ship sail; next we sent it by steam, and now our telegrams travel in a few moments all over the world and sometimes arrive quaintly, ‘before they were sent.’ But in language we may that we are still in the ‘horse’ stage; just as an army with its cavalry is still in the oar and sail stage. Why not seriously face the fact that we have only to utilise an undoubtedly growing discontent and to apply it to the discovery of more effectual modes of expressing our minds; and that then we shall find a general raising of the standard of speech quite as feasible as the raising of the standard of news-sending? (Welby 1903: 58)

In this passage, Welby is precise about language’s potential role in early twentieth century modernity. She considers philosophy’s ongoing imperative to expand, evolve, and refine language as a channel of communication, paradigm of culture, and system of meta-reflection. This quest for a new form of meta-language, which is also a strong concern of semiotics, enables Welby to probe the fixity of gendered identity as well as the constraints of patriarchal language and logocentrism. Yet, when considering Welby’s work within its historical context, it is obvious that Welby was not without critics or those who underestimated her academic merit and intellectual contribution. An article in The Spectator (1931) is dismissive of the coherence, clarity, and authority of Welby’s letters (published in Cust 1931). Drawing on her correspondence with the philosopher Ferdinand Schiller to support these criticisms, The Spectator (1931: 887) satirically states: “The present writer feels…he had been watching a column of smoke rising upward illumined from time to time by a gush of sparks.” The subtext of these comments is arguably misogynist derision of Welby, as a woman philosopher, whose fiery prose does not exhibit calm, “ladylike” decorum. Schiller also offers a patronizing response to her work, provoking Welby’s own sharp rebuttal and defense of mother-sense:

You speak of my misleading way of assuming things ‘already there’. May I say I think you are misled (1) by unconscious reference to the spatial there’ (as it were in a given spot or area) and (2) by an unsound reference to Time as a primary category. If you are to ‘make’ truth in any sense, then the ‘already’ is as much or as little relevant as the ‘notyet’ which would be a useful alternative word for the use of the Pragmatists (from an undated letter to Schiller from Welby, written around 1907. Cited in Schimtz 1985.)

In the quote above, Welby develops a precise critique of Schiller’s empiricist assumptions of space and time. Although well-known in his day, Schiller’s philosophical legacy has been largely forgotten while his concern with meaning was appropriated from the pragmatisms of James, Peirce, and also Welby. In Our Human Truths, Schiller (1939) echoes Welby’s Significs as he defines his position on the problem of truth by focusing on the psychological aspects and interpreting truth pragmatically. Welby also articulated a pragmatist notion of “truth” occurring via the semiotic prism of reality, which is constructed via the language of signs, determining how we might view the past, present or future. This is a similar position to Peirce’s view of human subjectivity and identity. He was never satisfied with mind/body dualisms of consciousness, individualist, linguistic or culturalist views of meaning making. Rather, Peirce views reality, and social actors’ practices within reality, as a broad cosmology of signs, interpretations, and sign-actions (Olteanu 2015). Peirce’s semiotics indicated that all living phenomena, communication, consciousness, and matter intersect as sign-action and interpretation and correlated with Welby’s work in terms of what he would call dynamic synechism. However, exploring Welby’s novel theory of Significs through a modernist lens helps to consider her proposal for the reflexive capacity of language.

Welby (1911) states: “Significs” evokes the verb “to signify” which is forward looking and alludes to the process of doing and meaning making. The concept of Significs, was Welby’s special approach to explaining semiotic onto-epistemologies occurring via signs, their meaning, and gendered significance. In Welby’s (1896) Sense, Meaning and Interpretation, testified by the 1911 Oxford dictionary entry ‘Significs’ (in A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles), redacted by the editors and published with her approval (Petrilli 2009: 253), Welby explains that Significs is intended as a philosophy of meaning, not merely as a description, grammar or typology, but as part of a new transdisciplinary approach to the sciences of sign, meaning, language, communication, and the field of pragmatism, which was unfolding at the time. Thus, Significs corresponds with onto-epistemological modernist questioning of Cartesian dualities of the subject, provoking reflexivity of form as well as radical re-conceptions of gender, race, class, and the human condition. Some of the features will be illustrated the next section.

