A Monkey Among Crocodiles
THE LIFE, LOVES AND LAWSUITS OF MRS GEORGINA WELDON

BRIAN THOMPSON

DEDICATION

FOR WALTER

EPIGRAPH

I don’t think there’s ever been a human being put down on this earth afflicted by a temperament as shy and reclusive as mine. A shyness pushed to the point of suffering by a nervousness nothing could overcome. There’s nothing more marvellous, nothing’s ever happened that’s more singular that I, among all the women in the world, find myself so to speak engulfed by the stormy existence that has been my lot since 1868.

My Orphanage, 1877

Look at Sarah Bernhardt – does she have my beauty, my voice, my worth, etc? So from where does she get her fortune? Fame!

Georgina to her mother, 1877

Quand on tombe, on tombe jamais bien.

Dumas fils

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1. Thomas

2. Florence

3. Going Home

4. Treherne

5. Weldon

6. Gounod

7. Tavistock

8. Menier

9. Argeuil – Paris

10. The Mad-Doctors

11. Rivière

12. The Courts

13 Finale

Keep Reading

Select Bibliography

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

One rainy evening in September 1889 the nuns of a small hospice in Gisors on the north bank of the Seine answered the night bell to find on their doorstep an Englishwoman called Mrs Georgina Weldon. The luggage at her feet was modest – two pugs, some aged birds and, peering from his wicker basket, a bedraggled monkey called Titileehee. Mrs Weldon, who spoke rapid and idiomatic French, was not a woman to be argued with and she was soon inside and shaking out her cape. The lateness of the hour was quickly explained. She had come hotfoot from London, her house stolen from under her by an accursed Frenchwoman she had considered to be a lifetime partner. In the background of the story was an estranged husband connected to the College of Arms, a man who was a friend to princes. As she rattled on in her guileless, headlong fashion the startled nuns learned how the less proximate cause of her ruin was the cowardice and ingratitude twenty years earlier of the composer Gounod. Here at least was a name they could identify. Gounod was a revered national figure in his seventies, as much noted for his piety these days as for the operas he had composed in his golden years.

Over the next few days, the garrulous Mrs Weldon continued her catalogue of misfortunes. In her time, she had been falsely accused of lunacy, fought vigorous actions in the English courts in defence of her married rights, run an orphanage and several choirs. She had served a prison sentence in Newgate for publishing ‘a false and scandalous libel’, only to be driven through the streets by her adoring public on her release. She served a second term in Holloway for an identical offence and this time on her release her followers unshipped the horses from their shafts and dragged her carriage to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, from where she addressed a crowd estimated at 17,000. The nuns grew nervous. This was many more than the population of Gisors. Ah yes, Mrs Weldon went on, but it didn’t end there – she was famous in so many ways! Her face had appeared in advertisements for Pear’s soap on Clapham omnibuses and, as well as singing at the Paris Opera, she had in more needy circumstances trod the boards of the London music halls. Nor was she in Gisors by chance. Twelve years ago she had found this selfsame hospice a haven and a blessing for a few months, as some of the older nuns might remember. And now here she was again at the mercy of the good sisters, seeking only calm and repose. A thought crossed her mind: had she mentioned she was once accused of going to look for Gounod with a loaded revolver?

The nuns admitted her out of charity and she stayed for twelve years, remaining more or less within the walls of the hospice all that time and seldom venturing outside. It was soon clear she was not there from considerations of piety. She was not a Catholic, nor was she very devout in any other direction, unless an alarming and scandalising enthusiasm for summoning the spirits of the departed could be counted as such. Though her bills were paid more or less on time there was much that was vexing about her behaviour. She insisted on adopting the working dress of the hospice, which she wore with a theatrical dash quite contrary to the spirit of humility it signified. Her French was salted with Parisian slang and she used it to command all those little things that were to her the necessities of life: stamps and writing paper, food for her pets. She played no part in the religious observances of the establishment but was not above criticising its management. (It was a matter of awe to some of the nuns that shortly after she arrived the cesspit was emptied at her insistence for the first time in thirty years.) She was fond of gardening and threw herself into the reorganisation of the herb and vegetable plots, as well as designing and having built a better sort of cold greenhouse. She developed a passion for beekeeping and corresponded vigorously with local experts. Her peas, she asserted, were the admiration of all who saw them. You might travel by train to Paris without seeing better.

Georgina Weldon was fifty-two when she first entered the Hospice Orphelinat de Saint Thomas de Villeneuve. She was given rooms on the third floor and one of her earliest acts was to hire a maid, a local girl called Charlotte. Since the other occupants of the building were elderly and alcoholic paupers, this caused a stir, but an even greater surprise came when the rest of her luggage arrived from England. Very quickly, two walls of her salle de séjour were lined from floor to ceiling with deed boxes. They accounted for only a fraction of the twenty-eight trunks of written and printed materials this strange Englishwoman had lugged across the Channel. The record of her life – if that was what all this paper indicated – was of staggering minuteness. As the French themselves say, God was in the detail.

