Cameron enlisted friends, family, neighbors, and household staff in her photographic activities, often costuming them as if for one of the amateur theatricals she presented at her home in Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, was her next-door neighbor, and his second son, Lionel, was a childhood friend of Cameron’s own sons. Here, Cameron’s inscription notes that Lionel is “in the character of Marquis de St. Cast as acted in Payable on Demand at the Private Theatricals at Mrs. Cameron’s Thatched House in aid of The Freshwater Village Hospital.”