George du Maurier: The Cartoonist of New Grove House
George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier was born in Paris on 6 March 1834, the son of a French-born naturalised British citizen and an English mother. His early life was peripatetic — Paris, London, Antwerp, Düsseldorf — and his artistic training was interrupted in 1857 by the loss of sight in his left eye, a catastrophe that ended his ambitions as a painter and redirected him towards illustration. He arrived in London in 1860, married Emma Wightwick in 1863, and began the long career as a staff cartoonist for Punch magazine that would make him one of the most recognisable names in Victorian England.
In 1868, the du Maurier family moved to Hampstead, initially to 27 Church Row, one of the finest early Georgian terraces in north London. Church Row, laid out in the 1720s, runs west from the High Street to the parish church of St John-at-Hampstead, and its houses — handsome brown-brick frontages with fine doorways and iron railings — represented the epitome of Hampstead gentility. The du Mauriers occupied this house for several years before moving to their permanent home at New Grove House on Hampstead Grove, a larger detached residence that afforded the space necessary for a growing family and a productive artist's studio.
New Grove House became the centre of George du Maurier's creative and social life for the remainder of his days. The house, which stood on Hampstead Grove near the junction with Admiral's Walk, was a substantial Georgian property with generous rooms, a garden, and the quiet that du Maurier needed for his work. From this house, he produced the weekly cartoons for Punch that made him famous — the large, elegant social satires depicting the manners and pretensions of the Victorian upper-middle class. His drawings of fashionable drawing rooms, at-homes, dinner parties, and country house weekends were executed with a draughtsmanship that combined precise social observation with a gentle, affectionate mockery that rarely descended into cruelty.
Du Maurier's Punch cartoons established many of the visual conventions of Victorian social satire. His tall, slender women — the "du Maurier woman" became a recognisable type — his languid aesthetes, his bluff colonels, and his self-important clergymen populated a world that Punch's readers recognised as their own, gently exaggerated. He invented recurring characters — Sir Dorian Doolittle, Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, and others — who appeared week after week in extended comic narratives that anticipated the comic strip. His artistic rivalry and friendship with John Tenniel, Punch's chief political cartoonist, was a defining feature of the magazine's golden age in the 1870s and 1880s.
The Hampstead that du Maurier depicted in his drawings — and that he inhabited in daily life — was a village of writers, artists, and professional men. His neighbours and friends included the painter Kate Greenaway, who lived at 39 Frognal; the writer and journalist Henry Lucy; and numerous other members of the literary and artistic establishment. The walks on the heath, the dinners at local restaurants, the social gatherings in Hampstead drawing rooms — these were the raw material from which du Maurier fashioned his art. Hampstead was not merely his address; it was his subject.
Trilby: The Novel That Conquered the World
George du Maurier's greatest fame, paradoxically, came not from his drawings but from his fiction. In 1894, at the age of sixty, he published Trilby, a novel set in the bohemian artist's quarter of Paris in the 1850s. The book became one of the most sensational bestsellers of the Victorian era — a cultural phenomenon that generated merchandise, stage adaptations, brand names, and a popular mania that contemporary observers compared to the reception of Dickens's novels a generation earlier.
Trilby tells the story of Trilby O'Ferrall, an artist's model of mixed Irish and French parentage, who falls under the mesmeric influence of Svengali, a sinister and brilliant Jewish musician. Under Svengali's hypnotic control, Trilby — who is tone-deaf in her normal state — becomes the greatest singer in Europe. When Svengali dies during a performance, his spell is broken, and Trilby loses her voice and eventually her life. The plot drew heavily on du Maurier's own experiences as an art student in Paris and on the bohemian world he had known before his marriage and his settlement in Hampstead.
The novel's success was extraordinary. It was serialised in Harper's Monthly Magazine from January to August 1894, and the book edition, published by Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, went through edition after edition. The name "Trilby" entered the English language: the Trilby hat — a soft felt hat with an indented crown — takes its name from the stage adaptation, in which the actress playing Trilby wore such a headpiece. The word "Svengali" became a common noun, denoting a person who exercises a controlling or mesmeric influence over another, and it remains in use today.
