Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 Muireann O’Cinneide Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writi...

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Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 Muireann O’Cinneide

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Titles include: Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Colette Colligan THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Jarlath Killeen THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874 Kirsten MacLeod FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle

Diana Maltz BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors) VERNON LEE Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Muireann O’Cinneide ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867 David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Julia Reid ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–97700–9 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 Muireann O’Cinneide

© Muireann O’Cinneide 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54670–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54670–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Cinneide, Muireann, 1976– Aristocratic women and the literary nation, 1832–1867 / Muireann O’Cinneide. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54670–7 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–230–54670–6 1. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 3. Upper class – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Authors and publishers – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 5. Literature publishing – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 6. Authors and readers – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 7. Books and reading – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 8. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century. I. Title. PR878.W6O25 2009 820.9⬘352621—dc22 2008025735 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

Part I Class and Authorship 1 Aristocratic Lives: Life-Writing, Class and Authority 2

Dilettantes and Dandies: Authorship and the Silver Fork Novel

3 Silly Novels and Lady Novelists: Inside the Literary Marketplace Part II

23 46 63

Writing the Nation State

4 Wrongs Make Rebels: Polemical Voices

93

5 The Spectacle of Fiction: Self, Society and the Novel

129

6 Affairs of State: Aristocratic Women and the Politics of Influence

153

Conclusion: 1867 and Beyond

180

Notes

184

Works Cited

211

Index

231

v

Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: Edward Bulwer to John Forster, 6 April 1839, sub-series 4.3 folder 395, in the Michael Sadleir Papers #11033, General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lord David Cobbold, Knebworth Estate Archive, Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, http://www.knebworthhouse.com, for Caroline Norton, letters to Edward and Robert Bulwer Lytton, D/EK C24/99 (1–20) and D/ EK C35/37 (1–7), held in Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, and for Edward Bulwer Lytton, address to the electors of Hertford, The Times 9 June 1858: 10. The British Library, for letters from Caroline Norton & Alexander Macmillan, 1861–1871, Add MS 54964, Macmillan Archives. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. NI Syndication, News International Newspapers, for letters from The Hon. Mrs Norton and the Hon. Mrs E. Norton, The Times, 3–11 November 1852; articles, The Times, 6 July 1858: 9; reviews, The Times, 11 January 1838, 29 May 1844, 12 October 1840; letter from the Hon. Mrs Norton, The Times 25 October 1871. © NI Syndication Limited October 2003. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Many people have helped in the writing of this book, not all of them voluntarily. Thanks must first go to my doctoral supervisor Kate Flint, whose keen insight, constant encouragement, and uncanny ability to have written at least one seminal article on just about every topic on which I needed help, made the D.Phil. a stimulating intellectual experience, even in its most anxious moments, and continues to this day. Joseph Bristow’s patient editorial work has been invaluable in the development of this book: his intensive feedback and range of suggestions opened it up into a much richer project and I am most grateful to him. Nicholas Shrimpton and Deirdre David, my thesis examiners, gave me helpful advice and suggestions for revision. Jo McDonagh’s generous professional support was and is warmly appreciated. Kirstie Blair, vi

Acknowledgements

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Stefano Evangelista, Isobel Hurst and Julia Reid have been constant sources of advice and sympathetic listening in times of stress, for which I continue to be humbly thankful; I only hope I reciprocate half as well. Aoife Bhreatnach’s academic insights have been an important part of my thinking, and Louise Foley, Angela Murphy and Jillian O’Keeffe have had a lot to put up with. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Patricia Coughlan and Pat Cronin of University College Cork. My brothers, Colm and Fionán, have been greatly supportive, or as supportive as is compatible with finding my tendency to think ‘the Sixties’ refers to the 1860s just hilarious. Finally, my deepest thanks as always to my parents, Donncha and Margaret, whose unvarying encouragement, perceptiveness, and willingness to listen to me burble for hours on end, I try not to take completely for granted.

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Introduction

An aristocratic Victorian woman invites the Prime Minister to her dinner table. The conversation moves from the weather to the Corn Laws, about which she expresses strong and persuasive opinions. She later decides to write about such a dinner, using her knowledge of circles of rank and power to give her novel both commercial appeal and discursive authority. Her interaction with the Prime Minister has then the theoretical potential to influence the business of parliament and the ideas of a reading public. At what point should we define this conversation as political in nature? Moreover, suppose that the hostess’s acquaintance with another guest, a prominent middle-class writer, assists the publication of her novel. Does this make their personal interaction social, political or literary in nature? Finally, what if that writer himself or herself uses this image of an aristocratic woman’s dinner party to comment upon the boundaries of legitimate influence, bases of power, and the nature of politics? It seems obvious that something beyond a simple private exchange is happening in this hypothetical conversation between a Prime Minister and a woman of high rank, something that may affect the former’s decisions on matters of state and may allow the latter to exert certain types of influence. At the same time, this dinner-table interaction is clearly different in its nature from a Cabinet meeting or a parliamentary debate. Aristocratic women in the Victorian period experienced a particular combination of gendered exclusion and class privilege in their lives and their writing. This combination generated distinctive literary modes of the social, at a historic moment after the Great Reform Act of 1832 when expanded general access to official political structures seemed to be lessening the impact of elite interactions. It is not sufficient simply to agree that the social can be political: if everything is political then nothing is. With definitions of political ranging from 1

2

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation

matters concerning governance to social relationships that involve authority or power, we need to pay closer attention to the socio-historical specifics of how the social can become political, to what extent, and in what circumstances. Politics as a process can comprise the articulation and debate of communal values, the co-operation or conflict between individuals or groups seeking to advance their particular interests, and/ or the making and implementing of specific policy decisions.1 What different claims to politicised standing can we make for writing that articulates a personal wrong, achieves critical success, influences popular thinking, and/or alters a parliamentary bill? My dinner-table scenario concerns women of a status such that their socialised interactions can regularly incorporate holders of state power, and can therefore potentially possess a specific political import beyond the scope of many of their contemporaries. The distinctively socialised nature of aristocratic women’s experiences of Victorian literary and political spheres opens a way through which we can consider these spheres afresh. The year 1832 was a particularly animating time for conversation in Seamore Place, the London home of the notorious Countess of Blessington. On 7 June that year, the Representation of the People Act, commonly known as the Great Reform Act, came into law, restructuring the electoral system of the United Kingdom and substantially extending the property qualifications for the franchise. Seamore Place acted as the ‘social stronghold’ for pro-Reform radicals during the struggles preceding the Act, offering such men a site for conversational exchange under the coveted hospitality of their prominent hostess, whose wit, charm and beauty had taken on near-iconic status. 2 In the years subsequent to Reform, the literary dimension of these salons would increasingly predominate over the political and fashionable, for Lady Blessington had a problem. Her financial troubles were becoming increasingly pressing, and she looked to literature to find a way out. Moreover, recent scandal left her with personal scores to settle against the highest aristocratic social circles, and with strong opinions about the criteria through which such circles monitored whom to bring in, and whom to keep out. Neither, during the months of discussion under her roof about the nature, composition, inclusiveness, and proper leadership of the nation, had Blessington been inattentive or silent. Around late autumn of 1832, therefore, Blessington seems to have decided to consult her new friend Edward Bulwer (later Edward Bulwer Lytton), a Radical politician, heir to a landed estate, and a popular and rising author. 3 It was, she felt, time to write a novel.

Introduction 3

Literature was a reasonably acceptable occupation for women of high social status, providing they approached their writing in a spirit of dilettantism rather than professionalism, and discretion rather than revelation. The pose of a dilettante would preserve a writer’s standing among a class that traditionally valued models of elegant leisure. As for discretion, the name of a titled author on (or associated with) a book promised revelations from the inner circles of fashionable aristocratic society, yet these same circles could view such revelations as an indiscretion or a betrayal. By the time of the Reform Act, Blessington needed to alter her priorities and, if necessary, sacrifice her social aspirations to the demands of literary labour. She would do so, however, not by separating herself from her more decorous contemporaries, but by building upon their common bond of rank. In popular public perception, Lady Blessington to some extent embodied aristocratic womanhood; despite or, more likely, because of her alleged sexual immorality, she would go on to become for many Victorian readers the epitome of the aristocratic woman writer. Blessington’s various consultations with Edward Bulwer bore fruit the following year in two different ways, each one, in its fashion, a personalised intervention into the politics, values and structures of the postReform nation. She insisted on introducing Bulwer to the Earl of Durham, a notable radical leader, and ‘in the drawing-room of Seamore Place the foundations were laid of a political alliance which, had Durham only survived, might have changed the face of mid-Victorian England’.4 In the best traditions of the aristocratic political hostess, the conversational spaces of upper-class feminine sociability opened up possibilities for forging important contacts in a relatively informal setting. Blessington’s status and fame also netted her an impressive four hundred pounds for the copyright of her first novel, Grace Cassidy; or, The Repealers (1833) (for which Bulwer may even have negotiated with the publisher, Bentley, on her behalf).5 The Repealers combined a tale of the 1798 Rising in Ireland with barbed satire of fashionable upper-class London society. The latter aspect drew on the then wide commercial appeal of the so-called silver fork novels, whose promises of scenes from high society and claims (however disputed) to aristocratic authorship made them the mode of fiction the reading public most readily associated with writers of rank. The rebellion storyline of The Repealers ultimately offers a vision of national unity across the United Kingdom – set in the years leading up to the 1801 Act of Union, it implicitly urges such models of mutually understanding reconciliation upon a post-Reform nation. In contrast,

4


the sections of the novel set in London high society serve partly as a clever marketing lure, especially given their roman à clef sketches of prominent real-life aristocratic hostesses, and partly as Blessington’s personal autobiographical revenge. As the widow of an earl, Blessington possessed more claim to the status of an aristocrat than, for example, her countrywoman, the Irish novelist Lady Morgan, wife of a Dublin surgeon. Unlike Morgan, however, Blessington remained outside many aristocratic circles. Her hopes of acceptance into the highest echelons of London society, to which aristocratic women of unchallengeable standing carefully regulated access, had effectively ended in 1831. Blessington’s origins (as the daughter of a Tipperary merchant) and shadowy past might in any case have outweighed her marital rank, but her public notoriety ensured her perpetual exclusion after scandal surrounded her relationship with her stepdaughter’s husband, the Count D’Orsay. The Abbervilles in The Repealers, a toadying, socially climbing Anglo-Irish peer and his wife, are clearly a satire on Lord and Lady Charleville, who had helped perpetuate the scandal.6 Yet this seemingly wholly personal attack is also a crucial part of The Repealers’ politicised commentary. Drawing upon her personal connections, convictions, alliances, and enmities, Blessington was engaging in an essentially socialised mode of writing and publishing, just as her insistence on bringing Bulwer and Durham together was a socialised form of political action. In both cases, the interpersonal spheres through which nineteenthcentury aristocratic women tended to exercise their most effective influence offer interim sites between the concerns of the individual and those of the nation. Blessington represents Lady Abberville’s toadying to high society patronesses, Lord Abberville’s lack of political principle, and their callous treatment of their Irish tenants, as all part of the same danger to visions of a progressive and unified future. Reform debates had generated rhetorical models of dissolute, frivolous, leisured aristocrats, but had also proved invigorating for the upper classes, particularly for Whig aristocrats energised by ideas of a reforming aristocracy leading the progress of the nation. Blessington’s sense of the injustice of her ostracism is not a wholly private concern: her interrogation of elite society’s dynamics of inclusion and exclusion becomes a means of intervening in wider dynamics of inclusion and exclusion across society as a whole. The incorporation of the rebellious Irish into a harmonious United Kingdom, and the incorporation of the ostracised Lady Blessington into London high society, comprise complementary visions of an inseparable body politic and

Introduction 5

body social founded on tolerance and acceptance: a literary nation as imagined through fiction in order to address and to reform the national imaginary.

Aristocratic women and literary history ‘Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about ... The middle-class woman began to write’, observes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1928). ‘It matters far more than I can prove in an hour’s discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing.’7 Yet even as middle-class women were putting pen to paper in ever-increasing numbers during the nineteenth century, the aristocratic woman writer was far from lonely. She was also ranging considerably further than her country house – itself an active site of socio-political exchange. Aristocratic women flourished in the Victorian literary world, their activities integrally linked with their ongoing participation in crucial social and political spheres between the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867. This book argues that their lives, their works, and the representation of these lives and these writings in popular discourse played a formative part in the evolution of midVictorian concepts of politics, professional identities, the nature of writing, and the state of the nation. Victorian literary studies have comparatively neglected the presence and high cultural visibility of aristocratic women in the era. Discussions of Victorian class identities and vocabularies have moved beyond a predominant focus on middle-class models; such discussions, however, tend to focus on working-class literature, a topic with which most critics feel ideologically comfortable. There is, in much scholarship dedicated to the post-Reform era, a lurking sense that women who wear expensive dresses can have no serious role in Victorian narratives of nationhood and identity. The counteracting critical temptation is to hail aristocratic women as forerunners of a feminist tradition. They might appear to some as glamorous Machiavels holding sway over drawing-rooms full of powerful men long before women could even cast a vote. To others, they may figure as prestigious editors of expensive fashionable productions in a competitive literary marketplace. From another perspective, their primary value might lie in their positions as best-selling authors who transformed the titles and status bestowed by fathers or husbands into channels to individual commercial and artistic success. The temptation to recover and celebrate aristocratic women writers for these

6


reasons though, is as ideologically and factually questionable as a sweeping dismissal of their importance. The authors’ ambiguous combination of class privilege and gendered exclusion generated a series of complex cultural vocabularies, which their own writing, and the writing of other authors, shaped, and to which such writing responded. Critical sources for my project then, emerge more readily from historical studies, in particular recent historians’ emphasis upon the adaptability and continuing significance of the British aristocracy during the Victorian period, and the relevance of aristocratic vocabularies and concepts to such a supposedly bourgeois era. In offering a literary complement to this historiographical development, I wish to restore the aristocratic female author to a period thought of as the great rise of middle-class women’s writing, and to consider her as a more ideologically multifaceted figure than either a repository of seemingly outmoded elite values, or an unconditional adherent to bourgeois values. Dorothy Mermin claims, as literary writing in general and the novel in particular became increasingly associated with feminised forms, that an important aspect of this feminisation of genre was the basic assumption of Victorian reviewing that the best literature came from deeply felt personal experience. The ‘location of literature on the border between private and public – where personal matters are presented to the general view’, she observes, ‘meant that for a man to become a writer was to make a partial retreat into the private sphere, while for a woman it meant emerging into the public one.’8 Yet for women whose rank and lifestyle meant that their understanding of their domestic duties could incorporate exchanges of hospitality within an elite circle, the representation of personal experience took on a distinctively socialised dimension between the private and the public. Two contrasting models of aristocratic authorship develop in the period around and after Reform. There is the model of the dilettante author (founded upon an ideal of aristocratic leisure), for whom writing is acceptable – providing it is not to be taken seriously as either an art or a profession. As I reveal in the chapters that follow, this model has several beneficial implications for the upper-class author anxious to carve out a career while retaining social standing and mystique. Yet it could also become a source of vulnerability. On the one hand, constructions of dilettante authorship evoke vocabularies utilised in the Reform debates for negative characterisations of upper-class lifestyles and power. These vocabularies drew on images of the idle, uncommitted aristocrat who fails to take seriously the responsibilities of their