It became clear to the nuns that Mme Weldon’s principal obsession was with herself. As well as the whiff of sulphur that seemed to rise from not one but dozens of court actions she had undertaken, there were in these papers the lighter fragrances of earlier and better times. The materials for an autobiography had never been more assiduously gathered and, in addition to this massive chronofile, which included menus and theatre programmes, cartes de visite, letters, sheet music, legal transcripts and yellowing telegrams, were the handsomely bound diaries and journals she had commenced as a child, and a splendid visitor’s book from a house in Tavistock Square that had once belonged to Dickens. Georgina Weldon, she insisted to anyone who was foolish enough to listen, had a story to tell. She, who had once published her own newspaper, was setting up in Gisors with the intention of putting all this material into shape, not merely for her own pleasure but as a lesson for future generations. She was there to write her memoirs.

There was something artless about Mrs Weldon, for all her protestations of genius. Gounod came into the story because, like him, she was a musician of the first rank, a singer and music educator such as the world had never before seen. His good opinion of her, which she freely embroidered now, had not prevented her in the past from demanding that her husband horsewhip him on the steps of the Opéra. The more perceptive of the Sisters of St Thomas came to realise there was serious folly in her. She was more like a thwarted and disappointed child than the biblical Jeremiah she often invoked. However, if she was a fool, she was a holy one. And there was one manner in her that was unchanging. Not very tall and no longer in possession of the beauty it was easy to see she had once owned, she nevertheless exuded a kind of upper-class English arrogance, a certainty that seemed to come from an aristocratic background only to be guessed at by the simple and pious folk of Gisors. This was the most cherished part of her persona. The nuns, with their blunt nails and chilblained feet, were left in no doubt that they were dealing with a lady.

I was part of the fashionable world which in truth fashionably ignores everything except the meetings and soirées devoted to who is who, or who is going to marry who; why Lady A. found herself uninvited to the ball given by Lady B.; or by what means Mrs C. dresses herself so magnificently; or how vexing it has been for poor Lady D. to lose one of her footmen, the one who made such an ornament of the other. The latest book, the winning horse, parliamentary gossip – arguing of course for what is best for the Party and not the country … it never occurred to me to dissent, nor to reflect. I flowed with the current, chatted well, listened attentively – and I was, which I am certainly not now, an excessively popular person.

The memoirs she set about writing were to be a vindication of all she had attempted in the name of art and love. She wrote in French, partly because she wished to address the work to her host nation, but much more plainly because any attempt to publish in English would most assuredly bring her before the courts again. The memoirs were a forest of libels directed against anyone who had ever dared to cross her will. She had already chosen this invocation, from Lamentations: ‘O vos omnes qui transitis per viam: attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus.’

Unlike Jeremiah she had not the slightest intention of taking it lying down. That had never been her way. Smoking cigarettes with a furious intensity, breaking off only to scold her maid or bully the gardeners, she roamed back over the turbulent events of her life. Gounod, who figures large in the story, died in 1893, four years after she came to the hospice. Once the formalities of a State funeral had been got out of the way, he started to appear at seances she held, saying teasing and affectionate things he had not said to her face for twenty years or more. It was quite remarkable good luck that Charlotte, the maid, had turned out to be such a gifted medium, though it may not have pleased the nuns to have her summon Gounod’s lumbering shade. But then, when Charlotte left, the composer left with her. Mrs Weldon bore the loss with equanimity. She wrote on steadily and patiently, while the pugs snored in the basket at her feet and Titileehee the monkey chattered in his cage above her head.

They grew to like her at Gisors. M. Robine, the lay administrator, felt he understood her. The narrow purpose of her efforts to expose the English system of justice was soon overwhelmed by her passion for digression. Robine knew enough about how the world wagged to see that she was storing up trouble for herself with every page she wrote. One day she waved a letter in his face. London society ladies were preparing a tribute to Victoria on the occasion of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Mrs Craigie had written: ‘No representative gathering of the women of England would be complete without Mrs Weldon.’

That might have been a good time to publish. Better still, it might have signalled peace and sent her home to England with her reputation restored. Instead, the galley proofs piled up in the offices of her long-suffering printers in Dijon while she hunted down letters she had sent a quarter of a century earlier. The Dreyfus affair captured her attention for a while. Was she not the English Dreyfus, she asked her readers? A nephew met Oscar Wilde in Paris and she wrote to him, sympathising with his plight but deploring his crime. Wilde replied with courage and wit. She was much preoccupied with the legend of Louis XVI’s son and his escape by substitution from the revolutionary terror. These matters and her peas and honey delayed completion of the great task she had set herself. In the end the Mémoires were not finally delivered from the printer until the new century. The work ran to 1500 pages, bound up by the firm of Darantière in six volumes.

Even in French the Mémoires shriek. Georgina finally went back to England in 1901 to publicise them and those few friends who remained in London persuaded her how dangerous and unwise she had been to have them printed at all. One of her principal targets in the work was her husband Harry, who was not only still alive but Acting Garter King-of-Arms. As such, he had stage-managed the funeral of Victoria and was now charged with the salvage of Edward’s Coronation, postponed by the King’s illness. Even Mrs Weldon’s most loyal supporters – and they were mostly women – were scandalised by the work. It was no good her telling them that the Mémoires were in print and on sale in France (though in fact she held most of the stock in boxes under her bed). Nothing good could come of promoting them in England, least of all their principal objective, her life vindicated at the bar of public opinion. In France itself they were not the sensation she had hoped and longed for over all those years of scribbling. She sent out presentation copies, sold a few sets of the work to unsuspecting customers, received no reviews. It was the bitterest blow. The whole enterprise sank like a stone into a lake. Was this to be the fate of what the medium Desbarolles had once assured her would be the most useful memoirs of her day and likely to last a century?

