The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  4

  Following Maurice Kenealy’s example, Georgina published her own paper, Social Salvation, a cut-and-paste job on recent newspaper reports of legal injustice, spiked with republished extracts from her earlier pamphlets, advertisements for her forthcoming concerts, and a youthful-looking portrait of her on the back page. On September 15, 1883, the Daily Chronicle reported a strange story from the South Coast:

  Considerable anxiety prevailed throughout the whole of yesterday in consequence of nothing being heard of the fate of the balloon “Colonel” which made, with Captain Simmons and Mr. Small, a local photographer, an ascent from that place on Thursday. They landed at Cap de la Hogue at midnight, having given people on the ground reassurance with a printed bill which read Read The Englishman, founded by Dr. Kenealy, 2d weekly. Read Social Salvation 1/2d monthly, Printed published and sold by Mrs. Weldon.

  Readers were left to guess how these pamphlets came to be in the balloon. However, Captain Simmons was wrestling at the controls of Menier’s self-steering invention, which the aeronaut had purchased from Georgina and which showed an exasperating desire to return to its maker.

  It was fun to publish the paper, despite the crudity of its production technique and its indifferent sales. It added another arrow to her quiver. But it was not the center of her attention, any more than the concerts she still gave at the Charles Street Chapel in Mayfair or, less romantically, Goswell Road in Clerkenwell. The big battles had to be fought in court, and once Harry had been disposed of, her second most important target was Gounod. The mad doctors paid in full for their impudence and temerity and the part they played in turning her out of Tavistock House. Gounod, however, was a special case. He stood with Harry as an instance of that earlier betrayal she had suffered in the days when the three of them were like brothers and sister. He could never be forgiven his cowardly flight or the subsequent repudiations he made of her once safely back in Paris.

  “His letters to me in 1871 . . . besides the numberless conversations we had on the subject gave me the right to believe I had found in him an experienced ally, a robust friend and an honest lodger, but as subsequent events have proved, I found but rejection and deception.” These words were written in an article for the Cosmopolitan which she reprinted in a pamphlet of 1875. That was at a time when nobody had paid her much mind because she had no powers to set things right. If she complained too hard, she would be put down as an example of a type, the hysterical bad loser. Eleven years on, things were very different. She had in her hands now a weapon she fully intended to use. After conferring with Chaffers and checking her legal powers she summoned Captain Harcourt from his lounging post by the door to her office and sent him to Paris to serve a writ on the composer. It was a brilliant stratagem, only too quick to take effect.

  After the runaway success of Redemption in Birmingham the Queen expressed a desire that the composer should return to England and conduct a new work in the royal presence. There was as it happened something suitable ready to hand—Gounod had composed an oratorio in similar elevated vein entitled Mors et Vita. It was nevertheless his painful duty to decline Her Majesty’s invitation. The writ Harcourt served made it certain that if he ever set foot in England again, he would be taken up for debt. Though he pleaded with Georgina through intermediaries, she was adamant. His flight from London, the obstacles she believed he had put in her way when she was Valerie de Lotz, and the humiliation she suffered at the Birmingham festival went too deep. Justice must be served!

  In personal terms, it was the second of her great victories. Despite entreaties from Littleton, who was making a pleasing amount of money for him in royalties, Gounod never again came to England to conduct. Georgina won both the actions she brought against him, and though she would never collect a single penny in damages, she had scotched the libels drawn down on her by Wolff and the French press.

  The news from the mad doctors was equally satisfactory. By the time of the second Winslow trial, Winslow himself was ruined and since he could not afford to engage counsel, was forced to represent himself. He made a miserable job of it.

  She was less lucky with Rivière. In the first action she brought against him, the impresario spent £1,600 on lawyers, only to lose the case for a piffling £50 in damages. Rivière had moved from deriding to hating her, an emotion she returned with interest. Her attacks on him intensified. In March 1885 she found herself in the Central Criminal Court defending a crown prosecution on a charge of criminal libel. Everything in the 2,500-word indictment had to do with words she had published since the first case. Rivière now risked his entire wealth to take revenge. No fewer than three leading counsels were ranged against her, including the man she came to fear most among the legal profession, Montagu Williams, Q.C.

  Right from the outset, the venom between the two parties was apparent. In cross-examination of Rivière she asked, “You have never trained a choir?”

  “No.”

  “You, not being a musician, you don’t know how to.”

  “What! I beg your pardon. My lord, I can’t stand this! I can’t be abused in this court. I have been conducting concerts for twenty-five years in this country and I think I am recognised.”

  “Have you ever given a lesson?”

  “I don’t give lessons. What for should I give lessons?”

  “Have you ever trained a choir?”

  “I have never trained a choir.”

  “You just beat with a stick?”

  Sometimes abuse like this found favor with the jury. Here it did not. Her defense in the second Rivière case was her worst performance, and there is no doubt that Montagu Williams did his best to draw out and emphasize the egoist in her. In one exchange he forced this retort from a nettled Georgina: “I have taught little children and now I teach grown up people if I can. Judges can sometimes get a lesson from me.”