Introduction 7

position, and who has therefore forfeited the right to those responsibilities.9 On the other hand, the re-energising effects of political and religious reform on the British upper classes, particularly adherents to the Whig political party and its reform-minded landowners, fosters an alternative model of Victorian aristocratic authorship, whereby the aristocrat spearheads social and moral reform through the power of their writing, acting as the elite spokesperson and leader for the wider world. Each of these models of authorship – the dilettante and the committed reformer – draws on tropes of inclusion and exclusion crucial both to the Reform debates, and to aristocratic women’s experiences as the ‘gatekeepers’ of high society.10 The idea of the dilettante emerges from languages of leisured exclusivity, offering alluring glimpses of an enclosed elite world, while the idea of the reforming aristocratic author embraces rhetoric of hierarchical inclusiveness: a cross-class readership drawn together under the benevolent literary leadership of their crusading betters. The literary focus of my analysis is on prose and fiction rather than poetry, despite the fact that several of the women novelists I discuss were also well-known poets. This decision is not, of course, to suggest that social status only influences prose. Neither is it to disregard critical re-evaluations of the politicised import of nineteenth-century women’s poetry and particularly of the figure of the ‘poetess’.11 Generic content, however, predominates over writers’ specific social identities – that is, such poetry tended not to have specific settings in upper-class circles, or sub-genres like the fashionable novel that readers and critics associated with the aristocracy. Social status did have a cross-genre effect on critical and popular responses to aristocratic authors: the reception dynamics of the literary marketplace that Chapter 3 discusses partly affect upper-class women’s poetry as well as prose. I also refer to key poems of an author if they have an explicitly polemical purpose. The identification of the women in this book as ‘aristocratic’ does not necessarily signal a homogeneous class identity. An important aspect of my work is the often-bewildering fluidity of Victorian definitions of aristocracy. While completing the present study, I had to rethink my earlier attempts to maintain a clear distinction between ‘upper-class’ as a general term, and ‘aristocratic’, which in some interpretations applies only to members of the peerage. Both personal commentaries and popular public debate used ideas of aristocracy far more widely than this distinction would suggest. The frequent confusion of the terms in contemporary discourse encouraged my decision to use both,12 albeit

8


with the understanding that while ‘upper-class’ is useful for us as a general descriptive term, ‘aristocratic’ would have been at the time more evocative of the fashionable, metropolitan lifestyle associated with the country’s most prestigious social circles. The phrase ‘the Upper Ten Thousand’ sometimes referred to the British aristocracy (though actually originating in reference to New York’s upper classes in the 1840s), yet Anthony Trollope’s wry comments in the opening of Can You Forgive Her? (1864–5) suggest the lack of any clear definitions of this group.13 Although several of my key figures would have been deemed socially and morally questionable by the eighteenth-century gentry who feature in Amanda Vickery’s The Gentleman’s Daughter (1998), they moved in considerably more prominent social circles than such women could or did aspire to. Faced with such problems of terminology, Lawrence Stone opts for ‘elite’.14 In my opinion, however, commentators on women’s history have tended to use the term ‘elite’ rather too casually. London in the mid-nineteenth century was the centre of groupings of social, literary and political elites, and although their overlapping nature is central to my argument, they were not identical. I consequently retain ‘elite’ only in defined scenarios. Likewise, I will also make use of some genderspecific terms like ‘lady’, ‘hostess’ and ‘statesman’ where they are contextually appropriate to the concept under discussion. ‘Fashionable’ is a term which has little specific class significance for modern readers, but which recurs in contemporary comment associated with the more visible and exclusive parts of aristocratic society. These predominantly consisted of the key figures in the upper-class social ‘Season’ in London when the main balls and dinners took place. ‘High society’ or ‘high life’ could also refer to these groups. The word, and concept, that the writers I discuss make perhaps the most use of, is ‘rank’, which is in keeping with Cannadine’s exploration of the range and subtlety of vocabularies of status and hierarchy available to Victorian commentators.15 ‘Rank’ suggests, not a rigidly stratified society, but an understanding of one’s social identity as a privileged element of a more organically layered community – a language that, as we shall see, recurs in much reformminded prose and fiction. In contemporary Victorian discourse, and throughout this book, the key terms ‘aristocracy’, ‘rank’ and ‘fashion’ remain in a complex state of interplay. We have already seen that Blessington, probably the most famous aristocratic woman writer of the Victorian period, had also one of the murkiest backgrounds and shakiest social standings. Lady Morgan, daughter of an actor and wife of a knighted surgeon, was by the late

Introduction 9

1830s a noted if eccentric figure in London high society, fuelled by the success of her early-nineteenth century tales of Irish life. Ireland also gave Georgiana Chatterton an entry onto the literary scene through her travel writing; Lady Chatterton engaged in debates with Cardinal Newman over her conversion anxieties, while writing across a range of genres including the ‘silly novels’ which were to call down George Eliot’s wrath in 1856. The novelist Lady Stepney divorced her first husband Russell Manners under Scots marriage law but married Sir Thomas Stepney, later equerry to the Duke of York, and enjoyed a thriving social and literary life. Other women were born into unchallenged social status but brought scandal down upon themselves, like Lady Charlotte Bury who achieved success and mild infamy by publishing revelations of her time as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Caroline, George IV’s estranged wife. Still others found that impeccable reputations did not preclude life-changing experiences: the Hon. Emily Eden left England and the English politics she loved in 1836 for almost six years to act as hostess to her brother Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley edited a fashionable annual publication and contributed airy fragments of poetry and prose before embarking on a round of extraordinary travels that would eventually lead to her death. Some women carried on family literary traditions in their own ways: Ladies Georgiana Fullerton and Emily Ponsonby, granddaughters of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and nieces of Lady Caroline Lamb, used fiction as a means through which to articulate their personal religious concerns. The two women with whom my detailed case study is concerned, Rosina Bulwer Lytton (Lady Lytton) and Caroline Norton (the Hon. Mrs Norton), both turned writing into a way of claiming power following their disastrous – and disastrously public – marital collapses. All of these women were capable of using terms like ‘aristocratic’, ‘rank’ and ‘fashionable’ as means both of defining themselves, and of describing circles from which they were excluded or from which they wished to distinguish themselves. Yet even if their individual standings in and access to these circles varied dramatically, they shared a sense of themselves as representatives of the circles of upper-class society, members of a privileged elite. More importantly, the wider reading public, less alive to social gradations, perceived them as women of high rank. Blessington and Norton, whose range and activity as writers make them prominent figures in my study, were also among the best-known aristocratic women writers, thanks to their scandalous reputations. Although their precarious personal situations

10 Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation

meant that they needed to write more than their socially secure contemporaries, their popular/commercial writing did not occupy noticeably different generic or critical territory. The titles and honorifics inseparable from aristocratic names in the public view gave women writers of high social standing an immediate claim on a readership’s attention. They did so in a way that few middle-class women could hope for, whether these names were on the title page of a book, in a newspaper column, or linked through gossip and speculation to secrets (of authorship or of sex). Yet class identities also tied upper-class writers to patterns of reader expectation and generic models, such as the ‘silver fork’ novels and the fashionable annuals, which were not particularly conducive to the formulation of a professional identity. These women became targets for critiques aimed at defining certain forms of individual and national identity. At the same time, however, they themselves were responding to changing social conditions and vocabularies, using their writing as a means of shaping new forms of identity and new modes of political intervention.

The literary nation 1832–1867 Conflicting models of aristocratic authorship are significant not just for the light they throw upon popular and prominent writers of the period, but also for the understanding they can offer of the formulation of the literary nation between the First and Second Reform Acts. The present study’s timeframe between the two Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 is not meant to indicate a rigid adherence to period boundaries. Recent scholarship’s interest in definitions of a ‘long nineteenth century’, and the ongoing relevance of eighteenth-century writing and culture to the Victorians,16 are borne out by the way in which aristocratic women inherited and refashioned their traditional modes of literary expression and political engagement. The inter-Reform period is significant, however, because it marks a cultural shift in focus from vocabularies and ideas traditionally rooted in aristocratic lifestyles, to ones centred in middle-class experience. Competing images around 1832 of venal aristocrats protecting decayed privilege versus images of noble leaders of an inclusive nation gradually became 1867’s images of unruly and politically immature working-class men versus decently productive working-class voters exemplifying bourgeois tenets of domesticity and responsibility.17 Recent scholarship has made it increasingly clear that members of the upper classes experienced this cultural transition as

Introduction 11

well, one that drove changes in behavioural patterns and mores. Peter Mandler insists that in ‘a political atmosphere drenched with antiaristocratic and anti-corruption rhetoric’, the ‘persistence of aristocratic power in the nineteenth century ... was not ... made possible simply by carrying on in eighteenth-century ways’.18 From the 1832 Reform Act’s traditional representation as the triumph of a burgeoning middle class over a declining upper class, historians’ assessments have shifted from celebrating change to stressing continuity, considering the Reform Act as aimed at preserving (with greater or lesser strategic intent depending on interpretation) aristocratic power from increasing extra-parliamentary pressures for change.19 Assessments have also highlighted ‘the persistent importance until about 1880 of a “traditional” politics in which local, aristocratic and religious influences remained paramount as against the importance of class in the subsequent era’.20 The British aristocracy, however, did not retain such a comparatively high level of power without considerable adaptation. Historians of the elite insist upon the British aristocracy’s remarkable capacity for self-reinvention in the face of greater cultural emphasis on domesticity and industry.21 Such adaptation was not the sole preserve of aristocratic men, as studies by Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, K.D. Reynolds, Peter Mandler and Amanda Vickery have shown, building upon Pat Jalland’s and Leonore Davidoff’s seminal earlier work on Victorian upper-class women. Davidoff, discussing the increasingly stratified rituals of social access that marked elite women’s responses to changing times, notes the incorporation of expected patterns of social and moral decorum into these rituals.22 Philanthropy was one of the most important ways in which Victorian women expanded their ‘separate sphere’, and upper-class women had important roles to play in fronting and developing charitable organisations.23 An aristocratic name was a valuable commercial property, able to launch a book or spearhead a charity. In the present study I consider some of the ways in which these women developed the potential of their names.24 Party political identity, an often-overlooked factor in literary studies, offered further languages through which upper-class women writers could respond and adapt to changing times. This was especially the case for pro-Reform authors, especially those who were committed Whigs: the party of high aristocracy and dissent, whose traditional origins in anti-Catholicism and constitutional monarchism evolved by the early-nineteenth century into a commitment to parliament, free trade and franchise reform. Political parties, as I discuss in Chapter 6,

12


were by no means solidly unified organisations or ideologies, but they were nevertheless significant factors in individual political engagement. Mandler argues that ‘the whig aristocracy – apparently on the brink of dispersal in the 1820s – was tremendously galvanised by the arousal of the national political mood after 1830’.25 At least up to the end of the 1840s, contends Mandler, the Whig mode of government was rooted in a vision of the natural role of the aristocracy as champions of the people’s extra-parliamentary concerns, combining flair and rationality to mould an actively patriarchal State in which Parliament would be a vibrant tool for reform.26 This process lost momentum towards the end of the decade. By midcentury rather different understandings of the role of the aristocracy and the relationship between Parliament and society were coming into play. The 1832 Reform Act had sprung from an uneasy alliance between Whigs and radicals, many of whom were considerably less enthused by Whiggish visions of aristocratic reform, and this alliance was not of long duration. The 1850s onwards was a period of relative stability after the social upheavals of the 1840s, with a consequent lack of the extra-parliamentary pressure on which the post-Reform Whig governments had thrived. This furthered the gradual evolution (from 1839) of the more bourgeois Liberal party and governments of the 1850s, which – as Mandler observes – ‘were such broad churches that they not only embraced whigs and liberals, but virtually swamped and drowned the whigs’. 27 Visions of aristocrats leading the parliamentary charge to bring about extra-parliamentary reform had, therefore, to compromise with a wider political base and a more mediated political agenda. This was particularly true for upper-class women, whose influence – informal, uncharted, and rooted in the hegemonic privileges of a ruling elite – does not sit easily with the ideal of the march of parliamentary democracy. Nor, as K.D. Reynolds warns, does it fit comfortably (or, she contends, at all) into a feminist political tradition.28 Several commentators have noted that, while the pre-Reform exclusion of women from the franchise (and from membership of Parliament) was a matter of long-standing custom, the 1832 Reform Bill saw the first formal, legal exclusion of women and hence the definition of the official political subject as male.29 Peter Mandler comments that from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prevailing discourses defined the world of politics as an essentially masculine sphere (in opposition to the ‘feminine’ irrationality supposed to have generated the French Revolution).30 Yet the very act of defining the vote as a specifically

Introduction 13

masculine right in itself suggests an uneasy awareness of alternative possibilities. The exclusion of women helped create the possibility of inclusion, thus placing women’s suffrage on the agenda for the debates leading up to the 1867 Reform Bill.31 Aristocratic women had ways of transcending this designation of politics as masculine, but these methods depended not on franchise campaigns but on a discourse locating political power in the structures of high society. Therefore the ‘shift from a society where patronage and familial or client relationship to a system where individual achievement was rewarded with great wealth and powe.’32 was an especial threat to their traditional power bases.33 That said, in avoiding a celebratory approach to aristocratic women’s political influence, we should not go to the other extreme of seeing reform and franchise extension as detrimental solely to the interests of an illegitimate minority. James Vernon has argued that the formalisation of political institutions and communication made English politics less rather than more democratic by the time of the 1867 Reform Bill, limiting many sectors of the community and alternative means of expression. 34 Historians are increasingly reading Victorian politics in relation to a broader range of contexts than solely parliamentary ones, including contemporary literary, intellectual, scientific and economic discourses. 35 Examinations of the languages of politics have highlighted the existence of a variety of other vocabularies on the nature of the ‘public’ sphere elided by the previous critical concentration on the franchise. 36 In considering Victorian England between the Reform Bills, then, I position my discussion between two of the century’s major public discussions of ideas of citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, the boundaries of formal power structures, and the nature of representation. In my use of the term ‘literary nation’, I mean two things. First, this imagined nation as represented in literature, in terms of transactions involving questions of identity, power, and belonging. From this arises a second idea of the literary nation in the sense of the nation itself as shaped by literature. I draw my understanding of the ‘nation’ from Benedict Anderson’s highly influential concept of imagined community, though Reform agitations highlighted a struggle between different forms of imagined communities. 37 The imagined ‘nation’ in mid-Victorian England was riven with the questions of inclusion and participation which were being hotly debated in 1832 and 1867, as parliamentarians, lawmakers, commentators, agitators, communities and authors sought to define what restraining qualifications of class

14


and property should demarcate the capacity to vote. Such debates inevitably generated the need for further definitions. First, what modes of political involvement were feasible – and acceptable – beyond the vote? What constituted the ‘political’ in the first place? What relation did parliament bear to society as a whole? How might understandings of the political affect understandings of the social? In sum, who, exactly, was part of the nation and what might being part of the nation entail?