In 1996, a copy of the Mémoires bobbed to the surface in a French bookseller’s catalogue. I read them with mounting incredulity in the garden of a house near Cognac, trying to fit a face to the name. Who was this engaging, maddening, self-deceiving Victorian? The work has little or no literary merit and is muddled, contradictory, and sometimes incoherent. The French in which it is written was a matter of wonder to my neighbours. The things it describes were far from their own concerns as small farmers and wine growers. ‘Why are you bothering your head with this good woman?’ the sardonic Mme Ayraud asked me over dinner one evening.

A short distance from where we ate, there is a village called Chez Audebert. At some time in the nineteen forties, in the garden of a house right on the main road, a simple man began making three-quarter size statues in cement. He started with angels and children but gradually broadened his interests to include de Gaulle, Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe. There is a man who might or might not be Jean Gabin and another who resembles Danny Kaye. The sculptor of Audebert made dogs – most of them with impudent, knowing grins – birds, owls and lions. There are nudes of young girls with their arms held out in innocent welcome, knock-kneed schoolchildren, and peasants like himself lurching home along a dusty track. Some of the people depicted carry briefcases and smoke jaunty pipes. Gradually his garden filled up with maybe a hundred statues, all arranged higgledy-piggledy. When he died, his widow left the gate open for anyone to visit and so it stands today. Whenever two or more people are in the garden, the living are quickly trapped in the arms and legs, breasts and buttocks of this mysterious sculpture park. If they are motionless for a moment, it is sometimes difficult to separate them from the statues all around.

We don’t know why the Audebert villager made these sculptures and they are regarded with an embarrassed condescension by his neighbours. Mme Ayraud’s comment is typical: ‘Pouf! He was not an artist, he was a poor man who had big ideas. That sort of thing never works.’ It is true that one Audebert figure on its own would be disappointing. A hundred are a different matter.

The great attraction of the Mémoires Weldon is a similar plenty. Georgina wrote as she spoke, pell-mell. The pages are crowded, noisy, exuberant and give a view of the nineteenth century that is not often recorded. As to her purpose in writing, one of the striking things about Georgina Weldon’s search for justice is the degree to which she incriminates herself. Many of the things that can be held against her – her high-handedness, her occasional cruelties, the want of a sense of humour which might have protected her from some of her disasters – come direct from her own narrative errors. The more she struggles, the deeper she sinks.

There is nevertheless great beauty in her story. ‘It’s the faith in what is good, what is beautiful and just that has armed my natural convictions,’ she wrote. ‘Gounod always called me his Jeanne d’Arc – others have called me Madame Don Quixote, a visionary, a utopian.’ After all the flim-flam and absurdity that dogged her has been discounted, these are the words that stick in the mind. How true they are is the subject of the present book.

I should like to thank some people for their help and wise comments. Mrs Wendy Hill followed the London end of the story with a sharp eye for topographical detail. In Paris, Kay Dumas plunged into the Bibliothèque Nationale shortly after its removal to new premises and survived to tell the tale. I am grateful to the staff of the Bodleian Library; Trinity College Cambridge Library; East Sussex County Records Office and the Staff of the Brighton Central Library. Elizabeth North gave me support and a novelist’s insights into the central character and suffered her presence in the life we share with unfailing good humour. As every author knows, some works are happier to see through to a conclusion than others. This has been a happy book, for which I am indebted to David Miller and Rebecca Wilson, more than I can say here. Finally – and to adapt a useful phrase from the screenwriter William Goldman – the energy and enthusiasm of a brilliant editor, Arabella Pike, ensured that when the thing was fixed, it was fix-fixed.

BRIAN THOMPSON

February 1999

1 THOMAS

Georgina Weldon was never quite the performer and entertainer nor the grand lady or talked about social lioness she so fondly invented for her readers. Her story starts with parents and a childhood of such a cranky nature that they must be examined with the care she gave to later episodes of her life. Her troubles started the day she was born, when she was presented with a mask fashioned for her by parents who were the kind that could not distinguish easily between the truth and a lie.

She came into the world on 24 May 1837. All day long the London streets were filled with people, running to see the Life Guards pass by or hanging on the Hyde Park railings to gawp or jeer at the rich. The greatest aristocratic houses in England were represented by the comings and goings of their lumbering and oversprung coaches, issuing from the squares about Mayfair and Belgravia. In the tens of thousands that milled about on foot there was that strange unvoiced sense of the exceptional that sometimes characterises how mobs behave. Londoners normally turned out in such numbers only to riot or exhibit their feral curiosity – a fortnight earlier, for example, 20,000 had gathered at Newgate to watch the murderer Greenacre hanged. Today the mood was different. The word sightseer was a brand new coinage and exactly suited the occasion. Placid and orderly citizens of all classes wandered down the Mall to inspect the newly completed but untenanted Buckingham Palace, where it was said few of the thousand windows would open and many of the doors were jammed in their frames by green timber and shoddy workmanship. Directly in front of the place squatted the enormous and foreign-looking Marble Arch, on top of which was to have stood an equestrian statue of George IV, a piece of triumphalism only averted by his death and the colossal overspend on the whole project.