6 Significs of gender

For Welby, Significs brings questions of gender outside previously conceived dualist or biological categories or human binaries, and into the realms of language and meaning. Moreover, her work suggests that since all human beings are interconnected with one-another, the Other, other species and the earth, mother-sense offers a vital perspective for viewing gender identity as occurring via the matrices of self/other; male/female; and multicultural concert. Welby’s interest in the plasticity of language, in Significs, or discussion of the polysemic or hermaphroditic qualities of gender, should therefore not be interpreted as intellectual vagueness, idealism or relativism, as Schiller (around 1907) implies. Conversely, the theories of Significs and mother-sense articulate meaning, gender, and identity as occurring through semiosis, as being in process and perpetual state of becoming. In What is Meaning, Welby also puts forward a triadic scope of her onto-epistemological analysis which extends beyond the synchronic level of language:

All ‘planetary’ knowledge is directly acquired either through observation and experiment, or through processes inductive or deductive. We are all in ‘touch’ with the world we inhabit. ‘Solar’ knowledge, on the contrary, is one remove from this. We can indirectly explore both our sun and sister planets in a way impossible in the case of the suns which used to be called fixed stars, and the unsounded depths even beyond even these. Thus ‘cosmical’ knowledge is in a sense doubly indirect, as though we needed a third instrument corresponding to the spectroscope to give us the spectra of the stars found recorded on the photographic plate attached to the telescope. (Welby 1903: 94)

Within Welby’s analytic framework, “planetary” description would be empirical observation at the micro level of the apparent or tangible elements. “Solar” analysis is meso orientated, synchronic, reflexive, and concerned with the objects of meaning. “Cosmical” theorizing is interpretive, diachronic, and speculative. Welby also relates “cosmical” knowledge as operating as a kind of “spectroscope” that could offer a broad snapshot of phenomena in macro terms. A spectroscope is an instrument used to measure properties of light, wavelength, and energy. It is used in many fields including astronomy and chemistry, but Welby applies it here as a diffractive theoretical metaphor and conceptual tool to consider meaning at its multiple and often intangible levels. Theoretical proposals such as these would have been considered unconventional for women philosophers; especially for women, many of whom, like Welby, had not received a formal education let alone studied at a prestigious academy. Nevertheless, she never expressed the sense that the female gender was a barrier to intellectual development or hindered her own participation in the public sphere. In her publication Significs and Language, she states:

We must gain our bearings and we must thus become able to correctly interpret our social experiences, – the swirl of the social tides, the lines of the social coast, the depth of the social sea, the direction of the ship’s drift which is to be counteracted by our steering.

No metaphor, however, can fathom all the depths or give the whole urgency of the need, if we could become more truly social, of a thorough and careful study of the conditions and the methods of interpretation – indeed of the very nature of that crowning gift of man. (Welby 1911: ccliii)

This passage articulates Welby’s “urgency of the need” to “become more social.” This is important to Welby because she believes that a realization of the shared dimensions of the human condition – beyond Cartesian separation – would also erode dualities of the gender divide. Welby views social subjectivity as occurring in a perpetual process of becoming through human interaction, dialogue and the self-reflexivity of human thought. Consequently, in Welby’s opinion this philosophical pursuit should not be limited within the confines of a single discipline or academy but in the public sphere and beyond. She states:

This is of course no mere question of psychological, of logical, of philosophical, of pedagogical, of sociological study. It is in truth all that: but it is also something more: it is a question of the barest of common sense, of the very presuppositions of education: it is a question of practically securing the inferential harvest of even the simplest work-a-day experiences. (Welby 1911 ccliii)

Although rarely discussed in semiotic scholarship, Welby’s theories challenge not only the siloed parameters of academic disciplines, but the patriarchal constructs of epistemology, ontology, and their separation. In a letter written to Conwy Lloyd Morgan, between 1904 and 1907, the British ethologist and psychologist (whose experimental approach to animal psychology is considered as a contributor to behaviorism), Welby says she is fascinated by Morgan’s discussion of the “woman problem” (cited in Cust 1931: 180). Similarly, in a letter written to Peirce, Welby expresses her philosophical commitment to deconstructing male and female binary categories. She writes to Peirce (between 1903 and 1905), “I see strongly how much we have lost and are losing by the barrier which we set up between emotion and intellect, between feeling and reasoning.” A later point in the same letter, Welby says, “But while in our eyes logic is merely formal, merely structural, merely question of argument ‘cold and hard’, we need a word which shall express the combination of ‘logic and love’ And this I have tried to supply in Significs…” The quest for women’s spiritual, physical and intellectual liminality resonates throughout Welby’s work. Welby states:

