Anyone reading a newspaper in the middle of May would find side by side reports from the Divorce Court, stories about the Derby, praise for Dickens’s Thursday evening readings, speculation and daily updating of the ministerial crisis over the India Bill, and discussion of the cabinet reshuffle which was forced on Lord Derby by Ellenborough’s resignation. On 13 May, three days after the resignation, The Times declared that Derby’s son Lord Stanley would replace Ellenborough as president of the Board of Control, while Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was likely to be made colonial secretary, ‘the difficulty of securing his return for Hertfordshire being averted by his advancement to the Peerage’.90 The problem alluded to here was that in order to take up a cabinet place, Bulwer Lytton would have to stand for re-election in his constituency, and, as The Times said, he could not be at all sure of succeeding, having won his seat only narrowly in 1852.91 Hence the suggestion that he might be made a peer and sit in the House of Lords instead of the Commons. As the newspaper knew (Disraeli was in the habit of sending political news in advance to the editor John Delane in letters marked ‘confidential’92), Bulwer Lytton had already been offered the same cabinet post when Lord Derby took office at the end of February, but had refused unless it was accompanied by a peerage. Derby had been annoyed at this, telling Disraeli on 25 February that he would not give in – ‘If he is to be of any use, it must be in the H. of Commons’ – and asking Disraeli to ‘call on our refractory friend, and get him straight again’.93 Disraeli tried, but Bulwer Lytton again refused, to his friend’s annoyance.94 When the question arose again in May, Bulwer Lytton was prevailed upon to accept the post, thus bringing down on himself, not for the first time, the wrath of his estranged wife Rosina. Disraeli did not escape unscathed by Rosina’s righteous venom. Mingling with news in the papers every day about marriage and divorce were reports of abuses of the lunatic asylum system by spouses with a grievance, abetted by unscrupulous doctors willing to sign certificates of insanity for money. Sensational headlines on these topics appeared all summer, and, to Disraeli’s chagrin and discomfort, the Lyttons supplied a large proportion of them.
The marriage between Bulwer Lytton and Rosina Wheeler, contracted in 1827, was a disaster from the start. Both were excitable and unstable; he was dependent financially and emotionally on a bullying mother, while she was the socially and sexually reckless daughter of an impoverished Irish upper-class family. They married against the wishes of both families, and Bulwer, as he was then known, had his generous allowance cut off by his furious mother. That did not stop the young couple from setting up house in Mayfair in 1830 and living well beyond their means.95 He had affairs with both men and women and neglected his wife and their two unfortunate children, Emily and Robert. She responded by taking lovers of her own, and by 1836 the pair were not only separated but implacable enemies. Both husband and wife were unstoppable self-publicists. Bulwer wrote novels of aristocracy and romance in the short-lived genre known as the ‘silver-fork school’ of fiction. In 1828 his second effort, Pelham, or, The Adventures of a Gentleman, the story of an aristocratic dandy, became a bestseller: the protagonist Henry Pelham’s penchant for wearing black for dinner gave rise to the fashion for evening dress – the ‘dinner jacket’ – which persists today. The novel aroused the ire of Thomas Carlyle, who published Sartor Resartus in 1833–4 in part to counteract the irresponsible and uncaring dandyism of the English aristocracy as represented in Bulwer’s novel.
Rosina also wrote novels, though she gained only infamy, not fame, from her writings. In them she poured out, at length, her grievances against a husband who had neglected and on at least one occasion beaten her, and who, on separating, took advantage of the law to keep her children from her. Their daughter Emily died in 1848 aged nineteen, without her mother being able to see her before her death; thereafter Rosina lobbied politicians, lawyers, and the general reading public in letters, pamphlets, and autobiographical novels drawing attention to the injustice of the law towards women. Unlike Caroline Norton, however, Rosina cared little for the plight of others or for the woman question in principle; all her considerable powers of verbal insult went into advertising her own case and attacking her husband, along with his many friends, from Dickens to Disraeli and other Conservative politicians.