Theoretical positioning The image of an upper-class dinner table with which we opened offers a valuable paradigm for positioning aristocratic women’s writing in relation to such discussions of nationhood and identity, highlighting as it does the distinctive mode of the social experienced by such women. ‘To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common,’ observes Hannah Arendt, ‘as a table is located between those who sit around it ... The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak’. 38 The dining table of the aristocratic woman unites her guests even as it divides them, bringing them into a temporary community of identification and separation. Yet a crucial aspect of the community thus created is its non-existence, or at most its partial existence, in any ‘public realm’. Where it does belong is, in Arendt’s terms, in ‘that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance that we call “society”.’39 The term ‘society’ has a dual meaning in relation to nineteenth-century upper-class life. As lower case ‘society’, it can refer to the wider community, but with the upper case ‘Society’, it was the term for the higher ranks of the elite fashionable world – and thus a term that takes its meaning from exclusion. One enters Society by virtue of being of a rank above most of society. One aim of this book is to use Victorian Society as a means of understanding Victorian society – and what ideas of nationhood and identity are at stake in the representation of both. Theorists have perceived the collapse of the intimate into the social, the elision of the boundaries between those concerns related to the individual life and those related to the well-being of the state, as one of the defining features of modern European society.40 Patrick Joyce notes the processes whereby the ‘state and civil society moved closer together, and the legitimation of rule in the name of this social became more

Introduction 15

marked’. ‘The social’, he continues, ‘began to take on a life of its own, becoming an objective “thing”, the source of both political and moral legitimation’.41 Political theorists have sought models of discourse legitimacy through ways of marking out the nature and scope of the ‘public sphere’, notably Jürgen Habermas.42 Yet as Joyce observes, ‘the public sphere was always a mode of exclusion as well as openness’.43 For Joan Landes, the key axis of exclusion is gender, but ‘class and its accoutrements (property, income, literacy, and cultural background) were major barriers to full participation’.44 Increasing participation is vital to Habermas’s principle of transformation, but ‘inclusion of small numbers of elite, literate women would not have transformed the bourgeois public sphere into a mass’.45 This is symptomatic of broader blind spots in critical thinking about nineteenth-century gender issues: the fact that upper-class women form a relatively small elite has fostered an assumption that their influence must be correspondingly limited, allowing theorists to disregard or subsume them into discussions about middle-class women. The ambiguous nature of these women’s participation in public discourse disrupts not only definitions of this discourse, but also the spaces in which Habermas locates this discourse as taking place. Drawing-rooms and dinner tables yield to (men’s) clubs and coffee-houses, but although upper-class women were effectively excluded from the latter spaces, they could exert influence over public affairs in the former. Denise Riley, in particular, has discussed the nineteenth-century gendering of the social, the redefinition of women in relation to the social rather than to nature. Riley points to the way in which nineteenth-century debates on ‘The Woman Question’ featured women as bearers of a morally pure future, elevating agents exempt from economics. ‘This new production of “the social” ’, she observes, ‘offered a magnificent occasion for the rehabilitation of “women” ’.46 The nineteenth-century social, in Riley’s rendering, is ‘a blurred ground between the old public and private, voiced as a field for intervention, love and reform.’47 Crucially for our purposes, Riley views this conceptualising of the social as bringing about a ‘dislocation of the political’. ‘The latter’, she says,

takes on an intensified air of privacy and invulnerability, of ‘high politics’ associated with juridical and governmental power in a restricted manner ... ‘Women’ are overwhelmingly sociological and therefore, given these new definitions, not political entities.48

16


Such constructions of the social opened opportunities for aristocratic women, influenced by the twin rhetorics of reform and religious revival, to forge new models of upper-class female moral leadership. Yet the interpersonal nature of their traditional modes of influence (as, for example, with the hypothetical conversation with the Prime Minister) does not align comfortably with this purifying, apolitical conception of the social. Despite their exclusion from the sphere of ‘high politics’, aristocratic women’s socialised rituals could all too easily allow them to act as ‘political entities’. Contemporary responses often figured such influence as impure, unduly centred on the individual woman’s desires and ambitions, and as such, constituting a negative contribution to the moral advancement of society. Therefore, because aristocratic women’s interventions into political and literary worlds prioritised the realm of the social, their activity could be fluid, far-reaching and influential, yet also criticised as illegitimate, overly personal, and lacking in cultural and political significance. The challenge posed for aristocratic women authors was to subordinate (or appear to subordinate) their personal concerns to the moral imperatives of the social, or else to yield the moral ground of the social in favour of laying claim to potentially alienating roles as political entities. Religious and economic freedoms, argues Seyla Benhabib, are conflated with the freedom of intimacy ‘under the one title of “privacy” ’, generating a ‘gender-blindness’ to issues of difference. In consequence, ‘power relations in the “intimate sphere” have been treated as though they did not even exist’.49 The process of ‘politicisation’, to take one of Riley’s later definitions, requires ‘the rendering collective of some condition or affliction formerly understood as a merely personal and private contingency’.50 For an aristocratic woman, the popular appeal of high social standing ensures a collective interest in her seemingly personal and private contingency: for example, a disintegrating upper-class marriage might feature in newspapers where a middle-class one would probably not. The same high social status, however, renders it more difficult for her to engender collective sympathy and/or support through the universalising of her contingency. When the Hon. George Norton accused the Prime Minister of committing adultery with his wife, the poet and novelist Caroline Norton, as my later case study will discuss, she was easily able to find an eager cross-class audience for her polemical accounts of her newly publicised domestic life. Yet the sympathetic identification of that audience proved harder to obtain than if she were

Introduction 17

a middle-class wife, requiring a sophisticated range of rhetorical strategies to insist on the communal resonance of her privileged suffering. This dilemma therefore presents upper-class women writers with particular challenges. Benhabib has a comparatively optimistic view of the possibilities of the social, but these possibilities do not include the automatic relevance of the concerns of the individual to all aspects of the wider sphere. ‘The personal becomes the political’, says Benhabib, ‘when one’s identity ... . – an identity one shares with others – is attacked by the larger society. But to translate an identity under attack into a political project, one needs to transcend the vicissitudes of individual life and find what is common and what can be shared by all in the public sphere’.51 For Benhabib, human cultures are ‘constant creations, recreations, and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between “we” and the “other(s)”. The “other” is always also within us and is one of us’.52 To be part of human culture, then, is to engage in acts of representation. ‘To be and to become a self is to insert oneself into webs of interlocution’, she says. We are born into webs of interlocution or narrative, from familial and gender narratives to linguistic ones and to the macronarratives of collective identity. We become aware of who we are by learning to become conversation partners in these narratives ... [but] we always have options in telling a life story.53 (my emphasis) The webs of narrative about class and gender, race and nation, inclusion and exclusion, into which aristocratic women were born, and the options these women take in telling their life stories – these things help us to understand some of the boundaries negotiated in representing the mid-century nation state.

Structure Part I of my study considers how aristocratic women sought forms of writing that allowed them to lay claim to representational authority and universal relevance while retaining the commercial appeal of fashionable exclusivity. The interpersonal connections that characterised upper-class women’s engagement with political, social and literary worlds not only opened up routes into publication, but also characterised choice of genres and modes of writing within those genres. Yet the socialised nature of this writing could also hamper the development of


cohesive professional identities, allowing critics – and other authors, male and female – to dismiss their writing as frivolously privileged interpersonal communication rather than as politicised art with a collective social and/or aesthetic significance. Chapter 1 considers the extent to which class identity shapes the representation and reception of biographical experience, and how aristocratic women could transform personal experiences rooted in high society into claims to rhetorical authority and cultural relevance. Moving onto questions of readership and authorial identity, Chapter 2 turns to the popular ‘silver fork’ novels of the early decades of the century to construct a circaReform model of aristocratic authorship. Chapter 3 takes up the evolution of quasi-professional forms of authorship in the later decades of the period, considering the role played by aristocratic women writers in the midcentury literary marketplace, and how this role forces us to re-conceptualise the class and gender dynamics of publishing and readership. Part II explores how these themes develop in the light of more explicitly politicised aristocratic women’s authorship, exploring how this socialised writing could become a mode of direct intervention into the affairs of state. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a detailed case study of the lives and writings of two upper-class women who broke the bounds of aristocratic propriety in claiming the right of wives to public speech. Rosina Bulwer Lytton was married to the novelist and politician Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (the Edward Bulwer whom Blessington consulted about her first novel), and following the breakdown of their marriage pursued a decades-long struggle against him through letters, pamphlets, autobiographical novels, and on one occasion his own electoral platform. Caroline Norton had her reputation ruined when her husband unsuccessfully sued the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, for damages for an alleged affair. Deprived of her children, she campaigned successfully to bring about the first Custody of Infants Act to allow the mother any rights over her children, and later in life, was instrumental in the incorporation of economic protections for separated women into the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. These women’s experiences forced them into rhetorical re-conceptualisations of their positions as women, as wives, as mothers, and above all, as upper-class. Chapter 6 considers upper-class female political influence over parliamentary policy, and the languages and vocabularies used by and about aristocratic women in this context. Finally, in the Conclusion I look ahead to the end of the century. Overall, I argue that aristocratic women writers and their work becomes a significant literary and cultural trope through which to consider power, marriage, politics, private and public spheres, cultural

Introduction 19

values, experiences of empire, and, ultimately, the ongoing representation of the nation state as it evolved between the landmark Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867. Their writings become an extension of socialised spheres of intervention whereby they could hold personal experience, public perceptions, and political goals in play. In the process, however, these women become vulnerable to other groups anxious to delineate their own places within the literary nation. Thus they need to respond to the changing cultural imperatives of the inter-Reform period by forging modes of writing that allow them to draw on the prestige and exclusivity associated with their names and rank, while retaining claims both to readership and to relevance. They needed to address Victorian society from their positions in Society, and find in the process voices through which they could speak to and of the Victorian literary nation.


Part I Class and Authorship

Part I discusses the implications of upper-class status for women’s experiences, languages and modes of writing. This part emphasises the more general definitions of politics involving the articulation or debate of communal values, and the interaction between groups aiming to further their own interests, rather than the achievement of specific measures. I am, therefore, asking whether women who define their primary social identities through exclusivity (or whom readers and critics define primarily in terms of social exclusivity) can find in these identities a means of articulating communal values – or of making their rank a basis for the articulation of their own values in such a way as to give them a communal resonance. This in turn raises the question of where the personal experience of the individual fits into this potential universality. It considers the ways in which aristocratic women used vocabularies and strategies rooted in the socialised dynamics of their high-class status to lay claim to rhetorical authority and collective relevance. It also, however, explores how the elite basis of these claims left them vulnerable to cultural marginalisation. Chapter 1, on aristocratic women’s life-writing, traces the shaping of generic autobiographical traditions through which such writing sought to give communal resonance to narratives of elite identity, and how the possibilities of autobiographical fiction generated changing models of self-exposure. Chapter 2 considers the modes of aristocratic authorship that the early nineteenth-century silver fork novel, marketing insight into upper-class society, offers those writers whose rank corresponded to the settings and focus of their chosen genre. Chapter 3 extends these questions of publication and reception into a discussion of the positioning and fate of aristocratic authorship in the mid-century literary marketplace. 21


1 Aristocratic Lives: Life-Writing, Class and Authority

Although this is an autobiography, and consequently I, it is nevertheless not Me. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Miriam Sedley (1851) I. 1 In this chapter, I consider the ways in which aristocratic women’s life-writing seeks cross-class cultural authority from the narration of elite lives. It commences with an examination of the generic traditions of autobiography and biography as the Victorians constructed them. The modes of the spiritual, domestic and scandalous memoir take on distinctive connotations in the context of upper-class social status. I then move onto autobiographical fiction, using three generations of aristocratic women writers to trace the changing representation of personal experience between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Models of Victorian aristocratic authorship gradually emerge that prioritise committed literary engagement with religious and moral values. At the same time, potential pitfalls remain in the writing of lives whose primary appeal to a reading public lies in the possibility of contravention of such values, given long-standing tropes of upper-class immorality. The women whose work I examine must balance a subtle dialectic of revelation and discretion to address a Reform-era readership. Discussions of autobiography over the nineteenth century, says Laura Marcus, reveal a contradiction ‘between the pursuit of “general laws” and the desire to restrict the writing of autobiography to the “better” sort of person’.1 A similar contradiction was central to the Reform debates of the 1830s and 1860s, preoccupied with balancing concepts of 23


the franchise as a common right with the franchise as a select privilege. In both eras, women remained excluded from possession of the vote. Likewise, women tended to experience autobiography in more marginal, fragmentary ways than did men, set apart from narrating the Great Life even as they were set aside from the (official) governing of the nation. If, as Marcus contends, ‘literacy, interiority, and the self as property are closely allied formations’,2 then Victorian accounts of female interiority must to some extent experience ownership of selfhood at a remove. Felicity Nussbaum’s study of eighteenth-century women’s autobiographical writing concludes that by the century’s end, as ‘autobiography becomes conceptualized as a narrative that requires making the accumulated details cohere in the recognizable ideological codes of class- and gender-identified character, to be a “woman” is to relinquish authority even over one’s own limited and stationary sphere’.3 We can see aristocratic women writers as necessarily involved in this relinquishment, yet in other ways, to be an ‘aristocrat’ as well as a ‘woman’ opens up other forms of authority, over spheres not necessarily either limited or stationary. Such women possessed access to literacy, to traditions of writing, and, above all, to an awareness of privilege, of being on one level part of Marcus’s circle of the ‘better’ sort of person, even if on other levels (such as the franchise) their position was no different from any other woman. Their writing therefore mediates between experiences of inclusion and exclusion in seeking to construct definitive narratives of aristocratic lives.