… every one of us is in one sense a born explorer: our only choice is what world we will explore, our only doubt whether our exploration will be worth the trouble … And the idlest of us wonders: the stupidest of us stares: the most ignorant of us feels curiosity: while the thief actively explores his neighbour’s pocket or breaks into the “world” of his neighbour’s house and plate-closet. (Welby 1896: 24)

Welby viewed the twentieth century as giving birth to distinct new philosophical categories, including onto-epistemologies (Petrilli 2014). In the passage above, she expresses her desire to experience a universe beyond the feminine bourgeoise confines of her “neighbour’s house and plate-closet.” Her determination to explore thought, philosophy, and a world beyond the traditionally narrow corridors of women’s lives, took various forms and activities, including carving out a prominent place for herself in the academic public sphere, as founder of the Sociological Society of Great Britain, as a writer of poetry, plays, pamphlets, lectures, and letters to over 450 of the age’s most prominent intellectuals. In contrast to literary heroines, made vulnerable by their femininity and sexual naiveite, Welby did not suffer from marital inexperience or want of a fortune. Indeed, although novelists like Henry James, who was acquainted with Welby and engaged with her in epistolary dialogue during 1908–1911 (see Cust 1928: 341–342), none of his female characters seem to have social status, intellectualism or independence of Welby herself.

And beyond realist fiction, Welby was an aristocrat born into great privilege. She possessed a sharp intellect and opportunities to advance her situation through a powerful matriarchal aristocratic network, which included Queen Victoria (1819–1901) and the Queen Mother (her godmother). Welby’s privilege and social standing was improved by marriage to William Welby-Gregory, Member of Parliament for Grantham in 1863 at the age of 26. Although she admits being very different to her husband, she expresses deep affection for him (Cust 1928). But in addition to the seemingly patriarchal view of Welby’s marriage, depicted by Dicksee in Figure 1 above, Welby is staged as an agential subject, rather than merely an object of the viewer, which was typical of portraits of this time (Pollock 1988). Beyond this representation, Welby was not prevented from raising the woman-question and writing the new public woman into semiotics and modern public sphere. Indeed, the most candid portrait of Welby is not Dicksee’s painting, but the photographs of her playing guitar, embroidering or painting her own self-portrait.

Concurrently, like the pragmatist philosopher James (1907) and student of Peirce, and his brother the novelist, Henry James, Welby prefigures certain modernist themes, including the fluidity of truth and the practical consequences of ideas. Through the application of the genealogical framework, and consideration of Welby’s works through a modernist lens, she can be viewed as a proto-modernist philosopher and transdisciplinary thinker who was responding to the modernist concerns of her age in a number of respects. Much like the new woman journalist Henrietta Archer in James’s Portrait of a Lady, Welby writes women into history, academia, and public life. She was fascinated by photography, new technology, and studies of discourse, and coins terms like “binocular” thinking, which underpin Significs. This neologism proposes how meta-language could be applied to zoom in on meaning and unpick the tacit construction of reality and common sense, interwoven into prose and speech. She is acutely aware that the late-Victorian discourses, including social Darwinism, eugenics, taxidermy, phrenology (studies of the skull), botany, medicine, psychoanalysis, etc., were hegemonic epistemologies constituting race, gender, and social class that were being delineated via the rise of the modern human sciences, economics, linguistics but also art, drama, religion, photography, carnival, spectacle, and visual economies (Poole 1997).