  Williams struck back instantly. “Mrs. Weldon, you teach children, you teach men and you may teach judges, but don’t try to teach me.”

  Nor was the jury impressed by the evidence of Captain Harcourt. “I am in consumption and blind and only want St. Vitus Dance to make me a perfect specimen,” he declared, mistaking the mood of the jury. (A little later he was removed from the court for saucing the judge.)

  Montagu Williams was two years older than Georgina and, like her, a late starter. He had been a soldier and an actor before taking up the law and had dabbled in journalism and the theater since. The jury had endured a very long and spitefully conducted trial about matters so small, so exact in detail, and very often so far from the point that it became itchy. Williams simplified it all for them in a devastating closing statement:

  Here is the whole cause of it. I will tell you what has been the cause from first to last of all this invective—egregious vanity and an insatiable thirst for notoriety. And that is what led to all this. Why, gentlemen, it was patent from every letter that she read. “Why do you give Madame So and So a hundred pounds a week and not to me? I am the person. I am the great musical star. I am the person who is making your fortune.” And because she was not a musical attraction; because she did not bring money into Covent Garden; because she utterly failed; and Mr. Rivière was obliged to remonstrate with her as to the shortcomings of this choir; the history of this black spot, the very origin of all this, was egregious vanity.

  She could not hold that Williams was some fusty lawyer who had never lived in the world: he put into his jury address the indignation that comes from experience of theaters and stars and agents. Speaking in a dramatically hoarse voice—he was in fact suffering from cancer of the throat—he managed to compress all the usual prolixity of a Mrs. Weldon trial into one damning word: vanity. When it was her turn to address a closing statement to the jury, she made it one of the shortest of her career.

  I am not a young woman, gentlemen of the jury: I have not got a career to look forward to; if I could only get my character into my hands again, it would be to pursue that which I devoted myself to in my you
th, sitting quietly at home in my chair, teaching little children. Of course a verdict against me, gentlemen, would be my ruin—you see they have three barristers—the costs would be something tremendous and I could never pay them. They might send me to prison for a year, and there I suppose I might die, because perhaps none of you have been in prison, but I have, and I know how hard it is. I was in the best prison here, but I have never been quit of gout since then. I was half starved, but I was not worse treated than other people are. They were kind women there, but they dared not show it. I was very cold all the time though it was in summer, and the hardships of prison are what nobody can imagine till they have been put there . . . I won’t say any more because I feel I have tired you; and therefore I leave myself entirely in your hands, never believing you will find me guilty and condemn me as a common felon.

  After twenty minutes’ deliberation, the jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to six months without hard labor. She was taken first to Millbank and then five days later to Holloway.

  5

  Beautiful place. I have such a nice room.” Holloway was then a prison for both men and women serving short sentences. The governor was the courteous and sympathetic Colonel Milman, whose uncle had been “the great dean” of St. Paul’s, Henry Hart Milman. She spent another of her birthdays in jail—her forty-eighth—and the governor gave her a musk plant as a present. She kept goldfish and a newt she fed on minced beef. She was even allowed to collaborate with another prisoner in writing a play. She was a very high-profile inmate. On one occasion Milman called her to his office so that she could be served with a writ for costs against her. Only a little while later he was happy to send her with Miss Jackman, the matron, to the Middlesex Sheriff’s Court for judgment in the Gounod case.

  The Queen’s Bench had already awarded her £1,640 for her services to Gounod as amanuensis and the costs of his stay at Tavistock House. The issue now was costs in the part Gounod had taken in the libels made by Wolff and others. The jury was out for a quarter of an hour and returned to award her £10,000. It was a joyous moment, and it drew a line under the emotional and turbulent years she had given to Gounod during his London exile. She never saw a penny of the money, nor did she expect to. Instead she commented breezily, “I shall be able to bother him for the rest of his life.”

  This was a way of breaking up the tedium of a jail sentence not given to many. She was extremely popular with the warders and delighted them by directing from her prison cell a sensationalist newspaper story of a cockatoo trapped by its chain on the steeple of a church she could see through the bars of her window. A man named Charles Balshaw got the bird down in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd drummed up by the press.

  Before she left, she and Milman exchanged photographs, hers inscribed “To my dear Governor, in grateful memory of my six months in Holloway.” To forestall a demonstration, Milman sent her home fifteen hours before she was due to be released. She was not to be cheated of her martyr’s crown and returned the next day in a barouche and four. Accompanied by hundreds of supporters, she drove down into Piccadilly, where the horses were taken out of their shafts and a jubilant crowd dragged the carriage to Speaker’s Corner. It is said the people gathered there exceeded seventeen thousand.

  There were in the sea of faces that stared up at her as she waved and smiled those whose interests in the occasion were quite narrow and specific. Her case had highlighted the need for a court of criminal appeal, and it had been a committee of political activists who had carried her down from Holloway and organized her triumphant reception. But such huge numbers indicated a more general enthusiasm. This was the apotheosis of her legal career and something even more valuable to her. She was loved. Eccentric or not, however foolhardy and exasperating she might be, there could be no question that she had won from the city a spontaneous demonstration not given to many Londoners. Plump and excitable Mrs. Weldon, in her silk dress and jacket and her borrowed white bonnet, was for a day the most famous woman in England. The monkey had vanquished the crocodiles.