Spiritual autobiography Nussbaum argues that we must view the ‘self’ of the autobiographical text as ‘less an essence than an ensemble of social and political relations’, while Alison Booth terms life-writing ‘a complex social interaction’ between narrator, protagonist and audience.4 Linda Peterson’s discussion of Victorian women’s autobiography usefully cautions against critical assumptions of a unified ‘women’s tradition’, arguing instead for a range of possibilities open to Victorian autobiographers.5 She places three forms at the heart of Victorian (re)constructions of an autobiographical tradition: the spiritual autobiography, the domestic memoir, and the scandalous memoir.6 All three of these forms take on particular significance for aristocratic women, a significance which in turn reflects upon the importance of women’s sense of class identity to their writing of their lives.

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The spiritual autobiography, one of the most long-standing modes of women’s life-writing, builds upon a variety of rhetorical tropes, most crucially the struggle between the opposing forces of good and evil, and the persecution or silencing of the narrator (male or female) for bearing witness to a divinely sanctioned truth.7 Nussbaum suggests it also provides women with ‘an occasion for confronting the particular ways in which their claiming public territory for speaking and writing violates social conventions of long standing’.8 The Evangelical revival of the early nineteenth century revitalised the spiritual autobiography as a mode, particularly for working-class women who could use religious authority as a means of justifying public expression. Religious revivalism also had an impact on the aristocracy, however, one that went well beyond the boundaries of specific church identity. Given Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s emphasis on the importance of religion as a means of establishing middle-class identity,9 it is worth noting that it could also be a formative organising principle for various aristocratic self-conceptions, both individual and communal.10 ‘Because evangelicalism has traditionally been thought of as a “middle-class” value system’, notes Mandler, ‘we tend to forget that it began and in many respects continued as a movement for the reform of upper-class mores’.11 This reform was also an internal one. Alison Adburgham cynically suggests that by 1850 in Belgravia (one of the most fashionable residential areas of London), ‘the smart new pastime was Puseyism ... Society was passing the time with such titillating spirituality, combining it with the usual round of the London Season’.12 Mandler argues more positively that religious reformism particularly affected aristocratic women, who could turn their traditional modes of interpersonal influence to moral use. His key example is the interaction between the Sixth Duke of Devonshire (son of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire) and his female relatives, especially his sisters, although in this instance attempts at reforming the bachelor Duke were rather unsuccessful.13 The Duke’s niece, the novelist Lady Emily Ponsonby, nevertheless turned her spiritual concerns into her writing, using both sermons and novels to formulate expressions of personal faith. Jessica Gerard points out that the mingling of home and work intrinsic to the country house meant that evangelicalism was much less likely to enforce rigid gender roles in aristocratic families than it might in bourgeois ones.14 Aristocratic women, with different responsibilities and expectations, stood in less need of ideological vindication, and could afford to make more flexible responses to religious influences than middle-class women,


for whom the spiritual autobiography needed to justify the very existence of their public voices. Mandler argues that the dramatic expansions in women’s associational life through the development of philanthropy and related social campaigns had a galvanising cross-class effect.15 Extending philanthropic activity beyond the boundaries of the country estate became an important aspect of the ideal of a ‘service aristocracy’ that Lawrence Stone has identified as a defining characteristic of the Victorian elite’s self-reinvention.16 Survival, says Mandler, required ‘a de-emphasis on gradations of status and birth ... and a shift to new grounds for hierarchy, based on service to the nation, personal worthiness, and good conduct’.17 The strengthened sense of personal religion and consequent social responsibilities that Mandler identifies in upper-class women was probably a factor in bringing philanthropy largely (though by no means exclusively) under their especial aegis – together, possibly, with the fact that upper-class male social reformers, like the Earl of Shaftesbury, had more direct recourse to Parliamentary action.18 ‘The personal account’, Julia Swindells points out, ‘provides both the record of the life, and also the means by which that life can be held to account’.19 These dual conceptions of an ‘account’ to be rendered inflected the thoughts and writings of many devout upper-class women, anxious to vindicate their privileged worldly positions in a society swept by the impetus of moral reform and social upheaval. The century’s most famous spiritual autobiography is probably Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), recounting his move to Roman Catholicism. There were certain traditional associations between Catholicism and the aristocracy, given such prominent figures as the Dukes of Norfolk, and the nineteenth century saw several high-profile aristocratic converts.20 These converts included Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, who was the model for the idealistic landowner Eustace Lyle in Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844). The popular imagination therefore linked Catholicism with elite social status more readily than with any other class, particularly given the rise of a middle class with identities rooted in an ethos of non-leisured, non-aristocratic Protestantism. Nineteenth-century Whigs, especially those associated with Lord and Lady Holland and the Holland House set, which lasted until around 1845, prided themselves on secularism and tolerance: Whig championship of Catholic Emancipation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had played an important part in galvanising the party’s political engagement.21 Then again, the deposing of James II in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 made hostility towards Catholicism a

Aristocratic Lives

27

founding tenet of Whiggery, a tradition which lingered in a wariness about excessive religiosity and questions about Catholics’ national loyalties. Tory ‘Ultras’, the most conservative and highly aristocratic element of the party, reacted to Emancipation especially poorly. With Catholic Emancipation taking place only in 1829 after a hard battle, anti-Catholic vocabularies were readily available for Reform-era discussions of citizenship and responsibilities to and of the nation state. Debates about Catholicism consequently offered a potential language through which to define the social role and national allegiances of the aristocracy. A clash between the novelist Lady Morgan and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman in 1851, the year after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy to England, demonstrates some of the possibilities these vocabularies open up. The Pope had recently (and controversially) appointed Wiseman as the first Archbishop of Westminster, and the Cardinal was an iconic figure in anti-Catholic discourses. Sydney Morgan, née Owenson, was an Anglo-Irish Protestant, daughter of an actor and a woman with some independent fortune, and the wife of a prominent Dublin surgeon. Her access to the highest echelons of London society therefore came primarily from the success of her novels, particularly The Wild Irish Girl (1806). In the midst of the anti-Catholic agitation of the 1840s and 1850s, a letter in the Morning Chronicle drew her attention (apparently for the first time) to an attack on her 1821 travel account Italy, an attack that Wiseman had made years earlier in 1833. Morgan’s response, Letter to Cardinal Wiseman (1851), offers an autobiographical retrospective of her writing career as her own apologia for her spiritual, moral and political standing. Morgan reworks the techniques and traditions of the spiritual autobiography in terms of the social – and in terms of Society. Rejecting Wiseman’s definition of her ‘romances’ as simple entertainment, she instead defines her novels as part of an extended struggle for tolerance and political liberation: they were, she claims, ‘written for and in the great cause of Catholic Emancipation – the theme and inspiration of my early authorship, and the conviction of my after-life’.22 Morgan formulates her authorial identity through her national identity, which implicitly acts as a means of reconciling religious differences: ‘[my] heroes were Irish Patriots; my models of pastoral piety were Irish Priests’ (5). Through this narrating of her life as author, her previous literary work becomes a personal crusade for the public good. Morgan’s invocation of John Wycliffe, the great English reformer (18), suggests a truly united kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in which,

28


as in her novels, Catholic and Protestant can hope to come together in the cause of truth to forge a truly united nation state. The newly opened Crystal Palace itself enters the argument with its promise of ‘the universal interest of a brotherhood of nations!’ (29). This image widens Morgan’s vision to encompass a trans-national unity, without threatening the integrity of individual nations. With what I can only describe as supreme chutzpah, Morgan concludes by urging Wiseman to take up a truly worthy mission in Ireland (32–39), instead of remaining in England where his very presence is ‘an anomaly’ and would previously have been High Treason (33). Morgan’s ideal ‘United Kingdom’ will bring together all religions in the service of enlightened national progress, and the ‘anomaly’ of non-national hierarchies of allegiance should not hinder this. Yet the ground on which Morgan formulates this national language of defiance is not communal but elite – that of the social sphere in which she (now) moves. Although Wiseman successfully placed Morgan’s Italy on the Vatican’s interdicted list, she writes, his attempt ‘to banish the Author of this work from the happy social position which she has always occupied’ (2) has failed. The banishment of Morgan fails because the Church ‘has now no longer the power to hurl its victims into the darkness of social oblivion; nor can even a Papal excommunication close the doors of European salons, against those whose moral consideration or intellectual attainments have brought them within the circles of distinguished society’ (2). Morgan reclaims salons, the especial province of aristocratic women, from their traditional associations with foreignness and frivolity.23 She instead recasts them as elite conversational sites whose admission criteria centre on moral and intellectual values. The role of gatekeepers of high society that Davidoff identifies for upper-class women24 becomes a device for principled, progressive inclusion rather than status-ridden elitist exclusion. Morgan mocks ‘Puseyite curates’ who ‘pace the aristocratic pavement of Belgravia, waiting for – a convert!’ (3). Even apparently frivolous literature – especially apparently frivolous literature – can carry political weight, when sent into the right hands: ‘my Romances ... found their way into boudoirs and drawingrooms, where better and sterner Propaganda might have been rejected’ (6). Morgan channels Victorian ideals of the socially reformative possibilities of fiction into the shaping of upper-class convictions. The boudoirs and drawing-rooms of aristocratic social circles become the true enablers of mid-century moral and intellectual progress – exclusiveness that brings about overall inclusiveness, aristocratic leadership towards a national, even international, goal.

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Catholicism itself seems to have offered particularly fertile ground for upper-class women’s spiritual experiences, despite – or because of – the tensions that conversion could generate between their religious, familial and socio-political responsibilities. The writer Georgiana Chatterton, daughter of the Prebendary of Winchester and widow of an Irish baronet who lost his rents in the Famine, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Cardinal Newman about her conversion anxieties. Newman had received her second husband, Edward Heneage Dering, into the Catholic Church on 20 September 1865; Chatterton followed in 1875.25 Later in the century, retrospective accounts of mid-century spiritual struggles include Lady Amabel Kerr’s Unravelled Convictions; or ‘My Road to Faith’ (1878) and Lady Herbert of Lea, wife of the statesman Sidney Herbert and an associate of the novelist and biographer Lady Georgiana Fullerton in philanthropic work, with How I Came Home (1894). In the latter, Herbert recounts her spiritual dissatisfaction growing up as a High Church Anglican, and the impact of the Oxford Movement, Cardinal Newman, and Cardinal Manning.26 Women married to public figures experienced religion and politics as inextricably linked: Herbert stifled her religious doubts until after her husband’s death in 1861 in deference to his political position. She also notes the role of the reformist Lord Brougham after the 1850 Gorham decision in insisting on Parliament’s right to make decisions on ecclesiastical matters.27 ‘Religious identification in the broadest sense of belonging or not belonging to the Church of England’, observes Andrew Robertson, ‘seems to have formed the most durable cleavage within the electoral universe’. 28 Religion and politics also inflected mid-century concerns about women’s education, standing, and position in marriage. Faced with the belief of her son’s Anglican tutor that theology was beyond women’s scope, Herbert combats this by an appeal to status rather than gender, observing that her unusual education and training made her an exception.29 High rank did not necessarily make an upper-class woman less vulnerable in marriage than her middleclass counterparts, as the case study of Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Caroline Norton in Chapter 4 demonstrates further: Herbert’s possible conversion brought upon her the threat of losing custody of her children. (This issue also arose for Amabel Kerr’s mother-in-law Lady Lothian in 1851, necessitating the Marchioness’s midnight escape from Newbattle Abbey with her younger children.) The spiritual autobiography offered upper-class women a model to transform personal religious experiences into texts that could claim the authority of testimonies to a divine goal – for both Protestant Evangelicalism and Catholicism.


This authority possesses distinctive class and political connotations, whether in an emphasis on individual spiritual reform through interpersonal influence on powerful male relatives, the associations between the aristocracy and Catholicism, or the ongoing struggles between religious and secular power structures.

Domestic memoir Similar patterns emerge from the domestic memoir, in which the autobiographer offers a familial rather than an individual life story. The value placed by Victorian life-writing on privacy and the importance of domestic morality generated the hagiographical biographies that Lytton Strachey mocks in his Eminent Victorians (1918). Intensive discussion in fact took place over what intimate aspects of a life a biography should rightly deal with, evinced by the debate over James Froude’s Life of Thomas Carlyle (1882–1884).30 The Victorian domestic memoir offers a form of autobiographical writing in which the self is often more or less subsumed into the biographical: the tendency to deal with a subject’s private life briefly in a chapter or two inevitably limited the personal witness which wives and daughters could bear to their husbands’ and fathers’ lives. Yet as the middle-class Elizabeth Missing Sewell writes of her own domestic memoir, the ‘history of a family, told by one of its members, must, in a certain degree, resolve itself into the history of the person who writes’.31 This move from familial to individual history has particular resonance for aristocratic women, whose overriding identity and role in a patriarchal and primogeniture-based system was traditionally that of receptacle. The ‘social fiction of an unbroken line of honourable, preferably patrilineal, descent was what counted in establishing enduring claims of political and economic privilege’.32 Their primary responsibility to their husbands centred upon the production of a legitimate male heir to lands and titles, while as daughters they represented either the failure of inheritance, or an indirect means through which to preserve an inheritance for future sons, as for example, when a legacy was dependent on the husband changing his name. Middle-class Victorian women also encountered prevailing ideals of female identities as essentially relational, but their prescribed responsibilities were more closely associated with husbands and hearths, ‘the family’ as a unit in an individual home, whereas the responsibilities of an aristocratic woman were directed towards ‘the family’ as a long-standing socio-political entity.