There were many such examples of the new and the bold to gaze on. London, in its West End, was being almost entirely remodelled. Ancient lanes and houses had been pulled down and greenfield sites opened. Behind Buckingham Palace, the ingenious Mr Cubitt was bringing soil from his excavation of St Katherine’s Dock at Tower Bridge along a canal that cut up from the Thames to the site of the present Victoria station. His purpose was to fill the marshy land round about and complete the building of Belgravia for his client, Lord Grosvenor. It was the showpiece of property development in the entire city. Filling marshes, levelling huge tracts was becoming a commonplace in that part of London. Thomas Cubitt’s plans for neighbouring Pimlico involved the wholesale tearing up of ancient market gardens: farms, even rivers were not to stand in his way. Though it was true the speculation in property was running into something of a slump, the check was only temporary. The scale of new building in the capital was greater than anything seen before. For a brief moment this sunny Wednesday, London stood still and took stock of itself.

For the nobility it was an important working day and most of those who peered from their coaches were in court dress. They were summoned in celebration of Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, which began with the formalities of an audience in the Drawing Room at Kensington Palace. It was an occasion of the greatest significance, for under the constitutional arrangements made for her, the Princess at last burst free from the clutches of her mother the Regent. Those people of rank who attended the young Victoria that morning witnessed a telling little piece of theatre. One of the many visitors she received was the Lord Chamberlain, who had ridden from Windsor with a letter from the King. The Duchess of Kent held out her hand to receive it on behalf of her daughter. Lord Conyngsby ignored the gesture and very pointedly gave the letter direct to the Princess. What was long promised had now become fact: the next monarch would be this almost unknown, unmarried young woman. As everyone understood, her accession was not far off. George IV had been fifty-eight when at last he became king and his brother William IV succeeded him aged sixty-five. The taint of madness and scandal hung over both reigns. If God should spare Victoria, Britain could anticipate a profoundly different future.

As soon as she was old enough to understand, Georgina’s father harped on the connection between these great events and her own birth. There was nothing particularly teasing about it either. Both parents made so much of the coincidence that she confessed later, ‘It filled my childish fancy with a vague idea of superiority and relationship with the Royal Family.’ Such ideas, which are normally no more than a harmless family joke, are supposed to wane with the passing of time: unfortunately, this one stuck. Georgina was to live her whole life with the unquantifiable feeling of superiority derived from that day. Encouraged by her manically snobbish parents, she was, she believed, blessed by greatness in some way; at the very least born to a rank in society which furnished its own recommendations and which needed no apology or explanation. She was a full part of the old aristocratic supremacy and the same gentle zephyrs that blew on Victoria’s reign would also fill her sails. When things turned out rather differently – and it would be hard to imagine two less compatible Victorian histories than those of the Monarch and her subject – then the fault lay not in her but other people.

It was certainly a wonderful day on which to be born. All England was en fête. The King lay at Windsor, unloved and unregarded, while at Kensington Palace his niece received twenty-two loyal addresses delivered by hand from every part of the country. In the evening hundreds of noble guests attended a State ball where there was much quizzing of the short and excitable Victoria, who showed her gums rather a lot when she laughed. Once again, the King was conspicuous by his absence. Wellington had attended George IV in his last days and with his usual brutal candour let it be known round the room that the brother was in even worse plight. Lit by hundreds of candles, the noblest in the land gossiped on the white and gilt chairs set for their comfort. The sole topic of conversation was the future Queen.

Morgan Thomas and his heavily pregnant wife Louisa rode round London in their carriage that balmy May day, soaking up the atmosphere. Far from being at the centre of things, they had no part to play and were not invited indoors to any great house: they were faces in the crowd. True, Morgan had a stare that could shatter glass and a coat in the old fashioned colour described as ‘King’s blue’. His wife wore a bonnet in which a plume danced as proudly as any other lady’s, but their carriage would have given them away. There was a useful phrase in vogue to describe the aristocratic predominance: men and women of rank spoke of themselves as The Upper Ten Thousand. Morgan and his wife liked to believe they too were in that number – not angling to be admitted but already there and secure in their tenure. It was the deepest and most cherished of their fantasies. As evening approached, they crossed the river and rattled home to rural Clapham, where Georgina was born at a quarter to ten in the last of the summer light. For a few days and weeks there was anxiety in the nursery, for the Thomases already had a child, the sickly infant Cordelia. She died thirteen weeks later and was buried in Clapham Parish.