7 Modernist sphere

Application of the genealogical framework above reveals that Welby’s works anticipate some of the signs of modernist art and literature. Significs expresses self-conscious meta-language and offers a dialogic onto-epistemology of meaning. The notion of mother-sense articulates the fluidity and dynamic synechism of gender subjectivities. Moreover, to fully appreciate Welby’s intellectual contribution, it is vital to consider the extent to which the Victorian society into which Welby was born in 1837 was organized hierarchically. Race, religion, region, and occupation were all meaningful aspects of identity and status, gender was the main organizing principles, in intersection with class and race (Evans 2018). As is suggested by the sexual double-standard, gender was considered to be exclusively biologically based and to be determinative of almost every aspect of an individual’s potential and character. Victorian gender ideology was constituted through doctrines of separate gender spheres and commonly held belief that, since men and women were biologically different, they were meant for different things. Due to their assumed strength, size and independence, men belonged in the public sphere, while women were tied to the domestic realm. These attitudes supported men’s leading roles in politics, discourse, and paid work, while women were meant to run households and raise families. Women were also thought to be naturally more religious and morally finer than men (who were distracted by sexual passions by which women supposedly were untroubled). Yet, most working-class families could not live out the doctrine of separate spheres, because they could not survive on a single male wage. Earlier Victorian public women were previously associated with prostitution or grueling working-class occupations, including textiles, clothing factories, match production, and domestic service.

Conversely, since Welby was a British female aristocrat who served for a short time for Queen Victoria’s court, as a lady in waiting who was partly raised by the Queen’s mother, she did not have to face the perils of working or middle-class public women. But even though she was ensconced within Britain’s powerful elite, she would have been deeply aware of the constraints on middle- and working-class women trying to survive in public, private, and liminal spheres. In tandem with intellectual endeavors, Welby engaged in women’s reform work. Setting up the School of Needlework with Queen Victoria’s third daughter Princess Helena (officially Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein) provided a respectable craft for women, who were widows, unmarried, and without other means of employment. Speaking via Zoom to Susan Kay Williams, curator of the Royal School of Needlework (RSN), in Hampton Court, London, she informs me that minutes from meetings which Welby attended, indicate her determination that needlework be recognized as an art. The RSN’s designs were inspired by traditional embroideries and the new Arts and Crafts movement whom they collaborated with, including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Selwyn Image and Walter Jones and Gertrude Jekyll (also known for her garden design; Shepard 1975). The large pieces were mainly created for interiors and involved a team of women working to a central design.

Welby would have turned to the arts and crafts of embroidery as a pragmatic solution to providing unmarried women with respectable paid work. But she would also have been aware of its marginalized status as a predominantly female-craft. May Morris, daughter of William Morris, was a skillful embroiderer and another pioneering feminist figure. Because women were not allowed to join the Art Worker’s Guild, May Morris co-founded the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907 with Mary Elizabeth Turner (Graf 2022). Although their designs did not specifically feature feminist messages, development of professional female embroiderers challenged sexist institutional structures and paved the way for other women working with the medium. In this study, the metaphor of embroidery provides an important theoretical thread for conceiving of Welby’s genealogy of works, interwoven with women’s onto-epistemologies, everyday experiences, and livelihoods. But ultimately, Welby’s choice of embroidery, rather than the experimental art of modernist painting, breaking with conventions of form, color, and representation, was as a profoundly pragmatic solution to women’s employment. Yet, her conservative preference – for traditional feminine arts and craft – thus stands in contrast with the more radical choices of modernist female artists, novelists, so-called blue stocking and suffrage activists of the new public sphere.

Welby’s commitment to female friendship and camaraderie also stands apart from Virginia Woolf, who is ironically considered as having ignored her female contemporaries in the public domain (Corbett 2016). In addition, Welby, was not necessarily experimenting with a “feminist aesthetic” as a unifying consciousness or a distinctive female form or genre. While the conflation of an (illusory) feminist aesthetic has been championed by some feminist critics, for instance Julia Kristeva and associated French feminism, it is misleading to consider either Welby’s works or modernist writing as necessarily feminine, especially considering the misogynist undercurrent of modernism in writers like T. S. Eliot. It is also crucial to remember that modernism has been conceived in varying ways according to cultural context (Sheehi 2007). Hence, Welby’s scholarship was developed at a transitional time, straddling the late Victorian and early modernist periods. While her ideas resonate with themes that would become central to modernism, such as the instability of meaning and the importance of subjectivity, she is not formally aligned with new modes of modernist expression. By the time modernism fully emerged as a dominant cultural force in the early twentieth century, Welby’s Significs may have appeared out of step with the newer, more radical forms of experimentation in art, literature, and philosophy.