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The domestic memoir therefore epitomises the position of the aristocratic woman memorialist, being the ultimate familial receptacle and the ultimate assertion of individual selfhood. This type of writing gave upper-class women a creative identity, albeit one limited by generic constraints, poised between editorship and authorship (the two terms interestingly commingle in contemporary discussion and on title pages). The upper-class female domestic memoir carefully subordinates its autobiographical voice to the requirements of familial memorialising; typically, the author barely acknowledges her own presence in the text except in her preface, and for the most part does not discuss her personal involvement and interest. Yet this narrative voice is the one summarising and contextualising events and documents, while in the selection of this material the author/editor can control what aspects of their patriarchal inheritance come into the public realm. It was only in the nineteenth century that the domestic memoir really attained recognition as an autobiographical form. Peterson characterises it as ‘a literary manifestation of the doctrine of separate spheres – at best a form of commitment to the private and the domestic, at worst a form of compensation for loss of the public, professional, and political’.33 The domestic memoir’s upper-class origins in early models such as Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson ... To which is prefixed the life of Mrs Hutchinson, written by herself (written between around 1664 and 1670) gave precedents for combining the celebratory account of a male relative’s life with a woman’s own personal experiences. Helen Rogers traces potential for ideological political history in the filial biographies that radical middle-class women like Josephine Butler, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner and Theophilia Carlile Campbell produced.34 Aristocratic women seem to have been less likely to lay claim to this potential. The biographical writing of aristocratic women instead sought a mode of authority that both upheld and challenged traditional concepts of power and influence rooted in patriarchal lineage and inherited property, by using such concepts as foundations of their privileged individual authority. They were already at an advantage in producing domestic memoirs, being far more likely than women of lower status to have husbands and fathers who were prominent public figures. Indeed, such prominence may not have been wholly necessary – a memoir of a Lord Such-and-Such carries with it on its title (and titled) page an apparent guarantee of life in high society and involvement in the inner circles of politics. Moreover, upper-class families tended to have longer recorded lineages, opening up further historical sources of familial memoirs, and a more sustained tradition of preserving family papers and viewing them


as potentially valuable documents. Such factors apply to both male and female aristocrats, but this particular route into print was often in practice the preserve of a family’s women, and was all the more important for women writers, as being less likely to easily find other routes into publishing historical material. The significance of patriarchal inheritance was even more marked for British aristocrats than for their Continental counterparts when it came to matters of naming and selfhood: Lawrence Stone notes how unusual the British elite were in not preserving the mother’s maiden name as an integral part of the child’s identity. 35 ‘English society had always prized its daughters’, observes Ruth Perry, noting the greater scope for inheritance than in other European cultures, all the way up to the throne itself.36 Yet Perry also characterises eighteenth-century familial structures as facilitating ‘the dispossession of daughters’ by furthering primogeniture. 37 Perry sees a greater eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emphasis on wives ‘as private sexual partners rather than as co-producers of lineage’.38 Then again, being born into families for whom lineage and tradition were significant may have helped upper-class women retain stronger senses of their identities in terms of consanguineous as well as conjugal kinship bonds than did their middle-class contemporaries. Writers such as Lady Theresa Lewis, with her Lives from the Clarendon Gallery (1852), and the political hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill with Mannington and the Walpoles: Earls of Orford (1894), drew on their fathers’ familial histories, and their own childhood spaces, for memorialising. While upper-class matrimonial habits, in keeping with overall social trends, increasingly privileged the idea of companionable marriage, high society matches retained a strong element of forging or strengthening bonds between elite families. 39 Representative Victorian examples of the aristocratic domestic memoir include Lady Georgina Bertie’s Five Generations of a Loyal House (1845), documenting the history of her husband’s family the Willoughbys; Lady Chatterton’s editing of the Memoirs, Personal and Historical (1861) of her maternal uncle, Admiral Lord Gambier; and Lady Combermere’s Memoirs & Correspondence of Field-Marshall Viscount Combermere, her husband (1866, co-authored with W.W. Knollys). Five Generations of a Loyal House combines a celebration of aristocratic heritage with a spiritual (and rhetorically astute) invocation ‘of the fleeting and perishable nature of all earthly tenures’.40 Bertie (née Kerr) constructs her husband’s heritage around images of Protestant warriors loyal to the

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nation (the Willoughbys had featured in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), ironically given the Catholicism of some of her female connections. Yet her act of dutiful memorialising becomes a way for Georgina Bertie herself to lay an individual claim to this heritage that seems only to be hers through marriage. Bertie’s insistence on both the humility and the honesty of her ‘historical account’ – ‘the simple narrative of the facts is sufficiently romantic without the aid of fiction’ – subtly bolsters herself as historian, the worthy chronicler of worthy men.41 Her foregrounding of the Willoughby motto (upholding virtue rather than victory) allows both the family and herself to appear as truly adapted to the moral spirit of 1840s England. Chatterton’s opening chapter on Gambier notes ‘the total absence of any reliable published information as to his personal qualities’, thereby justifying and elevating the importance of her own opening description of him. In insisting that her uncle ‘is entitled to a place in the memorial literature of this country’, she is also, under the banner of familial dedication, laying implicit claim to her own place as one of the memorialists of the country, a chronicler of the ‘events of considerable importance [which] revolve round his public career’.42 Chatterton is anxious to correct impressions that Gambier owed his rise to his friendship with William Wilberforce, insisting instead on his familial connections (in keeping with the traditions of upper-class women’s political involvement that my final chapter discusses further). Yet she emphasises ‘his disinclination to profit by private interest’, giving a picture of a dedicated servant of the nation whose invocation of personal connections is for the public good. Such an emphasis, we may surmise, was all the more important by the 1860s, given the wider social base of political life: Gambier’s advantageous familial connections must not militate against his acceptance by Chatterton’s mid-Victorian readership. Significantly, part of Chatterton’s polemical agenda is to correct an impression of the Admiral as a religious zealot, and instead to represent his ‘views of religion’ as ‘eminently simple, practical, and devoid of sectarianism’. Thus, Chatterton as familial biographer finds an admirable Victorian public figure in the man of a previous generation. She offers ‘many instances’ as proof, but instead of listing them, positions herself as the receptacle of collective testimony: ‘I can save the reader’s time, with an equal claim to credibility, by simply affirming such to be the united and undeviating testimony of the people who knew him best – a testimony given by them to myself repeatedly and without variation.’43 Chatterton is presenting herself as the ideal lifewriter, the receptacle who exerts narrative control.

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Mary Cotton, Viscountess Combermere, takes on the most intimate and autobiographical task of the three, since her memoir centres on her own husband. Yet hers is also the most publicly charged task, given the military prominence of the Viscount. The co-authorship she constructs with Captain Knollys allows the book to claim the authority of both domestic knowledge and military background: in a joint Preface, ‘the Authors’ aspire to produce ‘a comprehensive view of the public and private life of one of England’s most distinguished soldiers’ (my emphasis).44 Combermere and Knollys (who do not distinguish their respective inputs in the text) comment upon the Viscount’s marital and martial virtues with similar impersonality, thus giving his ‘private’ qualities a seemingly objective weighting. This detached tone does not preclude veiled but acerbic commentary on historical examples of less impressive high-ranking leadership, a topical issue in the year before the Second Reform Act came into law. The Viscount’s husbandly, fatherly and soldierly dedication stands in sharp contrast to the figure of the then Prince Regent (later George IV). Combermere and Knollys comment on the spite displayed by the Prince Regent in denying the Viscount a cavalry command at Waterloo, in revenge for indiscreet comments on the Prince’s relations with his mistress Mrs Fitzherbert.45 This joint authorship thus makes it implicitly clear that if the domestic memoir is to possess true political authority as a commentary upon the country’s ideal leaders, the private and public dimensions of their life-writing project cannot be separable. Thus, we see an essentially self-effacing form becoming at the same time a claim to life-writing authority, whereby the telling of the family tale becomes an endorsement of the author as daughter/sister/wife and as researcher, editor, and writer. The domestic memoir as an existing tradition also opened up opportunities for aristocratic women’s more directly autobiographical writing. The same factors of rank and documentation that ensured the publishing of husbands’ and sons’ papers gave at least partial validation to upper-class women’s memoirs. The Countess of Brownlow, Emma Sophia Cust, produced Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian from 1802 to 1815 in 1868. The turn of the century and the end of Victorianism as such produced several memoirs, such as Lady Randolph Churchill’s Reminiscences (1908) and Lady Dorothy Nevill’s cluster of recollections, while the Countess of Jersey produced her Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life as late as 1922.

Scandalous memoir Finally, there is the revelatory promise of the scandalous memoir, with its continuation of what Patricia Meyer Spacks identifies as the pervasive

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eighteenth-century feminine plot: woman as victim.46 Such a mode of autobiography was largely rooted in lower-class experience, particularly accounts of actresses such as the scandalous Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755). High society, especially royalty, could provide the crucial meat of the scandalous autobiography, as with Mary Ann Clarke’s kiss-and-tell 1809 memoir about the Duke of York, whose mistress she had been, or the courtesan Harriette Wilson’s infamous publish-and-be-damned 1825 memoirs. Upper-class women found the scandalous memoir less viable. They were more likely to have marriage settlements that placed them in secure financial positions in the event of a separation, while traditions of aristocratic public discretion militated against the personal exposure required. Their social milieu nevertheless opened up the potential for a scandalous memoir, although they were likely to have considerably more to lose from revelation than would someone in Clarke’s or Wilson’s positions. There was, moreover, the possibility of a form of ‘anti-domestic memoir’, raising possibilities of excoriation and embarrassment rather than celebration, as we shall see in the case of Rosina Bulwer Lytton. The upper-class potential of the scandalous memoir was realised with immediate commercial success by two aristocratic women writers of very different backgrounds: Lady Blessington and Lady Charlotte Bury. They also converted their personal experiences into novels of fashionable life (as we have already seen with Blessington), which the next chapter discusses further. Blessington, née Sally Power, was born in Tipperary in 1789 to a merchant who gained the hatred of his fellow-Irishmen by his willingness to hunt down rebels on behalf of the Crown in return for social advancement. Sold into marriage to a brutal officer, she became Margaret Farmer, fled home after three wretched months, and later ran away with another officer, who sold her again, this time amicably, to the Earl of Blessington. They were married in 1818 on receiving news of her husband’s death, giving her a new identity as Marguerite Gardiner, the Countess of Blessington, one of the most famous or infamous women of her day – and several other people’s days as well. The Earl died in 1829, and by 1831, the disintegrating marriage of her companion and alleged lover the Count D’Orsay and his wife, Blessington’s stepdaughter Harriet, had sparked gossip and condemnation across upper-class drawing-rooms and the scandal sheets of newspapers. As such, Blessington herself represented scandal in high life at its most exciting and commercially attractive. Her autobiographical venture was not a direct scandalous memoir – rather, she laid claim to a still earlier aristocratic scandal, the tempestuous life of Lord Byron.


Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington was serialised in the New Monthly Magazine (under the editorship of Edward Bulwer) between July 1832 and December 1833, and published in 1834. Conversations established her as a best-selling writer. The serial’s opening section set fashionable London happily abuzz with ‘Byron’s’ comments on an unnamed woman of rank, whom everyone recognised as the Whig hostess Lady Holland. ‘With such a beginning’, observes Sadleir, ‘what revelations might not be in store?’47 Richard Cronin emphasises the decision to make conversation the medium of memorialising, thus allowing Blessington to ‘make use of the techniques of the novelist as a way of lending their subjects the plasticity of fiction, and [she] need[s] to do this in order to accommodate apparently conflicting representations’.48 Conversation would also have been particularly congenial to an upper-class woman’s mode of influence and interaction, especially for the doyenne of a salon. In her preface, Blessington is careful to pre-empt any charges of a ‘breach of confidence’, denying any secrecy and aligning herself with the same observational biographical tradition of Boswell.49 Blessington’s combination of autobiography and biography allowed her to transform one aristocratic scandal, Lord Byron’s, into a defensive commentary upon another aristocratic scandal, that of her own life. The scandalous memoir became the basis for Blessington’s selfrepresentation, a representation that in turn comments upon the values of her social world. ‘Her’ Byron is a distinctly aristocratic one, indeed, excessively so in attaching undue importance to rank. This representation allows Blessington to set herself up as the true judge of status, able to distinguish between ‘the pride of a parvenu’ and ‘the calm dignity of an ancient aristocrat’.50 (Sadleir links this reference to her mother being a member of one of the oldest Irish families, the Desmonds.51) Blessington uses Byron as a point against which to figure herself – happy wife of a kind husband as versus tormented husband of an unforgiving wife.52 In one scene, she angers him by verses rebuking his unfettered displays of lamentation at his marital woes. Blessington stages her own writing as a corrective to Byron’s language of selfdisplay, contrasting him with the ‘noble hearts ... Too deep to suffer coarser minds to share’.53 Yet Blessington herself writes within the traditions of the early nineteenth-century poetess, whose public voice was constructed as an ostensible display of private sorrow,54 and as a biographer she is engaged in precisely the task of baring Byron’s ‘breast to vulgar eyes’. Although Blessington critiques her subject she, as Cronin observes, ‘at other times projects herself into Byron so

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completely that he becomes the mouthpiece for her own opinions’. Nowhere is this clearer than on the vexed topic of social ostracism for moral misdeeds, an issue of obvious autobiographical resonance for Blessington.55 The traditions and popular appeal of the scandalous memoir offer her a model and a cover for the social critique implicit in her life-writing as in her fiction. Charlotte Bury came from a far more secure social background than Blessington, being the daughter of the Fifth Duke of Argyll. Her Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting (1838), a gossipy, acerbic account of her nine years as an attendant to Queen Caroline (Caroline of Brunswick) plays not just on the lustre surrounding royalty, but also on yet another scandal among George III’s sons. This scandal was perhaps the jewel in the crown, as it were: the marital upheavals surrounding the then Prince and Princess of Wales. Opening in suitably portentous fashion – ‘Courts are strange, mysterious places’ – the memoir in effect promises ‘[i]ntrigues, jealousies, heart-burnings, lies, dissimulation’.56 It offers a display of casual familiarity with royal circles designed to thrill less well-connected readers, commenting freely on personal peculiarities and deflating glamour – ‘royal persons divert themselves with very puerile devices ... N.B.: All princes and princesses give shabby presents’.57 Yet Bury carefully balances this ostentatious casualness with detailed descriptions of social events and a cast of important characters. By virtue or vice of her position, Bury was in the thick of the ongoing conflict between the Prince and Princess of Wales, culminating in the Prince’s failed attempt to divorce his wife. So Bury’s (often phonetic) rendering of the Princess’s conversations, particularly those relating to her marriage, would still have had immense scandalous interest to both an upper- and middle-class readership in 1838, as would the letters of the Princess which Bury attaches to the end of the Diary.58 She uses the distancing device of notes to create the (very thin) illusion of an objective editor offering corrective historical context, while she codes the apparently ‘actual’ autobiography, the diary itself, as the wellintentioned, unmediated outpourings of the speaker. The various mysterious excisions, in the forms of dashes, served to whet the interest (or, as some reviewers happily suggested, to allow readers to fill in any missing names as they pleased).59 The Diary was a major success, selling several editions almost immediately and generating public notoriety and political warfare. Bury came under heavy fire, especially from aristocrats angry at such indiscreet behaviour. The diarist Charles Greville notes that he read ‘in the newspaper that Colburn [the publisher] gave Lady C. Bury £1,000

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for the wretched catchpenny trash ... nobody could by possibility compile or compose anything more vile or despicable’.60 Later, Greville offers an implicit contrast to Bury’s aristocratic indiscretion in the lower-class mistress of a dead acquaintance. This woman’s inheritance of revelatory personal papers caused much anxiety, but she behaved ‘with the utmost delicacy and propriety’. Such reticence, Greville considers, is all the more remarkable given the clear financial potential of scandal in 1838: ‘I have no doubt Colburn or Bentley would give £2000 or £3000 for Creevy’s papers.’61 Although the anonymous author was allegedly a lord, in reality everyone knew the memoir’s originator: ‘the pretence was only a continual reminder of the authority of the gossip the Diary presented.’62 No one in Bury’s own circles, at any rate, seems to have been in any doubt. Greville gives a pleasing vignette of Lord Brougham, who had made his reputation in defence of Queen Caroline, ‘at the Council Office, more busy writing a review of Lady Charlotte Bury’s book than with the matter before the Judicial Review Committee’.63 The Edinburgh Review published Brougham’s piece, while the Athenæum, reviewing the Diary on 6 January 1838, deplored the ‘moral obliquity’ of the narrator and the ‘impropriety and perfidy of the narrative’.64 W.M. Thackeray reviewed it for The Times in January 1838, claiming that we ‘never met with a book more pernicious or more mean’, while his Yellowplush review for Fraser’s Magazine in March takes a jocular but ultimately more cutting tone, criticising Bury as entrenching on the eponymous footman’s territory.65 (Fraser’s reviewed the book yet again anonymously in July.) J.W. Croker gave it sixteen pages of the January Quarterly Review.66 The upheaval suggests that aristocratic women could access the scandalous memoir effectively and profitably in terms of attractive material, but that this comes at a cost in terms of social standing and public critique – a cost that my later analysis of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s writing will expand upon. Even the publisher Henry Colburn, a hardened retailer of scandal, began to feel uneasy at his role in the Diary’s publication,67 probably wishing he had confined himself to Blessington’s Conversations (which he also published) and to the ‘silver fork’ fiction that, as the next chapter will discuss, had proved a profitable and reasonably safe mode of presenting high society scandal. By 1838, with a newly crowned Victoria on the throne, the rule of her uncle was already fast becoming the epitome of pre-Reform aristocratic unwholesomeness, a period to be left behind by all classes, but also to be looked back upon with suitable disapproval. (Viscountess Combermere’s 1866 memoir suggests the longevity of this view of the

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Prince Regent.) Bury’s middle-class readership could therefore enjoy both royal gossip and pleasurable condemnation of the upper classes, while Bury herself could reap the financial benefits of her revelations of royalty, but had to pay a price in terms of her moral standing among her readers and her social standing among her peers.