The novel also generated controversy. The character of Svengali was accused of antisemitism — a charge that has been debated ever since. Du Maurier's depiction of Svengali drew on stereotypes of Jewish appearance and behaviour that were commonplace in Victorian culture but that became increasingly objectionable as the twentieth century unfolded. The original serial version contained passages that were toned down in the book edition after protests from Jewish readers, but the character remains a problematic creation — a brilliant fictional invention shadowed by the prejudices of its era.
Du Maurier followed Trilby with two further novels, The Martian (published posthumously in 1897) and Peter Ibbetson (1891, actually preceding Trilby), but neither achieved comparable success. He died at New Grove House on 8 October 1896, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead on Church Row — the street where he had first lived in Hampstead nearly three decades earlier. His grave, marked by a modest headstone, lies in the extension to the churchyard on the north side of Church Row, close to the graves of other notable Hampstead residents including John Constable.
Gerald du Maurier: The Actor-Manager of the West End
Gerald Hubert Edward Busson du Maurier was born on 26 March 1873 at Hampstead — the fifth and youngest child of George and Emma du Maurier. He grew up at New Grove House, surrounded by the artistic and literary milieu that his father's fame attracted. Where his father had conquered London through pen and ink, Gerald would do so through the stage. He became the most celebrated actor-manager of the Edwardian and Georgian West End, a performer whose naturalistic style revolutionised English acting and whose managerial acumen at Wyndham's Theatre made him one of the dominant figures in the London theatre for three decades.
Gerald du Maurier's acting style was, by the standards of the late Victorian stage, radically understated. Where his contemporaries declaimed and gestured, Gerald spoke quietly and moved economically. He pioneered what would later be called naturalistic acting — a style that sought to replicate the rhythms and mannerisms of real conversation rather than the exaggerated elocution of the theatrical tradition. His performances were characterised by a casual elegance, a throwaway wit, and a physical grace that made the most demanding roles appear effortless. Critics described him as the first modern actor on the English stage, and his influence on subsequent generations of performers — from John Gielgud to Laurence Olivier — was considerable.
Gerald's most famous creation was the dual role of Mr Darling and Captain Hook in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which opened at the Duke of York's Theatre on 27 December 1904. Barrie, who was a close friend of the du Maurier family and who had based the character of the Darling family in part on the du Mauriers themselves, wrote the role specifically for Gerald. The connection between the du Mauriers and Peter Pan was, in fact, deeper than the casting of Gerald: Barrie had befriended the family through his acquaintance with George du Maurier's daughter Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whose five sons — George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico — were the inspiration for the Lost Boys. Peter Pan himself was named after Peter Llewelyn Davies, and the Darling family's dog Nana was modelled on the du Mauriers' own Newfoundland.
As actor-manager of Wyndham's Theatre from 1910, Gerald du Maurier presided over a string of commercial successes. He specialised in plays that combined sophisticated comedy with elements of mystery and adventure — a genre that perfectly suited his debonair persona. Edgar Wallace's The Ringer (1926), A.A. Milne's The Dover Road (1922), and numerous other productions drew London audiences to Wyndham's throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Gerald was knighted in 1922, the first actor to receive the honour for services to the stage rather than for charitable work — a distinction that reflected the new respectability that the theatrical profession had achieved in Edwardian England.
Gerald du Maurier died on 11 April 1934, at the age of sixty-one. His final years had been shadowed by financial difficulties, declining health, and a sense that the theatre was moving in directions he could not follow. The rise of the "serious" drama of the 1920s and 1930s — the plays of Sean O'Casey, Eugene O'Neill, and the early works of Noël Coward — made Gerald's repertoire of well-made commercial plays seem dated. But his influence on acting technique proved more durable than any individual production, and his naturalistic approach to performance became the dominant style of twentieth-century English theatre.
Daphne du Maurier: The Gothic Imagination
Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park — not in Hampstead itself, but within the gravitational field of the du Maurier family's Hampstead connections. She was the second of Gerald's three daughters, and she grew up in an atmosphere saturated with theatre, literature, and the particular brand of artistic bohemianism that the du Maurier name represented. Her childhood was spent partly at Cumberland Terrace, partly at the family's country house, Cannon Hall in Hampstead, and partly on holidays in the West Country that would later provide the settings for her most celebrated novels.