Additionally, modernism was characterized by tight-knit intellectual and artistic communities, such as the Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group in England or the avant-garde circles in Paris. Welby, though philosophically innovative, did not belong to any formal intellectual movement, artistic group, salon or academy. Much like Peirce, she was an intellectual outsider, despite her vast epistolary network. Although she would have known some of the modernists directly, and was a correspondent of Woolf’s father Leslie Stephenson, Welby’s isolation from the younger modernist circles may have limited the dissemination and influence of her ideas, leading to their marginalization over time. Moreover, from a modernist perspective, Welby’s relatively conservative, Victorian presentation of her ideas, despite their radical potential, may have made them less appealing to the avant-garde intellectuals of the modernist era.

Thus, her work was never positioned as making a revolutionary break with tradition, which was the hallmark of modernist thinkers and artists, even as they became more commercial (Levenson 2011). While Welby was an intellectual and social activist who was challenging gender norms, her works cannot be considered as explicitly modernist. First, the figures associated with modernism, in a formal attempt to break through the language of realism, turned to art and literature rather than philosophy, pamphlets, travel writing, and journalism. In relation to the style of Welby’s prose, although at times it was verbose and as long-winded as the stream of consciousness that came to characterize modernist fiction, it differs substantially from the technical novels and poems that came to define the modernist movement. Thus, considering how Welby was out-of-kilter with the radical new genres and style of modernism in the twentieth century as well as the traditional androcentric philosophical academy of the late nineteenth century adds important contextual detail to why her semiotic contribution has been overlooked and almost forgotten.

Nonetheless, a modernist lens helps to enunciate Welby’s semiotic theorizing in fresh terms. Significs emerges as a description of how reality and meaning are constructed via language. It advocates a semiotic philosophical-method, to debate new concerns with time, reality, and subjectivity, by zooming in on the illusion of the neutrality of language or the fixedness of gender. It offers critical meta language, linguistic reflexivity, experimentation, and neologism, which arguably resonate with the new rhetorical devices of the modernist movement. Yet, Welby’s contribution remains firmly outside of the modernist oeuvre, devoid of modernism’s new aesthetic styles and formal technicalities that radically disrupt realist representations.

8 Conclusions

This main question of this theoretical study asked, how can a modernist lens reevaluate Welby’s intellectual contribution to semiotics? In answer to this question, the Welbian genealogy conveys that her writings, in a number of respects, challenge the conventional discourse of Victorian society, which was organized hierarchically. Welby brings the linguistic construction of meaning into question while expanding the facets of communication in semiotic terms. It also undermines the sexual double standard and notion that gender was entirely biologically-based and determinative of almost every aspect of an individual’s potential and character.

However, limitations of this genealogical framework are that it collates merely an interpretivist assemblage of Welby’s works, via a range sources, historical reflections, and discussion of Welby’s Significs and concept of mother-sense, though a modernist lens. It arrives at its findings via interpretation of the scattered Welbian genealogical data-set available. Another obvious limitation is that relatively little is known about Significs’ historical impact or whether Welby was even aware of the modernist art and literature movement and these are areas for further research. But what we do know is that when Victoria Welby died in 1912, England and the world had changed in a number of respects, not least in relation to the changing status of new public women. The Victorian Period ended with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and a change in the political stability that her rule had guaranteed. Modernism responds to the rapid transformations of western society, including urbanization, the growth of industry, and World War I. The tensions of Empire and the multiculturalism it gave rise to, are also central to the social changes that modernism articulates.

Revisiting Welby’s Significs, and concept of mother-sense, via the genealogical framework refreshes semiotics by viewing it through a modernist lens. It highlights the contribution of Welbian Significs and mother-sense for the semiotic theorizing of gender, feminist trends, and contemporary cultural issues. Yet, for Welby these subjects cannot be separated but are to be understood and appreciated in tandem with the human condition. Welby’s intellectual gifts are to propose that the semiotic plasticity of language, and vitality of the feminine power of mother-sense, serve rather than divide humanity. Welby’s development of semiotics’ ethical premise continues to be relevant to our siloed age, beyond modernism’s inward formal reflexivity, or its succession into postmodernist play and critical nihilism.