Autobiographical fiction – the roman à clef This final section draws upon a comparison that Mandler uses to epitomise the changing nature of aristocratic women’s public voices from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Mandler points to ‘a clear progression in three generations from Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s equable and anonymous novel The Sylph (1779), to her niece Caroline Lamb’s wild and emotional Glenarvon (1816), to her granddaughter, Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton (1844) ... the only one of the three to appear under the author’s name and also the most widely popular and influential’.68 Burton Pike’s claim that ‘all autobiography is essentially fiction’ highlights the processes of narration, self-construction and fictionalising that inevitably mark all acts of ‘life-writing’.69 Yet collapsing autobiography and fiction together as genres obliterates the influence of autobiography’s ‘referential intention’ on both writer and reader.70 Peterson argues for the importance of recapturing the distinction between autobiography and autobiographical fiction, which she reads as between interpretation and representation.71 Any ‘venture into public life by a woman’ in the mid-nineteenth century, argues Mermin, ‘risked being greeted as a highly sexualized self-exposure’.72 The roman á clef, the novel whose characters are deliberately supposed to represent real-life people, allowed upper-class authors a way to tap into the popular appeal of high social status while using fiction as protective covering from their contemporaries’ disapproval. The Duchess of Devonshire’s The Sylph has strong autobiographical elements (at least in terms of how the Duchess saw her own experience) in its story of an innocent young woman, Julia, married to a dissolute nobleman and almost coming to ruin on the rocks of high society. Amanda Foreman notes the notoriety that contributed to The Sylph’s success, with readers and reviewers shocked by its scenes of sexual licentiousness and violence. ‘The author displayed that dangerous possession for a woman: too much knowledge of the ton.’73 At the same time, the ‘equable’ element Mandler identifies emerges in the nature of


The Sylph’s autobiographical elements. The Duchess published it anonymously with reasonable success, although – despite textual red herrings such as references to herself – the identity of the author spread rapidly, and she probably admitted authorship in private. This knowledge undoubtedly contributed to its popularity, yet the fact of its authorship was not central to the novel, in contrast, as we shall see, to Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon. Despite several characters such as the cynically amoral Lady Besford, who owes much to the Duchess’s mentor Lady Melbourne, there is a strong sense in which the fictional aspects of the novel retain control over the directly autobiographical elements, transforming these elements into knowing commentaries on the essence of high society as a whole. The Sylph is a novel immersed in the politics of spectacle. It represents high society as composed of a series of performative spaces, founded upon an enclosed economy of spectatorship whereby one’s value as a social spectacle correlates to personal worth. The protagonist’s success during her presentation at court generates a sudden outpouring of affection from her husband – affection expressed only in private, since a public display would lose him social cachet.74 Since this affection is the direct result of his pleasure in her as successful spectacle, their home becomes simply the repository of social interaction, the private stage on which the participants tot up the gains or losses of their public interactions. To achieve her triumph, Julia has to accept the social necessity of self-exposure (figurative and literal, given her unease at the low-cut dress she must wear) and artificiality (despite the pain of achieving the required small waist).75 Yet the still inexperienced Julia resists complete constructedness, tearing down the ludicrous edifice made of her powdered hair, in an attempt to regain the natural state from which her marriage has taken her. The logical result of this economy of spectacle is to turn women’s bodies into forms of merchandise, commodities in this internal enclosed marketplace of high society. This commodification takes place most graphically through gambling, an enclosed form of exchange within high society which forces women to trade their bodies, like one character in the book, or have them traded, like Julia by her husband, in return for relief from debts. This theme would have had powerful autobiographical resonances for the Duchess herself, whose gambling debts were notorious, but it becomes a universal preoccupation given the rumours that such blackmailing trades did indeed take place within high society circles.76 The novel’s emphasis on spectacle shows particularly in its fascination with disguise. In this

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world of appearances, even the loyal hero must construct a written self – the eponymous Sylph – in order to give guidance through his letters. The curiously interpolated story of Julia’s mother, who dresses as a man to join her lover and fights alongside him in war, adds the element of gendered disguising to the novel’s absorption with forms of spectacle. The Duchess’s reference to cross-dressing anticipates her niece Caroline Lamb’s own use of such disguises during her love affair with Lord Byron. Acts of cross-dressing are often a staple of the scandalous memoir. Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816), the best-known of these three novels, is in some ways the archetypal roman á clef, with seemingly clear identifications to be made for the main characters, and a readership all too able and willing to spot the connections. Glenarvon came out anonymously in 1816 with Colburn, early in his career of purveyor-in-chief of high society scandal, and benefited greatly from the public excitement over the breakdown of Byron’s marriage. The novel’s anonymity has a rather different function, as I see it, than that of The Sylph’s authorial ‘young lady’, in that the (rapidly known) fact of Lamb’s authorship is the essence of the novel. That is, while The Sylph inserts a representation of the Duchess’s marriage into a more conventional fashionable story about worldly corruption, the core of Glenarvon is Lamb’s obsession with Byron. ‘Caroline Lamb writes as a way of ridding herself finally of Byron’, says Cronin.77 In my view, however, Lamb writes as a way of tying herself to Byron forever. Like Blessington, representing Byron becomes her way of representing herself. Lamb inscribes herself in the Byron myth, creating a role for herself that she, in effect, would play for the rest of her life. (This role, as we see in Chapter 5, helped bring about the disastrous Bulwer Lytton marriage.) An affair that seems swiftly to have become a source of irritation to Byron becomes through Lamb’s fiction a narrative of tragic and glamorously doomed passion. The Sylph sold well because of the appeal of an insider’s satirical view of high society in general; Glenarvon sold extremely well because of being Caroline Lamb’s tell-all. The transformation of the setting to Ireland in the grip of the 1798 Rising against British rule, and the transformation of Byron into an (ultimately turncoat) rebel leader, reshapes a personal narrative into a political one – or rather, allows the elements of both to become inextricably intertwined. The rebellion led by the brooding Glenarvon stands in the novel as emblematic of Lamb’s alter ego Calantha’s rebellion against the dictates of marriage and society, and in turn represents the rebellion implicit in the very

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existence of the novel. Patriotic and romantic passions fuse into an uncontained, destructive, yet glorious force, in which characters become elemental parts of the landscape. Despite heavy fictionalising of her relationship with Byron, the problem (from Society’s point of view) is that she fictionalises the wrong aspects: the central relationship remains too close to her own in its frenzied obsession, if not in its surroundings and conclusion. The main sin for an aristocratic woman in the Regency period was the making of a scene, and Glenarvon unquestionably constituted making a scene. The upshot was that, unlike her aunt, Lamb’s quasi-autobiographical writing proved the final straw and sealed her social exile. The supposed licentiousness of The Sylph may have shocked people, but however happily its contemporary readers presumably speculated on the doomed central couple, they do not seem to have perceived it as a definitive exposure of the Devonshires’ marriage. Moving into the Victorian period with the third-generation member of the family, Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton (1844) appears at first to be the furthest of the three novels from the author’s personal experience. In actuality, though, I see Ellen Middleton as heavily autobiographical – but in a very different way. Whereas the other two writers draw on the traditions of the scandalous memoir, Fullerton’s novel reflects the religious concerns of mid-Victorian England in its engagement with the mode of spiritual autobiography. Born Lady Georgiana Leveson-Gower in 1812, she married the Irish diplomat Alexander Fullerton in 1833, and followed his conversion to Catholicism in 1843 with her own in 1846. The death of her son in 1855 intensified her philanthropic and religious activities, including helping to bring the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul to England and co-founding a new religious community, the Poor Servants of the Mother of God Incarnate, with Frances Margaret Taylor.78 On her death in 1885, Cardinal Newman told Fullerton’s biographer of his ‘reverence and admiration for her saintly life’, a saintliness clearly compounded in his view by her social status, which heightens her sacrifices. ‘A character and mental history such as hers’, he continues, ‘make her a fit representative of those ladies of rank and position in society who, during [the] last half century, have thought it little to become Catholics by halves, and who have devoted their lives and all they were to their Lord’s service’.79 Likewise, W.E. Gladstone’s review of Ellen Middleton comments upon ‘those stations of especial power and peril, to which she belongs by birth and rank, and which she thus adorns by genius and by devotion’.80

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Fullerton’s fiction reflects an increasing impulse towards forms of spiritual autobiography. Catholicism becomes an important explicit theme in her later novels, with her second, Grantley Manor (1847) pleading for religious tolerance, and Constance Sherwood (1865) – ‘an autobiography of the sixteenth century’ – depicting the persecution of Catholics for a readership immersed in the debates about national identity and belonging generated by the Second Reform Act. In particular, Constance Sherwood’s portrayal of the aristocratic Catholic martyr Philip Howard is a spiritual call to Fullerton’s upper-class readers. The theme continues with Mrs Gerald’s Niece (1870). Written in the years between her husband’s conversion and her own, Ellen Middleton, an immediate bestseller much praised by people such as Brougham, Greville and Harriet Martineau, was therefore the product of a crucial period of spiritual transition.81 Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton, like her aunt’s Glenarvon, is a novel about passion. Yet passion here is about anger and hate rather than love and desire, an essentially destructive emotion with no redeeming glamorous qualities. When the young Ellen Middleton strikes her tiresome little cousin in a moment of jealousy and so causes her death, she reveals the dangers of unbounded emotions. Despite the lack of any (known) autobiographical element to the main story, Ellen Middleton is the work of all these three women most absorbed with questions of autobiography, selfhood and expression. ‘And death, and hell, and darkness/Are driving me to madness’, writes the adult Ellen in church, to the intrigued bewilderment of the clergyman who, like the reader, is not as yet privy to her past.82 Ellen Middleton is rooted in the dynamics of confession, a key concept of Catholicism that the Oxford Movement also supported. The unspecified ‘I’ who narrates the opening segment (effectively a third-person narrator) swiftly yields to Ellen’s written confession to her pastor, which occupies much of the novel – a form of anti-spiritual memoir in which a woman recounts her fall from grace. Ellen claims that ‘I cannot confess my sins without revealing the history of my life, my guilt and sorrows are so closely linked together, that they cannot be separated’ (I. 38). Confession and autobiography are inextricably linked, the act of life-writing is also an act of confession, and in writing a confession Ellen has written ‘a history of my life’ (I. 38). After her cousin’s death (I. 67), she tells us that whereas first she ‘could not, now I would not, speak’ (I. 73). The second volume is replete with involuntary acts of self-betrayal, as Ellen constantly hovers upon the brink of confession. She finds herself easier around her future husband Edward Middleton

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(who she thinks knows her secret) once she ceases to express all her feelings to him: ‘I felt in his presence as a criminal before his judge.’ At one point, she finds that in a ‘moment of morbid irritation’, she has written ‘Beware; I know your secret!’ on the blank page of a book (II. 11). This fusion of writing and confession, a self-splitting selfaccusation, will reappear in various forms until the moment when she decides fully to confess. Ellen’s written account ends in the middle of the third volume (III. 178), leaving her repentant and comforted, and hoping for a last reconciliation with her husband. Once she has achieved this, on her deathbed she asks Edward to ‘give me a secret chamber in your soul’ (III. 247). Confession is the ultimate self-revelation, yet is also an action whose fetishised privacy made it a central trope in anti-Catholic representations as engendering disloyalty – to the public realm of the (Protestant) nation and the private realm of the marriage, especially for gullible women easily swayed by the political and physical seductions of their fatherconfessors.83 Here, however, the penitent wife eventually transfers her self-revelation from curious clergyman to absolving husband, the true ultimate recipient of confession. By 1844, we have come a long way from the concept of marital space in The Sylph. The ideological transition to a bourgeois model of intimate, privileged family life emerges from the difference between The Sylph’s performative social stage and the almost morbidly excessive private space delineated by the Duchess’s granddaughter: a ‘secret chamber’ in the soul of the husband whom Ellen once saw as her judge, and who ends the book as her confessor. According to Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, in the mid-Victorian ‘spectacle of intimacy’ for the reading public the ‘congregation of families in their sacred separate spaces was identified as the paradoxical foundation of sociality’.84 So too the Middletons’ ‘secret chamber’ owes its existence to a narrative dynamic of self-exposure. Of the three aristocrats, Georgiana Fullerton is the only one who puts her name on her book. She can do this not in spite of, but because of the moral values of the narrative, which transform self-exposure into a spiritual action. Ironically, though, she can also claim authorship openly because of the absence of ‘direct’ autobiographical elements, and thus utilise the appeal of upper-class status without its potentially damaging scandalous associations. Mandler’s comment that of the three novels, Ellen Middleton had the widest readership and the most influence, suggests that by the 1840s, fiction rather than autobiography was the route to societal influence, and the further from direct autobiographical

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experience the better. Yet the fluidity of fiction seems still to generate an unease that other genres, more directly concerned with life-writing, do not: pressure from Fullerton’s husband, her confessor, and her physician made her eventually give up writing novels and confine herself to translations and the lives of saints. In the changing ways in which three generations of aristocratic women writers transform personal experience into published text, we can trace a movement from concern with elite social circles, to a wider spiritual and moral concern with the state of the individual’s soul, a concern that is both distinctly individual and distinctly universal. Yet this attempted alignment between the experience of the privileged individual and the wider community in turn has consequences for the development of a upper-class professional authorial identity in the period, consequences which the next two chapters will address.