  Not everybody there that day knew or cared that the president of the Mrs. Weldon Release Committee, pumping her hand and praying silence for her speeches, was none other than her old adversary Dr. Forbes Winslow. For her it was a specially rich detail and a fine irony for her to savor. She had brought them all low—Harry and Gounod and now the mad doctors. Five years of press publicity, five years of doing things her way without regard for the dull proprieties of her mother or the remonstrances of her cowardly brother, had ripped like a bullet through asylumdom as well as the inequitable marital status of women. She could shake hands with Winslow with triumph in her eyes. Much of the credit for this changed public awareness was hers. Everyone present knew it.

  Finale

  1

  Dr. Semple christened his child Georgina Angele. Forbes Winslow wrote her a comic song and offered to appear onstage with her to perform it. At Peckham Rye one day a spontaneously generated crowd estimated in thousands threatened to overturn her carriage with their fervor. Leslie Ward—the cartoonist “Spy”—added her to his famous caricature gallery of legal personalities. She toured the provinces for a year with a play called Not Alone—a bad play, an awful play, but one that gave people who knew her only through newspaper reports a chance to see her in the flesh. (Some of her stoutest supporters had been provincial press editors only too pleased to belabor the London establishment with such a handy stick.) She trod the boards of the music halls, dressed as Buzfuz and singing extracts from Biondina. There was not a radical platform at which she was not an honored guest and principal speaker. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry sent her tickets to the theater. She was invited to debates in the House of Lords. In 1887, when the Queen astonished her subjects by hurling herself into the Jubilee celebrations with a vivacity and energy they had not seen for years, every London omnibus carried a portrait of Mrs. Weldon with this legend: “Though I am 50 I have the complexion of a girl of 17—thanks to Pears Soap.”

  Georgina Weldon had the fame she so much desired as a child and for which Victoria’s accession had been the guiding star. In one way she had finally triumphed over the oppressions of her lunatic father, just as Victoria had overcome, with an almost girlish surprise at the consequences, the long years of seclusion following Albert’s death. Eighteen years separated them in age, but here they were—Victoria’s image on the postage stamps, Georgina’s on the buses.

  The Queen was about to enter her most serene decade. More and more great-grandchildren were given to her, until the total numbered thirty-seven. Her popularity was established beyond all doubt. During her reign, seven attempts had been made on her life, but henceforth it was unthinkable that anyone should wish to hurt or harm her. As with Georgina, the newspapers printed the legend, and Victoria became a kind of public property. Benign old age suited her. She was no more enamored of London than she had ever been, but then London had changed, enough to assert a sovereignty of its own. The great houses, the preeminence of a few families, all the aristocratic privilege of Victoria’s youth, had declined and was on the verge of disappearing altogether. One of the duties of the Jubilee that the Queen accepted with pleasure was to drive to Mile End Road and open the People’s Palace. It has its symbolism, that journey to the East End. As well as the new People’s Palace, both General Booth and Dr. Barnardo had premises in Mile End Road.

  Georgina was older than either of these two philanthropists, but in the heyday of her popularity her name was far better known, measured by column inches in the papers. There were a dozen things she might have done to capitalize on it. She might have developed her orphanage ideas in a more practical setting. She had enough connections to radical and philanthropic groups to follow Victoria down to Stepney, where she met General Booth. In fact, she had the honor of sharing with him a shower of mud and stones and horse droppings flung by people who could not care less about social salvation. Booth was personally kind and encouraging, but she was put off by the hymns he sang. She
dismissed them as “comic music-hall religious songs” and seriously misjudged her man. About the citizens of Stepney she said, “If they want to throw mud and stones, let them throw at the Judges, the Magistrates, the M.P.s, the Ministers.” That had a fine radical ring to it, but Georgina was no more the revolutionary than she was a salvationist.

  She seems never to have met Barnardo, whose duty of care to orphans was so much more sophisticated than her own, resembling more the clearheadedness of the Gisors sisters than her own confused fantasies. Another avenue open to her was to have taken a role in more general law reform. She campaigned in a small way for the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh in his effort to take his seat in the House of Commons. Her personal life had, she discovered, much in common with Annie Besant’s. But Mrs. Besant’s mind was sharper and clearer by far, and as a plaintiff in person (in the famous obscenity trial of 1877) she had shown a grasp of legal argument beyond anything Georgina accomplished. Writing in the National Reformer in 1887, Annie Besant observed: “The closest of human ties may be the noblest or the basest of relationships; fully and graciously given, it crowns friendship with its last perfection. Life has nothing fairer for its favourites than friendship kissed into the passion of love.” This was language Georgina could not match. No one can be taken to task for what they cannot do: they cannot be taller, or younger. The question is whether she could have done more with the opportunities dropped in her lap by an adoring press and public.