ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an interview which exemplifies perfectly the confidence and verve of a vigorous, successful self-made Victorian woman, active in a medium which appeared, at the time, to have endless possibilities. Alice Hughes was one of London’s most successful studio portraitists in the later years of the nineteenth century. At one time, she employed over fifty assistants and process workers in her Gower Street studio. Her work is invariably distinguished by qualities rarely found even in a portrait; for she has the gift, perhaps the most valuable of any in those whose mission it is to reproduce the human form divine, of taking her sitter at her best, and she is one of those who can claim the honour of having revolutionised modern photography. She herself modestly ascribes most of her success to the fact that her father, Mr. Edward Hughes, greatly helped her, when she first opened her photographic studio, with his experience and advice.