2 Dilettantes and Dandies: Authorship and the Silver Fork Novel

This chapter considers the popular ‘silver-fork’ novels of the early decades of the century in order to characterise a circa-Reform model of aristocratic authorship. The silver fork novel, recounting tales of fashionable high-class society, drew part of its appeal through its assumed roman à clef status. Romans à clef are usually swiftly outdated, but as a genre their attraction is timeless: they promise a glimpse into the inner workings of an elite world. The more directly these inner workings enact contemporary fears and fascinations, the more successful the author can hope to be. In other words, a roman á clef tends to achieve greatest commercial success when it confirms to a wider audience that the inhabitants of elite circles act in just the way that everyone hopes they do – generally, badly. Intimacy with these questionable circles can then become both a basis for writing, and an obstacle to professional credibility. The debates surrounding the early Reform period gave an urgently political charge to ideas of social exclusivity, with which silver fork novelists could engage to mediate upon the nature, societal value, and future of aristocratic authorship. The silver fork novel, or fashionable novel, was in vogue primarily from the mid-1820s to the 1840s when its popularity waned, although it lasted as a genre into the 1850s. While critics dismissed it for decades as a minor, irrelevant, elitist niche in literary history, the genre is undergoing a sustained critical re-evaluation, building on work by critics such as Winifred Hughes, who reads its lifecycle as marking out a crucial transition from Regency cynicism to Victorian earnestness, and thus to the growth of the great bourgeois realist novel.1 The term ‘silver-fork’ is itself problematic, given its derogatory origins in an 1827 critique by 46

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the essayist William Hazlitt. A writer of this type of novel, Hazlitt declares, ‘comes forward to tell you, not how his hero feels on any occasion, for he is above that, but how he was dressed ... and also informs you that the quality eat fish with silver forks’.2 The term also homogenises a wide variety of novels and authors dealing with fashionable life, and therefore occludes important distinctions. April Kendra therefore argues persuasively instead for the description ‘fashionable novel’, a term which shall also prove valuable for the mid-century novels I discuss in the next chapter.3 This chapter will, however, continue to use the term ‘silver-fork’ for these early nineteenth-century novels of fashionable life, partially because it marks out a range of novels whose readers perceived them as occupying similar generic status, but also because it emphasises the materiality of the high society sociability that these authors sought to represent. The genre offered a source of income for writers as various as the Marquis of Normanby, Charlotte Bury, Blessington, the ill-fated poet Letitia Landon, and the respectably upper-middle-class Catherine Gore, while it gave both Edward Bulwer Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli their first literary successes. Hundreds more authors wrote anonymously. Although so closely associated with high social status, the silver fork novel was an aristocratic genre populated by predominantly non-aristocratic writers. Attacks on the silver fork novel combine critiques of aristocratic society with contentions that the writers are middle-class impostors who know nothing about the world they claim to portray. Hazlitt’s implication is that the genre’s dazzled revelling in such commodities as, well, silver forks, emerges from the lack of any acquaintance with them. Yet despite such attacks, the silver fork novel was by no means the sole preserve of authors lacking familiarity with such implements. The genre’s main publisher, Henry Colburn, had learned valuable lessons from his 1816 success with Glenarvon. He actively sought out titled writers who could offer the lure of real knowledge of fashionable society. Colburn’s ‘Modern Standard Novelists’ series of 1835–1841, which included works by Edward Bulwer Lytton, Sydney Morgan, Benjamin Disraeli and Theodore Hook, effectively coalesced the genre. Before then, however, a wide range of upper-class authors had joined Colburn’s ranks. The silver fork novel tended to combine two key elements, not always successfully: a display of opulent, leisured fashionable life and a moralising strain on the wickedness of such a life. This combination posed different problems for authors of different classes. A middle-class silver fork novelist, or even one still outside the top circles of London society, would need sufficient

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knowledge to make their display of fashionable life convincing; an upper-class novelist, amply supplied with the necessary background information, might wish to avoid giving undue ammunition to those who criticised the aristocracy for precisely this sort of lifestyle – or to avoid implicating themselves. We may distinguish two main silver fork narratives. The first recounts the progress of a young man in fashionable society, a topic which allows for a range of adventures both sexual and political, and which tends to generate wittily cynical observational satire. This category includes some of the best silver fork novels, such as Robert Plummer Ward’s Tremaine; or, The Man of Refinement (1825) (with an older hero) which helped start the genre; Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826); Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham (1828) (which I discuss further in Chapter 6); Thomas Lister’s Granby (1826); and Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841). The second, more frequent silver fork narrative, probably drawing inspiration from works such as Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), depicts the introduction of an innocent young woman to high society, often through marriage, and her gradual temptation, corruption, and either redemption or fall. The main plot line is facilitated by a cast of usually scheming, dissipated aristocrats, together with the occasional upright exemplar to offer some dim hope of salvation. Such novels include A Marriage in High Life (1828) by Charlotte Bury’s cousin Caroline Scott, Catherine Gore’s Women as They Are (1830), and Blessington’s Victims of Society (1837). Kendra distinguishes these two narratives as the ‘dandy novel’ and the ‘society novel’, which she views as essentially masculine and feminine modes respectively.4 Each form of narrative, the dandy and the society model, tends to alternate between moralising on the folly and corruption of high society, and a pleasurable revelling in the accoutrements and wit of such society. Both moralising and revelling, we may surmise, were also enjoyed by their readers – indeed, one aspect was probably crucial to another, since the moralising vindicated the decadence, and the decadence spiced up the moralising. All in all, the genre offered its readers what Hughes has described as ‘its irresistible if paradoxical formula of exclusivism for the masses’.5

Narrating inclusion Silver fork narratives were absorbed with the dynamics of innocence and guilt, purity and corruption, resistance and temptation, and, beyond all else, inclusion and exclusion. The novels turned ephemerality into a self-reflexive narrative trope: as Charlotte Bury


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observes in The Devoted (1836), ‘the present generation are acting a history, for futurity to write about’.6 Cronin says that in reaction against and in response to Walter Scott, these novelists ‘become the historians of the contemporary’.7 The silver fork novel declared itself to be quintessentially of its time, a genre committed to preserving a record of a fleeting historical moment even if this came at the cost of lasting artistic or cultural relevance.8 Yet ‘the contemporary’ of these decades is deeply rooted in the period’s wider political concerns. ‘The largest number of silver-fork novels’, observes Edward Copeland, ‘are in fact so closely attached to the reform ideology of the Whig party (also doomed to disappear after the 1840s ... to become the Liberal party), that the brief lifespan of the genre is inscribed by the “age of reform”, that is, from around 1822 to 1842’.9 Similarly, Kendra reads Gore’s The Hamiltons (1834), depicting the political and social transformation of the ‘rotten borough’ of Laxington, as offering a wary but positive model of the effects of Reform.10 In its very ephemerality, the silver fork novel offers a distinctive meditation upon questions of inclusion and exclusion during a period when the central socio-political discourse centred on who should be involved, and how, in the workings of the nation state. The silver fork novel’s settings in aristocratic society generate an economic nexus built upon inherited rather than earned income. This nexus can be read in parallel with the wider socio-economic framework implicit in the 1832 Reform Act’s considerations of property, the franchise, and the rightful scope and constraints of inherited wealth.11 The world of the silver fork novel is in effect a closed system, in which inheritance dictates financial positioning among a set group of characters. Yet the narrative dynamics of the genre set up alternative, indirect modes of competition that act as ironic commentaries upon the apparent stability of this system. The intrusion upon the scene of nouveaux riches characters with wealth not tied to land and family generates twin disruptions requiring narrative containment: the addition of fluid capital, and the possibility of this wealth being bartered off against social standing through marriage. Marriage offers a means of rising in the social and economic stakes, turning beauty, rank and/or money into marketable assets; marriage also generates a peculiar mode of postmarital competition: actions for criminal conversation, brought by a husband against the seducer of his wife.12 This process, which required the setting of a financial value on a wife’s affections and a husband’s honour, attracted much satirical comment, particularly concerning those for whom the symbolic rendering of affection and honour in


terms of financial value might be said to have lost its symbolic function. Bulwer’s Pelham describes the chagrin suffered by both the hero’s parents when his father accidentally interrupts his mother midelopement, thus forcing him to prevent it and lose the opportunity to extract large sums from her lover.13 For aristocrats wishing to engage in competition, the world of fashionable society offers essentially artificial, carefully ritualised modes of encounter: duelling and gambling. Duelling occupies a complex moral coding in silver fork novels. On the one hand, it represents an older way of life, a gentleman’s code of honour in implicit contrast to a more mercantile world of profit and loss, a process by which someone’s honour is measured in terms of their willingness to maintain it with their life. On the other hand, duelling also represents negative constructions of aristocratic behaviour, associated with violence, outmoded codes of conduct, and an alternative set of laws for the upper classes.14 In this representation, duelling can be used to criticise the aristocracy, or, as in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754), to mark out the upright, morally sound aristocrat like Sir Charles who refuses to duel. By the time of the silver fork novel, as Robert Baldick discusses, duelling and the values it represented were unquestionably on the wane.15 Gambling is in many ways the ultimate luxury activity, the epitome of useless consumption, and consequently an activity which Victorian public opinion particularly associated with high society. While it was to become an important motif for moral recklessness in the Victorian realist novel,16 it features strongly in the silver fork novel as both another mode of aristocratic competition, and as the ultimate mode of consumption. Silver fork fiction particularly associates gambling with falsity and deception, since for a gentleman to cheat at gambling was one of the ultimate social sins. Moreover, ‘debts of honour’, that is, sums lost to other gentlemen, were unavoidable obligations. Such an understanding of indebtedness retains an essentially closed economic system, since money remains circulating within a small social group. It is an ironic title, since the fact of a debt being ‘of honour’ gives it financial actuality: it must be paid precisely because it is understood not to be a commercial transaction. In contrast, ‘actual’ commercial debts could be avoided for as long as possible without social censure, since contracted with tradespeople. The implications of this behaviour are sharply critiqued by Thackeray’s portrayal of the hard working Raggles in Vanity Fair (1847–1848), and his ruin by the Crawleys in their quest to live well on nothing a year.


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What purpose do these displays of the spaces of high society serve for middle-class readers who would never attend Duchesses’ drawingrooms or get tickets to Almack’s, the club at the epicentre of early nineteenth-century Regency aristocratic society, ruled by highranking patronesses like Lady Jersey? Paradoxically, some claimed that the silver fork novel served as anti-aristocratic propaganda, intentional or not – Edward Bulwer certainly alleges this in England and the English (1833).17 But another – and, one suspects, more prevalent – function existed with quite the opposite implication: the silver fork novel as etiquette guide for the socially aspiring. After all, it was precisely at dinner parties and balls that the social aspirant needed to know how to behave. So the novels’ focus upon the display of socialised public spaces has a commercial and educative role, albeit a role that must remain unacknowledged by a genre founded on the premise if not the reality of exclusivity. In the aftermath of Reform, however, these socialised spaces could take on more directly politicised significances. Copeland discusses the representation of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, the home of Italian opera in London, in the novels of Catherine Gore and Charlotte Bury. ‘As a quasi-political institution’, he argues, ‘the opera house offered itself to the authors of silver fork novels as the only politically potent institution in London where women could be seen to take part in the spectacle of reform’.18 Less publicly visible arenas could, however, still possess their own modes of political potency. Despite its implicit promises and occasional glimpses, I would argue that the silver fork novel is not about revealing the private world of high society to the voyeuristic viewer. In its predominant concentration on the intricacies of conversational rituals, it is the social aspect that is placed on display for the less privileged reader. The quintessential narrative spaces of the silver fork novel are dining rooms and drawing rooms; dinner parties were integral to the operations of society, and the drawing-room ‘belonged to the front region where people displayed only their public or social selves’.19 As I show in Chapter 6, the social network thus constructed is inseparable from the overriding political and social concerns of the day, and these social rituals play a vital role in contemporary power structures. Yet such socialised rituals constantly play off the possibility of further penetration, the hint that at any moment the narrative may admit its reader into the furthest reaches of individual intimacy. Such possible revelations thrive on beleaguered aristocratic women, menaced by sexual, emotional and financial predators, enmeshed

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within their own social machinations. Recurring stagings of these women’s moments of tormented privacy (usually in third-person narratives) offer readers the double pleasure of inside knowledge and class-fuelled Schadenfreude. The ambitious Lady Fitzarlington in Bury’s The Devoted can ‘command the world’, but the reader is reassured to know that ‘whenever she retired from that public scene to enter upon the privacy of her own feelings, she acknowledged the same unsatisfactory vacuum which she had ever felt’ (III. 176). There is, Bury tells us, ‘no place where persons may be so completely, so intensely alone, as in London’ (III. 229). Inclusion in the exclusive spaces of high society, a communal display of the aloneness of the elite, these are the paradoxical possibilities with which the silver fork novel tantalised its readers. One of the central paradoxes of the genre was that, for all that its internal narrative economy (based around landed property) resisted capitalism, Cronin observes that the silver fork novel itself was absorbed in the commodification of culture.20 The silver fork novel’s relentless insistence on the external material emblems of fashionable life – the right shops, clothes, food, décor, jewellery – creates a textual echo of a paratextual reality: the novel itself as commodity, marketed to the hilt by Colburn. A crucial aspect of this commodity was the highly fashionable concept of ton, a certain quality of breeding, behaviour and style. ‘Ton’ as an idea epitomises the paradoxes in the silver fork novel’s commercially appealing emphasis on exclusivity and manners: Winifred Hughes points out that the ‘rule of ton, while effectively exclusionary, nevertheless introduced another criterion of selection besides that of birth and hereditary station’. 21 A Duke could be ‘bad ton’ if he failed to live up to the unspoken behavioural and fashionable expectations of his social circles. For all the mystique and exclusivity of the concept of ton, it opened up ways in which untitled newcomers could gain influence over their social worlds while bypassing the traditional hierarchies of such influence rooted in landed property and high social standing. A quality that anyone – above a certain social level – could possess, yet few could fully master, it was both eminently desirable and forever out of reach. Yet it was out of reach for the highest of the high as well as the lowest of the low – if middle-class readers could not achieve ‘good ton’ to order, neither could the aforementioned duke.