There is no doubt that Bulwer Lytton was a monstrous husband and father, and there is no doubt, either, that Rosina was obsessed to the point of insanity in her pursuit of him. In the spring of 1858 she was preparing to bring out her novel, The World and his Wife: or, A Person of Consequence, a lengthy story in three volumes, published at the end of May, with a minimal plot and an emphasis on lampooning the aristocracy, in particular in the person of Sir Hubert de Vere, a not even thinly veiled portrait of her hated husband. This preposterous figure is introduced in the second chapter, with Rosina alluding to her husband’s extreme pride in his ability to trace his provenance to the time of William the Conqueror and in his family name; after his mother’s death in 1843 he had added her surname Lytton to his previous name Edward Lytton Bulwer, thus becoming, to the amusement of his many hostile critics, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer Lytton. Other easy targets for Rosina were his ambition to reach even greater heights in the ranks of the nobility, his personal vanity, and his influence over the press, especially The Times:
Hubert de Vere, Earl of Portarjis, Viscount Clanhaven, and Baron Derrersley, in the peerage of the United Kingdom, a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, a Baronet of Nova Scotia, and a Knight of the Garter, was, what in England was emphatically called, a clever man; that is, he parcelled out his existence into two distinct and separate portions of small vices, and great talents; the latter were duly burnished, gilt, and emblazoned for the public service, and, unlike the apartments at Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, were open to the public and the newspaper press all the year round; while the former were thrust into a private reservoir as concerning no one but himself: a wise precaution, in general use among clever men, for … no man likes to subject that which he most cherishes to any severe censure.96
Lord Portarjis neglects his wife and laughs at the idea some people have that his friend Lord Lyncius (a portrait of Lord Lyndhurst), in promoting the new Divorce Act, had justice towards women in mind. ‘As if any one cared how the deuce’ women were treated, says Portarjis; ‘after all, confound it, a man has a right to use his own wife as he pleases’.97 Rosina, who knew that her husband was hoping for a cabinet post in Derby’s new government, pestered her publisher for months in order to get the book published at the optimum time to do him harm.98 Her most recent novel, Very Successful!, had been printed in the usual three volumes in 1856 with a preface bemoaning the fact that she was publishing it herself in Taunton, in Somerset, where she was then living, because she could not find a publisher in London to take it on. The reason for this was that her husband used his influence against her, and that she had no ‘Fudgester’ (Bulwer Lytton’s friend and adviser John Forster) to support her.99 Throughout the novel she attacks her husband and his friends; Dickens is sarcastically said to be ready to be made ‘Lord Bleedingheartcourt, Lord Fleetditch, Lord Froth de Pewter’, while Carlyle, not a close friend of Bulwer Lytton but a good target for her practice of insulting name-calling, is to be created ‘Lord Göethecant [sic], Lord Haggis, Lord Ursa Major, Lord Fitz Flunkey’. Other victims are The Times (‘The Weekly Thunderer’), Sir Janus Allpuff (Bulwer Lytton under yet another name), and Disraeli, who appears as Mr Jericho Jabber.100
Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli are presented as bosom buddies both in the field of literature and in politics under Lord Derby (‘Lord Oakes’ in reference to another famous horse race, the Oaks, inaugurated by Derby’s ancestor). Their dandyism is also mocked. One character asks another ‘who those two ill-looking fellows opposite to us are’,
‘… the one with black ringlets, that look as if they were made out of snakes and leeches, and the other with a head of light hair and moustaches, like a distaff gone mad, and the lines in both their faces gi
ving one the idea of the devil having ridden rough-shod over them, and indented the hoof of every vice into them?’
‘Oh! those,’ laughed Mr Bouverie, ‘are Mr Jericho Jabber and Sir Janus Allpuff, my Lord Oakes’s two leading acrobats. Theirs is one of the chief trained bands of our Metropolitan cliques, of which what is called “society” in London has some half-dozen …’
‘Good heavens! how can Lord Oakes think of balancing his political ladder on the chins of two such mountebanks? ’Pon my life! their hair alone is worth paying a shilling to see …’101
Jabber, described as ‘our friend the Jew d’esprit’, holds forth on the question of allowing Jews to sit in parliament, while his colleague Lord Lyncius [Lyndhurst] is one of the ‘set of superannuated adulterers’ in the House of Lords supporting Caroline Norton’s ‘hocus-pocussed emancipation’, a reference to Lyndhurst’s efforts to pass laws giving more freedoms to married women.102 Rosina, though an ill-used wife herself, was fiercely hostile to Caroline Norton’s campaigns, and thought all the divorce debates in 1856 and 1857 were nothing but a ‘job’, with no real intention on the part of parliament to give equality to women.