Georgina was destined to bear three surnames, but the first of these, Thomas, under which she was registered, is tied to a childhood that resolutely failed to budge from its anchorage in less progressive times. Her father was a William IV man, a Tory of the old stripe. At the time of Georgina’s birth, Morgan Thomas was thirty-five years old and as reactionary as any man in England. His wife was a hapless woman who liked to protest that she was not made for children and the family hearth. They were a strange couple, she by temperament as indecisive as her husband was truculent and hotheaded. Morgan’s position in society was a commonplace of the times: he was a lawyer never intending to practise law. His gentlemanly status had been expressed to his own satisfaction in a book published in 1834 by a writer called Medwin. ‘Judges of the Exchequer were designated thus: one as a gentleman and a lawyer; another as a lawyer and no gentleman.’ Morgan was always ready to insist he was of the first kind. He had found and married his rather plain wife in Naples three years earlier, and if the venue was romantic, the circumstances were not. Both bride and groom were in their thirties and whatever hand life had dealt them it did not include friends and confidants. One unhappy and solitary human being was joined with another. Much later, at the time of his death, Morgan’s younger brother George wrote an enigmatic letter to Louisa.

I ignore for the moment that I have treated you and yours with the greatest kindness, without mentioning the way I plugged the gap when you got married, without which it would not have taken place. I have always come to your aid when the means permitted and it was only after Morgan’s gross and insulting letters that I broke off relations, necessarily.

The help that was given the newlyweds was almost certainly financial, but may have included moral support for an unwelcome or overhasty union. These Thomases were turbulent and aggressive opportunists when it came to marriage and Morgan may have been thought to have chosen his wife unwisely. It was a family fiction that he had courted her for ten long years – it seems more likely that he met her in Italy by chance. Louisa was once described by Count D’Orsay, the supreme arbiter of London taste and fashion, as ‘the offspring of Punch and Venus’. The poor woman interpreted this as a compliment. To marry so late and in such a venue as the British Embassy, where otherwise only naval officers spliced the knot, might indicate to the sharp-witted or malicious observer a sudden inheritance on the part of the parentless bride. In this at least Morgan was his father’s child. The marriage was much more favourable to him than to the luckless Louisa, and she was to pay a very heavy price.

The belief that he was a person of importance went very deep with this strutting, vexatious man. It was a matter of pride that his family had some mention in Burke’s Landed Gentry, the second edition of which was brought out in the same year of 1837, for he was descended from those ancient Thomases who owned considerable land near Llanelli. The Lletymawr estates had been in the possession of his family since an honoured forebear Sir Hugh Trehearn followed the Black Prince to Poitiers. Morgan liked to emphasise this glorious ancestry. Perhaps, as the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Poitiers approached, he was inclined to make too much of it, yet it was easy to see why. For the first and last time in history, a French king had been taken in battle; more to the point, the entire chivalry of France had either been slain or surrendered. It was a huge payday for the Prince’s army. The lowliest archer had three or four prisoners to ransom and Sir Hugh and his little contingent went back to Wales far richer men than when they left. And there they languished.

Morgan’s great-grandfather gave the family its English connection. In 1745 he married an heiress of the Goring family of Frodley in Staffordshire. Through the female line, the Gorings traced their ancestry back to Edward III, bringing Morgan to the point where he could assure his impressionable daughter that her family ‘would become entitled to the throne of England if anything should happen to the ruling family.’ She believed him. The more recent past was much less romantic. At the turn of the century, Morgan’s father, Rees Goring Thomas, married Sarah Hovel of Cambridge. This was almost certainly an undergraduate romance, spiked with a hard-headed opportunism, the like of which Georgina was one day to demonstrate herself. Hovel was a name well known in Cambridge, but not for its aristocratic connections. Thomas Hovel was a haberdasher and his brother John a saddler. These two had by diligence and hard work acquired property in the market area of town, as well as a parcel of fenland on the road to London on which the Leys School now stands. Rees Goring Thomas, of the illustrious Welsh ancestry, made himself comfortably secure by marrying the haberdasher’s daughter – the last parcel of Cambridge land he acquired through marriage was sold out of the family in 1878. Rees took his bride out of Cambridge and into Surrey, where the family had bought the title to a small manor called Tooting Graveney, in the middle of which was erected a property called Tooting Lodge. It was in this house that Georgina was born.

There was just one small problem: the property did not belong to Morgan. He lived there as his elder brother’s house guest. To be a gentleman under these circumstances was a difficult part to carry off. There was already a nephew bounding about Tooting Lodge, a thirteen-year-old called Rees destined one day to return the family to Wales. Worse yet: only a few months after the birth of Georgina, Morgan’s brother, late in life, was given another boy. This finally slammed the door in the face of any hope he himself might have had of the Lletymawr properties and their rents. It was true he did not have to work but neither was he rich in the way his heart desired. Riches were not quite the central issue – what he longed for was pre-eminence. He was a man who could not bear to be in another’s shadow. This was a feeling he gifted in full to his daughter.

Georgina’s mother had an equally illustrious family history. She was born Louisa Frances Dalrymple, of Mayfield in Sussex. The Dalrymples were an ancient family and claimed descent from the Earls of Stair. Her grandfather was General Sir Hew Whitefoord Dalrymple, the soldier who had signed the Convention of Cintra in 1808, which provided for his enemy the French to evacuate Portugal in British ships with all their impedimenta and a mountain of loot besides. The terms of the Convention were considered so scandalous that Sir Hew never again commanded in the field. He was instead made a baronet and died in 1830. Of his two sons, the elder, who was also a soldier, sat in Parliament for Brighton. The younger was John Apsley Dalrymple, Colonel of the 15th Hussars and Lord of the Manors of Cortesly and Hamerdon near Ticehurst in Sussex. He died in 1833. This man was Louisa’s father. There were problems with this lofty background too.