Cannon Hall, a large and imposing house on Cannon Lane off Christchurch Hill in Hampstead, was the du Maurier family home from 1916 to 1934. The house — originally built in the early eighteenth century and substantially altered in the Victorian period — provided the grand domestic setting in which Daphne and her sisters Angela and Jeanne grew up. It was a house of corridors, attics, and hidden spaces, and it is tempting to see in its labyrinthine layout some of the spatial anxieties that would later animate Daphne's fiction — the sense of houses as living entities, repositories of secrets, places where the past refuses to stay buried.
Daphne du Maurier's literary career began in 1931 with the publication of The Loving Spirit, a novel set in Cornwall that drew on her love of the West Country landscape. But it was Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), and Frenchman's Creek (1941) that established her as one of the most popular and distinctive novelists of the twentieth century. Rebecca, in particular, achieved a success that placed it alongside the great popular novels of the English language. Its opening line — "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" — is one of the most recognised sentences in English literature, and the novel's exploration of jealousy, identity, and the oppressive weight of the past resonated with readers across the world.
Alfred Hitchcock filmed Rebecca in 1940, with Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture — the only Hitchcock film to do so. Hitchcock also adapted Jamaica Inn (1939) and, later, The Birds (1963), based on Daphne's 1952 short story. The Hitchcock-du Maurier collaboration — though the two did not always see eye to eye on questions of adaptation — was one of the most productive partnerships between a filmmaker and a source author in cinema history, and it ensured that Daphne's narratives reached audiences far beyond the readership of her novels.
Daphne du Maurier's relationship with Hampstead was more ambivalent than that of her father or grandfather. She escaped from London to Cornwall as soon as she could, marrying Major (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Frederick "Boy" Browning in 1932 and settling at Menabilly, the Cornish house that inspired Manderley. But Hampstead remained part of her imaginative landscape. The sense of houses as characters, of domestic spaces as sites of psychological drama, of the past pressing upon the present — these themes, which run through all her major fiction, owe something to the grand, slightly oppressive atmosphere of Cannon Hall and to the weight of family history that the du Maurier name carried.
Church Row: The Family Resting Place
The churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead, at the western end of Church Row, is the resting place of George du Maurier and has become, by extension, a place of pilgrimage for admirers of the du Maurier dynasty. The church itself — designed by John Sanderson and consecrated in 1747 — is one of the finest Georgian churches in London, its Portland stone tower visible from much of the surrounding area. The churchyard, shaded by mature trees and bordered by the elegant houses of Church Row, has the quality of a peaceful enclave removed from the bustle of the High Street a hundred yards to the east.
George du Maurier's grave lies in the extension to the churchyard on the north side, in a section that also contains the graves of John Constable, the painter, and of numerous other notable Hampstead residents. The headstone is relatively modest — a stone cross of conventional Victorian design — and it can be easy to miss among the more elaborate monuments that surround it. But for those who know what they are looking for, it is a moving sight: the final resting place of a man who, through his art and his novels, created images of the Victorian world that have never been surpassed.
Gerald du Maurier, though he died in 1934, was cremated and his ashes were not interred at St John's. Daphne du Maurier died on 19 April 1989 at her home in Cornwall, Par, and her ashes were scattered on the cliffs at Menabilly — a characteristically dramatic gesture that reflected her lifelong attachment to the Cornish landscape. The du Maurier connection with Hampstead's churchyard is therefore primarily associated with George, the founder of the dynasty's English branch, but the family's presence in the parish registers, the local directories, and the collective memory of the neighbourhood extends across all three generations.
Church Row itself has changed remarkably little since George du Maurier walked along it in the 1870s and 1880s. The houses, most of which are Grade I or Grade II* listed, retain their original facades, their iron railings (replaced after the wartime salvage drives), and their characteristic proportions. The street is often described as the finest Georgian street in London — a claim that invites comparison with Bedford Square in Bloomsbury and with the terraces of Greenwich — and its preservation is a testament to the conservation movement that has protected Hampstead's architectural heritage since the designation of the Hampstead Conservation Area in 1968.