Rosina, after reading in The Times in February 1858 that Bulwer Lytton might be given a cabinet position in the Colonial Office, wrote an extraordinary letter to Lord Derby:
My Lord
Every one is aware that it is a matter of very little import whether the manure on the political Dunghill be labelled ‘Whig’ or ‘Tory’[,] ‘Conservative’ or ‘Radical’ as the one thing needful – the amount of corruption is sure to be the same. The dear Whigs once had a ministry nick-named ‘All the Talents’[;] yours just formed is far more appropriately named ‘All the Blackguards’ – Knowing that your Chancellor of the Exchequer has long since paid his Thirty pieces of silver[,] people only shrug their shoulders at that act of your New Farce ‘The Follies of a Night’ and pass on; but in appointing a Liar, a Coward, a Swindler, and a Blackguard to the Colonies instead of sending him to them! you commit at starting a blunder so ridiculous! that you will make your administration not only the contempt but the laughing stock of the world. And indeed if you would study the propensities of your loathsome Colonial Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer you would make one King of Sodom, and the other King of Gomorrah, they having run the gauntlet of every vice.
One comfort is, that your Tickets of leave will as speedily expire now as they did the last time.
I remain, My Lord, with every species of contempt for you, and your gang[,] your Colonial Secretaries [sic] Hunted, and starving Legal Victim
Rosina Bulwer Lytton
alas!103
It is not recorded what Derby felt on reading this fearless document, with its reference to Disraeli’s debts and dubious financial dealings, and to his and Bulwer Lytton’s homosexual activities, possibly with one another, as well as the swipe aimed at Derby himself and the short length of his only previous experience as prime minister.
Not content with confronting Derby, Rosina wrote a week later to his son Lord Stanley and to Lord Lyndhurst. Once more, she did not mince her words. Stanley, who was hesitating about taking a cabinet post, in part because of his distrust of Disraeli, received Rosina’s congratulations on 23 February:
It is much to your credit, that you would not sit in the same cabinet with such a revolting incarnation of every pollution as Sir Liar Coward Bulwer Lytton. Surely in point of utter, and shameless want of principle Disraeli! is quite enough to leaven with corruption 50 administrations, even in England! … when next My Lord Derby blasphemes in the House of Lords about ‘transporting adulterers!!’ (and except with the variation of Fornicators – what are both Houses composed of but adulterers?) pray let him put my Lord Lyndhurst … at the head of those Legions of Derby Deportees!104
To Lyndhurst himself she wrote on the same day, reminding him of his sexually adventurous life and his advancing age (he was almost eighty-six and now completely blind):
My Lord
That a superannuated adulterer like yourself! who could not be made Lord Chancellor till your own crim.con [sic] damages in the affair of my Lady Sykes were paid! should keep the unities[,] by at the dregs of your profligate career jobbing a blasphemous swindle of a bill through Parliament for an old Messalina [i.e. a loose woman] like Mrs Norton … is all very natural … and you should remember old man, how soon you will have to appear before a Tribunal far other, than the House of Lords! where no blasphemous humbug will avail.105
Lyndhurst was a rake; even Disraeli described him in his reminiscences as ‘notorious’ for his ‘susceptibility to the sex’. But he also remembered his friend’s lucid mind and ‘sweet disposition’.106 In truth, Lyndhurst did contribute to the improvement of women’s lot. He helped Caroline Norton with her successful attempts to change the law of infant custody in 1839, and his interventions in the long debates of 1856 and 1857 on the Divorce Bill were remarkable for their insistence on giving women parity, wherever possible, with men. He succeeded in passing an amendment to the 1857 act promoting the rights to property of divorced women.107