Insecurity and disappointment made both Georgina’s parents tremendous snobs. The careful and faintly comical allusions to an ancestry not half as grand as they pretended was second nature to these two, and was a form of vanity that ran – increasingly as the Early Victorian period developed – against the tide. Georgina grew up in a meritocratic age. This same Victoria, who seemed so light and biddable when she became Queen, came to preside over the greatest shift in social structure the country had ever experienced, calling for the wholesale redefinition of words like art, and culture, industry and progress and, most significantly of all, family. This change in style and substance had no effect whatever on Georgina’s parents. In 1837, Mr Pickwick’s friend Sam Weller had a characteristically sardonic way of expressing the essence of the old order: ‘Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sweetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list ’cos his mother’s uncle’s wife’s grandfather vunce lit the King’s pipe with a portable tinderbox.’

This was also Morgan’s view of the world. He never mastered the new epoch. You had to look quite a long way down the descending orders of rank to arrive at his actual position in society – though of course his contemporaries could place him after only a few idle questions. This was a second son, educated at Cheam, entered under Mr Wilding at Trinity College, Cambridge, with men who would far outshine him. He was hardly highborn: his great-uncle’s saddlery overlooked the college gates. Later on, in supplying biographical details to year books and the like, he lightly removed his mother from a haberdashery in Cambridge and described the Hovels and all his numerous cousins as ‘of Norfolk’. In the same vein, he once claimed to have been presented at all the Courts in Europe, which was – to put it mildly – stretching the point. This mania for improving the bare facts – and in him it became an actual mania – was passed on to Georgina. There was something very wrong with Morgan Thomas and it seems to have been a wilful attempt to make time stand still or even run backwards. In this he was not alone and there was in his generation a writer only too likely to understand him and his kind.

Thackeray went to Trinity at about the same time as Morgan; and, like him, read law at the Inner Temple. In 1837, he came back from a three-year sojourn in Paris and in that year he too was presented with a daughter, born in London a fortnight after Georgina in much less auspicious circumstances. What distinguished Thackeray from Morgan Thomas and his kind was his energy and, above all, his talent. It was enough for Morgan to be a gentleman of independent means, however shaky those means were. But Thackeray had nothing on which he could fall back: what little he did inherit, he lost at cards in a disastrous evening or two when a student at the Inner Temple. Necessity sharpened his wits. In satirising the likes of Morgan and his foolish wife, he showed himself a man very much in the spirit of the times. The world was moving forward and the gifted man looked outwards and opened his mind and his senses to the new.

Part of the hack work Thackeray did for Frazer’s Magazine was to write the highly popular ‘Christmas Books’, the last of which was published in 1850. He was by now famous through having written Vanity Fair, which some of his contemporaries placed higher than anything by Dickens. At the end of the book the plot is triumphantly resolved when the major surviving characters find themselves thrown together at a Rhineland spa. In the Christmas Book of 1850 Thackeray returns us to the Rhine in the company of a fatuous family called Kicklebury. His satirical portrait of them drew a reproof from The Times. The review, which was written to order by a friend of Thackeray’s called Charles Lamb Kenney, greatly amused its target, enough for him to reprint it in the second edition of the work, with commentary. The one unanswerable point Thackeray had to make about the savaging of the Kickleburys was that the work had sold out. Kenny had written:

From the moment his eye lights on a luckless family group embarked on the same steamer with himself, the sight of his accustomed quarry – vulgarity, imbecility and affectation – reanimates his relaxed sinews, and, playfully fastening his satiric fangs upon the familiar prey, he dallies with it in mimic ferocity like a satiated mouser.

Yes, Thackeray rejoins: and the public loves it. Something is moving, something is in the air: there is no pity for vulgarity, imbecility and affectation. The Times, he indicates with an unruffled assurance, has missed the joke.

Georgina’s arrival did nothing to settle her parents’ position. In the short term, it greatly worsened it. The Thomas family had always found Morgan’s violent temper hard to stomach. Clearly he could not expect to go on living at Tooting Lodge for ever and the question had already been broached more than once as to when he would shift for himself. Georgina’s birth made an issue of it. As soon as it was clear she would not follow her sister into an infant grave, Morgan and Louisa came under pressure to leave. There may have been a second impetus. The family banked with their neighbour William Esdaile, who lay dying in Clapham. For two years Esdaile, who was a very old man but nevertheless the presiding genius of the bank he had built up, had done no business following malarial fever contracted in Italy. At the beginning of 1837 the bank failed. Whether or not the Thomas fortunes went down with it, Morgan was left with just enough unearned income to continue as a gentleman: the challenge was to find a house and a style that would reflect his high opinion of himself. Putting it another way, in the long gallery of snobs, what kind of a snob was he going to be?