The Barrie Connection and Peter Pan
The story of the du Maurier dynasty in Hampstead cannot be told without reference to J.M. Barrie, the Scottish playwright and novelist whose friendship with the family produced one of the most enduring works of English literature. Barrie first encountered the Llewelyn Davies boys — the sons of Arthur Llewelyn Davies and his wife Sylvia, née du Maurier — in Kensington Gardens in 1897. Sylvia was George du Maurier's daughter, Gerald's sister, and the boys became the inspiration for Peter Pan, the play that would make Barrie immortal.
The relationship between Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies family has been the subject of extensive biographical scrutiny, particularly since Andrew Birkin's definitive study J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979). Barrie was enchanted by the boys — George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nico — and he developed an intense attachment to them that survived the deaths of both their parents: Arthur in 1907 and Sylvia in 1910. Barrie became the boys' guardian, a role that he discharged with a combination of generosity, possessiveness, and emotional intensity that has troubled some later commentators but that was accepted by the family at the time as the product of a deeply felt, if unusual, devotion.
The Hampstead connection is central. Barrie visited New Grove House regularly during George du Maurier's lifetime. After George's death, he maintained his friendship with the family through Sylvia and Gerald. The games that Barrie played with the Llewelyn Davies boys — the pirate adventures, the fairy tales, the imaginative flights that became the raw material of Peter Pan — took place partly in Kensington Gardens and partly in the world of the du Maurier family, with its theatrical flair, its artistic sensibility, and its characteristic blend of sophistication and childlike wonder.
The tragedy that befell the Llewelyn Davies boys darkened the Peter Pan story in retrospect. George was killed in action in Flanders on 15 March 1915, at the age of twenty-one. Michael drowned, along with his close friend Rupert Buxton, in Sandford Pool near Oxford on 19 May 1921, in circumstances that have been the subject of speculation ever since. Peter, the boy whose name was attached to Barrie's most famous creation, suffered from depression and alcoholism throughout his adult life and threw himself under a train at Sloane Square station on 5 April 1960. The association between the du Maurier family and Peter Pan, which had seemed so charming and so magical in 1904, came to carry a freight of sadness that Barrie himself could not have foreseen.
A Dynasty's Enduring Legacy
The du Maurier dynasty represents something rare in English cultural life: three consecutive generations, each of which achieved fame in a different art form, all rooted in the same north London village. George's satirical drawings defined the visual culture of the Victorian periodical press. Gerald's naturalistic acting transformed the English stage. Daphne's novels and stories created a body of work that has never gone out of print and that continues to generate film and television adaptations in the twenty-first century. The cumulative achievement is extraordinary, and its connection to Hampstead gives the neighbourhood a claim to cultural significance that few other parts of London can match.
The family's story also illuminates the social history of Hampstead itself. George du Maurier's arrival in Church Row in 1868 coincided with the period in which Hampstead was being transformed from a semi-rural village into a fashionable residential suburb. Gerald's career at Wyndham's Theatre reflected the Edwardian confidence that characterised Hampstead society before the First World War. Daphne's escape to Cornwall mirrored the tendency of later twentieth-century artists and writers to flee London for more remote and romantic landscapes. Each generation responded to Hampstead differently — as home, as stage, as a place to leave behind — and their collective experience maps the changing meaning of the village across a century of English life.
Today, New Grove House still stands on Hampstead Grove, a private residence whose current occupants may or may not be aware of the extraordinary family that once lived there. Cannon Hall on Cannon Lane has been divided into flats. Church Row remains one of the most photographed streets in London, and George du Maurier's grave in the churchyard extension receives occasional visitors — literary tourists, du Maurier enthusiasts, and those who simply appreciate the quiet beauty of one of Hampstead's most atmospheric corners. The du Maurier dynasty has passed, but the streets they walked, the houses they inhabited, and the creative legacy they left behind continue to shape the character and the reputation of NW3.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*