Disraeli said he knew ‘three great men who rouged’, namely Lyndhurst, Palmerston, and Bulwer Lytton, and the vainest of these was Bulwer Lytton.108 Rosina was not alone in ridiculing her husband’s vanity, his love of his hair, his use of make-up, and his habit of wearing corsets to improve his figure. Fraser’s Magazine carried a cartoon of him looking in a mirror in August 1832; six years later it printed Thackeray’s verbal and pictorial sketch of Bulwer Lytton as a lisping dandy sporting a fine head of hair, ‘a hook nose’, a pale face, a tight coat, and a wig, and introducing himself ‘in a thick, gobbling kind of voice’ as ‘MistawedwadLyttnBulwig’.109 When Bulwer Lytton foolishly attacked Tennyson in an anonymous long poem of 1846, The New Timon: A Romance of London, calling him ‘School-Miss Alfred’ and parodying refrains from Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’, Tennyson responded immediately with a poem printed in Punch on 28 February 1846. Entitled ‘The New Timon, and the Poets’, it describes Bulwer Lytton as ‘the padded man – that wears the stays’. Tennyson also spoke of Bulwer Lytton putting ‘three inches of cork’ in his shoes, which had ‘pink chamois tips to them’.110 Disraeli, an often exasperated friend, recalled his pomposity, eccentricity, and raving ambition, especially in the spring of 1858:
He wanted to be a popular author, a distinguished orator, & a Baronet of the Kingdom of Heaven – with Knebworth Park [Bulwer Lytton’s country house] to boot! He very truly said to me on a memorable occasion, when he wanted me to make him a Peer, & I wished to make him a Secretary of State ‘Remember this my dear friend; I speak to you solemnly; you are dealing now with the vainest man that perhaps ever existed.’111
Disraeli also noted that Bulwer Lytton, though friendly with Dickens, was ‘dying all the time of jealousy & envy’ of his fellow novelist.112
Rosina turned out spirited and antagonistic prose about Bulwer Lytton and his friends by the yard in her letters and novels. At first she believed, as she boasted to her friend Rebecca Ryves in early March 1858, that it was her intervention with Lord Derby which stopped Bulwer Lytton from being appointed to the cabinet at that time.113 When she discovered a couple of months later that he was after all prepared to stand for re-election in his Hertfordshire constituency in order to take up the post of colonial secretary, she took her revenge in the full glare of publicity, ensuring that her story filled the newspapers. Things took an unexpected turn in June, with rumours of lunacy and a brief incarceration in the hottest days of the year, before the Lyttons receded from the headlines.
The provisions of the new divorce laws were of no use to Rosina or Edward. Neither could risk petitioning for divorce, as the considerable dirty linen of both would be revealed in court, and no judge or jury would be likely to find in favour of either.
A moment of fear about divorce assailed Dickens, however. He had long sympathised with his friend Bulwer Lytton’s marital difficulties, commiserating in 1851 about Rosina,
‘the misfortune of your life’, when she threatened to turn up at a performance before the duke of Devonshire of Bulwer Lytton’s play Not So Bad as We Seem, which Dickens was directing.114 A threat to his control of his own marital arrangements came at the end of May 1858, as he was inducing Catherine to sign a separation agreement which ensured that she was looked after financially and also, importantly for him, that he would face no blame in the matter. The brief but shuddering shock took the form of a possible rebellion by Catherine’s family, particularly his hated mother-in-law and her daughter, Catherine’s younger sister Helen Hogarth, whom Dickens already suspected of spreading rumours.
A rapid exchange of letters between Dickens, Forster, who was acting for him in negotiating the settlement, Dickens’s solicitor Frederic Ouvry, and Mark Lemon, acting for Catherine together with her solicitor, George Frederick Smith, suggests that the Hogarths were hinting that they would encourage Catherine to take Dickens to the Divorce Court. It seems unlikely that they would actually have pursued this course, since Catherine would have had to prove not only adultery but also cruelty or incest or desertion by Dickens – all of which would be difficult, not to mention distasteful to Catherine, who was no seeker of the limelight. Divorce cases depended, inevitably, on the sometimes lurid and often dubious testimony of observers – friends, servants, coachmen, hotel staff, and the like – giving details of adulterous encounters. If, as one of the rumours doing the rounds had it, Dickens’s affair was with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, that would legally count as incest (though of course Dickens and Georgina were not blood relations), and so could have constituted a case for divorce. It stretches credulity, however, that the Hogarth family, no matter how angry they were at Dickens’s treatment of their daughter Catherine, would go to court to point to their other daughter Georgina as the guilty party in an adulterous affair.
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