Late in life, when the mood of retribution was upon her, Georgina published a letter from her brother Dalrymple. It read in part: ‘If you think to alarm me by threatening to unveil the fact that our grandfather Thomas was a drunken and dissolute lawyer and that Mother was a bastard you enormously mistake yourself.’

Dal was by then a Colonel of Militia straight from the pages of a Thackeray novel. His exasperation was well merited. No one more than his sister had cultivated the legend of glorious Welsh and Scottish ancestry. But he also knew there was truth in at least the second allegation. John Apsley Dalrymple died unmarried. This clashes painfully with the entry in the cherished family copy of Burke’s Landed Gentry, where Louisa is shown as wife to Morgan and ‘only child of John Apsley Dalrymple, Esq., of Gate House in the parish of Mayfield, Sussex.’ The discrepancy is only interesting to us because for Georgina to have learned about it must have been as a consequence of some bitter family accusations. We do not have to look very far for the major culprit. All the cruel candour in the family came from Morgan. As she grew up, it was a style very much to his daughter’s taste. Both parents made her lofty, but she learned her recklessness from him. In her Mémoires, which were a settling of all the scores, Georgina went out of her way to explain to the world how her fearsome and aloof father ended his days in Dr Blandford’s asylum in Long Ditton, restrained night and day by four burly attendants. Without her testimony, this was a secret that might have followed the poor man into the grave. All in all, when the parents gazed down into the crib that first May evening, they were looking unknowingly at a wild child.

Imagine her hand lax and pink against the linen of the crib. Who she is, what she will be is written there in that moist palm as plainly as in any book. Many years later, one sultry afternoon in Paris, the palm reader and psychic Desbarolles, who said so many interesting things to her, was the first to interpret a very pronounced line which ran from her lifeline and ended in a fork or trident under the little finger. ‘Madame,’ the palmist explained, ‘you will write the most celebrated memoirs of the century: and at the same time, useful.’ He repeated this word to her several times, an instance, if any were needed, of his amazing powers. For had she not already begun these memoirs? The word useful rang like a gong in the stuffy room. It was exactly the adjective she herself would have chosen. The nineteenth century had done her wrong, not because she was a ninny, but because she was a woman of genius in a man’s world. There was a vital subtext. The very people who ought to have championed her, her parents, the aristocracy to which she believed she belonged, had cast her aside. Her class had betrayed her. Another palmist, Madame de Thèbes, had also studied the curious branchings and forkings and came up with a different reading, but one which brought the story nearer to home. It was clear to her, she said, before giving Georgina back her mitten, that what the hand indicated was that she would most assuredly be divested of her £27,000 inheritance – if that had not already happened. The glorious thing about palmistry was that both statements were true, one not less than the other.

Until Georgina came along, Morgan was a man who cherished political ambitions. After leaving Cambridge he had gone on a journey through Persia with a friend and this at least showed some enterprise (or was an example of his famous bloody-mindedness) since that country was then at war with Russia. In 1830, with this slight claim to fame and sponsored by his uncle, he stood as a Whig at the Cambridge parliamentary election, where he made an utter fool of himself and was soundly trounced at the hustings. Two years later he went up to Coventry with his mind a little clearer to stand as a Tory in elections to the first Reformed Parliament. His campaign throws great light on his character and helps explain the man he was to his children.

The task before him was a daunting one. Coventry was an uncommonly prosperous borough returning two Members. One of these had enjoyed the confidence of the town for many years. Edward Ellice was a fifty-one-year-old politician of great distinction who had held office under the outgoing Grey administration and was a Whig whip. His son – also of Trinity – was a rising young star in the diplomatic service. Ellice’s running mate was Henry Lytton Bulwer (briefly of Trinity), a man the same age as Morgan, but already infinitely more experienced. Bulwer had that maddening aristocratic languor his opponent so much envied. As a twenty-three-year-old idler, he had been entrusted with £80,000 in gold by the Greek Committee, which he carried across Europe to the insurgents. As a special agent of the Foreign Office in Belgium in the Revolution of 1830, he had an amusing story to tell of how the doorman of the hotel he was staying in was shot dead at his side by a stray bullet while he, Bulwer, was politely enquiring directions. He was hugely rich, apparently completely indolent, and already a very highly regarded diplomat.

Morgan arrived in Coventry on 8 December and made his way to the King’s Head. The Tory favours were light blue and as he peered over the balcony at the mob he could see at a glance they were greatly outnumbered by the dark blue and yellow ribbons of the Whigs. He and his fellow Tory had hired some balladeers who sang, hopefully:

Morgan Thomas and Fyler are two honest men

They are not like Ellice and that East India grappler:

I hope Ellice and Bulwer may ne’er sit again,

But let’s return Fyler and young Morgan Rattler.

Unfortunately, the Rattler was no great speechmaker and his manifesto made dull reading. It began: ‘I shall strenuously support the most rigid Economy and Retrenchment, the Reformation of every Abuse in Church and State, and all such Measures as may tend to promote the Happiness and alleviate the Burdens of the People.’ His one piece of acumen was to declare himself for the retention of tariffs on foreign imports. This was an important and popular point to make in Coventry for the town was getting rich on the manufacture of ribbons and watches, and free trade would flood the market with French goods. Overall, however, it was a lacklustre candidature. Then, quite suddenly, he was illuminated by the sort of forked lightning his daughter was one day to draw down.

Making his way from the King’s Head to the hustings, he was attacked by the mob. This wasn’t an unexpected turn of events; in fact it was the norm. A contemporary Coventry innkeeper with experience of these matters has left his unfailing recipe for election days: ‘To thirty-six gallons of ale and four gallons of gin, add two ounces of ginger and three grated nutmegs. Boil the liquid warm in a copper; place in tubs or buckets and serve in half-pints; with a large cigar for each voter.’ The army pensioners recruited by the magistrates to keep order were soon swept aside, or were perhaps themselves victims of this nutmeg surprise. However, Morgan was not quite so green as he looked. On his way to Coventry he had noticed 600 Irish navvies digging the Oxford Canal near Brinklow, and these he now recruited to his cause. To give some generalship to his forces, he sent to Birmingham for half a dozen prize fighters. The Whigs responded by alerting their own local pugilist, a man called Bob Randall who ran a pub in Well Street. Randall massed his forces. His orders were perfectly simple. He was not to murder anyone, but leave as many as possible hardly alive.

Inflamed by drink and religious bigotry, the riots Morgan Thomas managed to incite were remembered in Coventry for fifty years. His Irishmen suffered a terrible defeat. The local paper reported:

Many, thoroughly stripped, were knocked down like sheep, or escaped into the King’s Head for their lives, in a wretchedly maimed condition, and the yard of the hotel presented the appearance of a great slaughter house, but the gates were closed and the place secured, whilst doctors were sent for to attend those injured.

When the dust settled and the vote was finally taken, in a booth festooned with his supporters’ trousers, the Rattler found himself bottom of the poll, bested even by his running mate Fyler.

Then as now, there was no disgrace in failing at your first attempts to enter Parliament. What marked out the Coventry election of 1832 was not just the scale of the rioting, but its aftermath. To the disgust of the Whig Ministry and the outrage of the battered townsfolk, Morgan at once petitioned the House of Commons, contesting the result on the grounds that the electors had been intimidated. This was particularly rich coming from him. In the following year, after the case had been thrown out in Committee, Halcomb, the member for Dover and a fellow lawyer of the Inner Temple, raised the issue on the floor of the House. When they found they could not silence him, the Ministry departed en masse to watch the Boat Race. As he left the Chamber, Ellice was heard to remark of Morgan with awful prescience: ‘That man will never represent Coventry as long as I draw breath.’

The Rattler’s humiliation was complete, but the victors had failed to identify something it would be his daughter’s misfortune to emulate. No shame was too great for a man possessed of manic powers. Morgan Thomas contested Coventry another four times in his life, finally being elected in 1863. His stubbornness was comical, but it was also touching. The Tory interest in Coventry took early pity on him, and he made a second attempt at the seat in the year of Georgina’s birth. Perhaps this time there was slightly more urgent reason to do well and in one sense he was to be admired for putting his head in the lion’s mouth. The Whigs were waiting for him. One of the broadsheets read: ‘And they went to the man Morgan, who is commonly called Tommy the Truckler, because he weareth two faces – one for Cambridge which looketh blue, and one for Coventry which is an orange yellow …’

Again he came bottom of the poll. His supporters softened the blow by presenting him with a Warwickshire watch. He wore it like a campaign medal. Just before the opening of the new Parliament in 1838, Peel invited more than 300 jubilant new Tory members to his London house. Some of them had been Morgan’s contemporaries at Trinity, some he had met through the Inner Temple. Counselled by Peel in small meetings, cajoled, flattered, cosseted and inspired, the new Members were in no doubt they were the breaking wave of an almighty sea change. Three hundred of them fresh from the hustings, shoulder to shoulder in Peel’s house at Whitehall Gardens and surely soon to be the government of the country! Morgan was left on the outside looking in.

His participation in the age was to be more or less confined to such disastrous outings. When the entail on her father’s estate was settled, Louisa’s inheritance would give her husband that small portion of England – a few acres of East Sussex – sufficient to allow him to describe himself as a landed proprietor. Wanting to be the Member for Coventry was a personal and not a political goal: he wanted it because it had been denied to him. His Toryism was of the old-fashioned and reactive kind. What he saw of what was happening around him he did not like and would not join. Yet, behind the hauteur and exasperated bad temper was another more small-minded calculation – for all his disappointments, this was a world in which he did not absolutely have to compete. He was – but only just – a private gentleman. He could not fall; he need not rise. Even as early as 1837, there was a kind of redundancy about his position. He had no friends, the fashionable world outraged him and in his own family he had been made to look a fool, not once but several times.

The search for a place in England appropriate to his idea of himself was too much for him to contemplate. In 1840, he took himself and his wife off to Florence, along with Georgina and a new child, a solemn boy called Morgan Dalrymple. The ostensible reason for their flight was the state of Louisa’s health. In fact, they stayed off and on in Florence for twelve years, and the consequences to Georgina were to be enormous. Nothing blossomed in Florence: a dangerously narrow man took his bitterness with him and, as his children grew up, inflicted it upon them.

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