Silver fork authorship The question for aristocratic silver fork authors – and particularly for women authors – was how to make the best use of their exclusive social


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standing, without risking lowering this standing. Hughes contends that ‘the act of reading itself became an encounter between classes’ in these novels.22 Yet these encounters must inevitably have also been characterised by readerly suspicion – the very probable fear of finding oneself not engaged in a cross-class exchange, but actually being ‘fooled’ by a middle-class author. Consequently, aristocratic identity and status could serve as a guarantee of ‘true’ knowledge, and consequently as a desirable marketplace commodity. Verisimilitude, or the claim to verisimilitude, is all in all.23 As The Times writes (approvingly) of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s The Budget of the Bubble Family (1840), ‘the authoress does not merely peep through a keyhole at a well-dressed drawing-room party, to whom she is never introduced, but who are to her a set of pretty unrealities’.24 The striking difference between the payments of Blessington and the well-connected, more critically regarded, but lowerranking Gore indicates the value that a title could possess, even (or especially) one attended by scandal: in 1836 ‘Lady Blessington expected, and got, eight hundred pounds from a publisher for a book, Caroline [Norton] two hundred and fifty, and Mrs Gore only one hundred and twenty’.25 To claim such commercially attractive status, the aristocratic author had to permit his or her name to be used (as Blessington did, reluctantly, after the success of her Byron book), or rely on Colburn’s expert ‘puffing’ (laudatory advertising) to associate the name with the book. Anonymity remained a complicated issue for the aristocratic silver fork novelist hoping to establish an authorial identity – particularly a woman writer, given high society’s ambivalence about a lady’s name appearing in the public eye. It was one thing for everyone in your elite social circle to know about your authorship, quite another to declare this authorship to an unknown reading public via the title page. Of the forty-three novels known to be by women and published by Longmans in the 1820s, thirty named the author on the title page, whereas of the seventeen published by Colburn in the same decade only three named the authors.26 Advertising one’s name could generate greater sales, but at the potential cost of loss of social caste. From a publisher’s point of view, the mystique of anonymity could be valuable, providing it was associated with the possibility of aristocratic authorship. But a Lady’s name, like Lady Blessington, Lady Charlotte Bury or Lady Morgan, was an important selling point, and those writers who sought some sort of long-term career appear to have made use of their names, or built up an understanding with their reading public based on being ‘the author of’ a previous successful work.

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Writing, it would seem, was allowable in a woman of fashion, but only if approached in the right spirit. Even the most productive fashionable novelists adopt fairly standard tones of deprecation about their work, as with Charlotte Bury’s observation that ‘people of the ton have taken to writing novels; it is an excellent amusement for them, and also for the public’. 27 Writing as a way to gain a little extra money was acceptable, but excessive interest in financial gain was not encouraged: aristocrats who wrote etiquette books, ‘so obviously designed to make money’, almost always did so anonymously. 28 Hardly amateur, since this could imply disinterested (and unpaid) artistic fervour, silver fork authors’ way of reconciling social expectations with their payments was to adopt the pose of dilettantism. They could then code their writing as a hobby, rather than as either a vocational or an economic imperative. The social advantages of dilettantism as a pose, however, were counterbalanced with other disadvantages in terms of authorship. The biographical knowledge that gave the silver fork novel its popular appeal also denied its producers a creditable professional identity. The closer writers appear to be to the world they describe, the easier it is to dismiss them as merely channelling direct personal experience into frivolously unimportant novels. Contemporary comment (and later criticism) coded the rituals of sociability intrinsic to the silver fork novel as merely somewhat extended forms of interpersonal communication, presided over by society hostesses and marriage mart mothers who stamp the proceedings as essentially feminine, and therefore essentially devoid of political relevance. In the great mid-century (and onwards) debates regarding the professional identity of writers, and especially women writers,29 aristocratic women were handicapped by the burden of inherited dilettantism. Some of the most prominent silver fork novelists were upper-class men, although the form as such seems to have been considered essentially feminine.30 The main professional difference, however, between men and women aristocrats who wrote silver fork novels is that men found ways of leaving the genre behind. Of all the silver fork novelists, the only two who really manage to make the transition in contemporary critical opinion from light-hearted chroniclers of fashionable life to serious commentators upon the nation are both men. Bulwer’s best-selling Pelham (1828) and Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826) paved the way for the development of their authorial careers, as well as enhancing their social standing. However, they swiftly perceived the limitations (commercial and ideological) of the genre and moved onto writing of more explicit social significance.31


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It appears that middle-class woman writers were best suited to claim a professional voice – a process we can see in the late 1830s and 1840s with the decline of the silver fork novel and the rise of the domestic novel. By the end of the 1830s, the silver fork novel was yielding to fiction with a more general social focus.32 Thomas Carlyle’s scathing attack on Pelham and the ‘dandy school’ in Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) indicates the (perceived) increasing distance between the society novel, never held in high critical repute, and the era’s main social concerns.33 The 1840s, as Robert Blake puts it, were a period ‘of social, religious, political anxiety and doubt: “the condition-of-England” question, the problems raised by the Oxford movement, a general disillusionment with Whig and Tory party politics’.34 ‘Social problem’ and domestic novelists depicted worlds whose wider social range was matched by a wider geographical range and greater variety of settings.35 The appeal of the realist novel centres not upon autobiographical fiction but upon the details of a generalised middle-class private life, an emphasis upon the domestic hearth that becomes, as Nancy Armstrong has traced, a means of constituting middle-class identity in relation to institutions of state power.36 The standard critical history of the silver fork novel tended to position the publication of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair between 1847 and 1848 as both the greatest product of the genre and as its final death knell: a middle-class author uses his Regency setting and accounts of a jaded and debauched aristocracy to represent fashionable society – and the very act of writing about it – as a painted charade, puppets to be returned to the box. More recently, criticism has highlighted Thackeray’s debt to the genre – and his anxiety to distinguish himself from contemporaries and rivals such as Catherine Gore.37 The only aristocratic women who eventually thrive in Vanity Fair are those like Lady Jane who are the best guardians of the domestic sphere; the haughty Lady Bareacres is as morally (and financially) bankrupt as Becky Sharpe, or rather more so, and all that really separates the two women are the barriers drawn around the innermost circles of fashionable society. Even these barriers eventually yield to Becky when she is acknowledged by the Countess of Fitz-Willis, who is ‘neither handsome, nor wealthy, nor entertaining; but it is agreed on all sides that she is of the “best people” ’.38 Thackeray is at pains to puncture the silver fork novel’s display of aristocratic spectacle, insisting that behind the glittering surfaces of these best circles lies not excitement or glamour but boredom: ‘They talked in English, not in bad French, as they do in the novels. They talked about each others’ houses, and characters, and families – just as the Joneses do about the Smiths’ (637). Yet Thackeray’s


narrator combines this display of inner knowledge with an explicit placing of himself, and his readers, outside the doors of high society, ‘doors so great and tall that the beloved reader and writer hereof may hope in vain to enter at ... an uninitiated man cannot take upon himself to portray the great world accurately’ (633, 637). Such a satiric rhetorical gesture deliberately reverses the foundation of silver fork authorship, which is about the claiming of inclusion, not exclusion. But if, by the end of the 1840s, being outside Society’s portals could be a source of authorial credibility (Thackeray clearly prides himself on his narrator’s lowly position), how could aristocratic writers, whose commercial attractiveness and experience of authorship lay within these portals, lay claim to such credibility?

Blessington and Gore – writing aristocracy I close with two silver fork novels written towards the end of the genre’s popularity: Blessington’s The Victims of Society (1837), and Gore’s Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), both of which strikingly foreshadow Vanity Fair. The scandal-smudged aristocrat (formerly a merchant’s daughter), and the merchant’s daughter and army officer’s wife, turn the always referential silver fork novel into a remarkably self-reflexive entity, one which meditates on its own limitations even as it comments upon the nature and future of aristocratic writing. Staple silver fork themes become ways to offer a meta-commentary on the genre itself, and ultimately on the act of writing and the nature of authorship itself. Blessington and Gore open up the possibilities of narrative voice as a tool of inclusion and exclusion. Each novel makes full use of the knowingness that was a crucial component of the silver fork novel’s narrative tone, whether in first-person or in the more common third-person voice. But this knowingness is transformed by the novels’ extraordinary acts of ventriloquism into a locus for meditations upon identity, authorship, and the possibilities of reform – individual and societal. Between them, The Victims of Society and Cecil encompass the two main silver fork narrative strands. The Victims of Society is a threevolume epistolary novel which recounts the rash marriage of the innocent protagonist Augusta, and her eventual ruin through the machinations of her supposed friend Caroline Montressor. Cecil is a three-volume version of the dandy narrative, with an engagingly cynical first-person narrator, who recounts the processes through which an illegitimate younger son shapes himself into a ‘coxcomb’, and achieves social standing and prosperity. Blessington has a range of narrators,


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including the naïve Augusta, her scheming nemesis Caroline and her equally morally dubious friends, more noble associates, parents, and the men, dissipated and virtuous alike, who hover around these women as potential lovers and/or spouses. Blessington’s use of the epistolary mode turns The Victims of Society into a cacophony of competing voices, reworking the seemingly straightforward story of ruined innocence into a performance of fragmentary and multiplying perspectives. In place of such diffusion of perception, Gore’s first-person narrator offers a strongly distinctive central recounting voice. But Cecil’s voice is a remarkable act of gender, class and generational ventriloquism, as the upper-middle-class woman author at the end of the Reform decade takes on the voice of a dissipated male aristocrat looking back over his past. Unlike the bulk of silver fork fiction, Cecil’s emphasis is not on contemporaneity, but on the dandy narrator as misplaced in time: Cecil is a relic of Regency England. By the 1840s, Cecil is speaking of a time spiritually very far into the past for an early Victorian readership, and his narrative is a much bleaker and harder version of the dandy’s cynical insouciance than that offered by the essential light-heartedness of Pelham in 1828. Blessington’s The Victims of Society explicitly invokes the language of reform as a positive tool of moral condemnation, chastising the despotism of high society: ‘Of that unreformed borough, “good society”, the most effective members are often those who are most independent of the electors.’39 In Bury’s The Devoted, an embittered male character rhetorically separates reform in fashion and in politics, with only the former being women’s concern (Devoted II. 169), Blessington’s language refuses such a distinction. In common with many reformers (including, as I explain in Chapter 4, Caroline Norton), her narrative urges the need for gradual and measured reform by commenting upon the imminent dangers of revolution: ‘Liberty has degenerated into license with the society you describe ... license is always certain, sooner or later, to produce a reaction, in morals as well as in politics’ (II. 134). A more disciplined form of government is required then, for society and for Society, but Blessington associates this discipline with a reformist loosening of older, despotic forms of authority. Fashion in The Victims of Society lacks the liberating, democratising capacities claimed for it by Hughes. Instead, in significantly Orientalist language, it is ‘this more than Eastern tyrant’ (II. 149). Blessington suggests that the real peaks of society are the true aristocrats like the Count and Countess of Delaward and their friends, people whose nobility consists precisely in being ‘not leaders of fashion’


(II. 108). It is tempting to read these characters as models for the sort of enlightened post-Reform aristocracy discussed in my introduction. Yet Blessington is as much looking backwards as forwards, given the repeated comparisons between the Delawards and Samuel Richardson’s Grandisons, a middle-class writer’s eighteenth-century ideal of virtuous aristocratic exemplars (I. 11, 28). The truly Victorian potential of Blessington’s novel lies in its subtle but insistent emphasis on the reforming social role of fiction, a role rooted in its capacity to generate sympathy. One of the most curious sequences in the book comes from the unfolding correspondence between Caroline Montressor and Caroline’s early companion in vice, Delphine, the Marquise De Villeroi. Caroline’s witty cynicism, ambitious scheming, and capacity to deceive give her a striking degree of resemblance to the later Becky Sharpe. This is particularly true of her relationship with Augusta, whose husband she steals and whose reputation she blasts while maintaining a certain degree of affection for her. Blessington’s choice of epistolary mode means that in the early stages of the novel Caroline seems to lack the ambivalence of Becky’s moral shades of grey: her own malicious and triumphant voice contrasts with the wry commentary of Thackeray’s mock-sympathetic narrator. Caroline’s main correspondent Delphine is not only represented as a mutually corrupting influence, but is also, to crown her iniquities, French. We therefore expect the two women’s exchanges to be the epitome of callous worldliness, yet the first-person voice unexpectedly becomes a way of staging the workings of fiction as an agent of moral repentance. In the first volume, Delphine recounts an unpleasant story of the idly malicious wrecking of a devoted Parisian couple’s happiness by rumour and innuendo (I. 79–95). Implicit in the tale is Blessington’s critique of models of aristocratic leisure, the models on which the dilettante nature of aristocratic writing was founded: the interesting nastiness of the story comes from the sheer pointlessness of the destruction involved, other than as an amusement for the bored and idle. But Delphine does not merely tell the story, she deliberately and explicitly sets out to narrate the story as a piece of fiction. She does so successfully enough for it to be hailed by Caroline as ‘entitled to a place in one of the fashionable annuals here, to which lords and ladies contribute’ (II. 113). Delphine finds herself unwillingly drawn into sympathy by the act of narration, so that what Blessington could easily have made a moving tale callously told, is instead a tale movingly told by a narrator whose sympathetic identification with the victims surprises both herself and the reader.


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Delphine’s transition from knowing detachment to emotive sympathy is paradigmatic of wider processes in the novel. Early on, the villainous Caroline uses fiction to spin fantasies of vice and misdoing in place of the noble reality of the acts and motives of good aristocrats like the Delawards (inspired by her assiduous reading of French novelists like Sand). Yet as she continues to write to Delphine and recount her scheming, there evolves a reluctant sympathy for Augusta, her victim, which breaks through again and again in her letters, even though it does not prevent her real-life actions. For the anticipated readers of The Victims of Society, however, the case may be different. Writing becomes an instrument of moral reform through its capacity to produce sympathy – in readers and in writers themselves. For the ultimate message of the book is, as Ann Hawkins and Jeraldine Kraver highlight, that the eponymous ‘victims of society’ are not just the hapless innocents like Augusta Vernon, but those like Caroline who have been corrupted and hardened from an early age.40 (Although this message is rather unsubtly rammed home by a distinctly excessive pile-up of bodies at the end, which like many silver fork novels features a flurry of murders, suicides and allround collapses.) As we saw with The Repealers, Blessington is still using fiction to extend the concerns about exclusion and morality that she displayed in her life-writing. She is, however, also staking a claim for participation in wider social developments regarding the nature and role of fiction and the redemptive capacity of writing, developments which would come into full flower with the mid-Victorian realist novel. A darker view of the future of aristocratic writing, however, comes from Gore’s Cecil and the voice it summons up. ‘Through her extraordinary practice of gender ventriloquism’, notes Hughes, ‘Gore found a way to indulge her own most disreputable opinions while keeping her distance from them’.41 Cecil offers a mordantly funny but biting critique of the figure of the dandy, insisting on the dangerous effect of this model of decorative, spectacle-oriented male upper-class creation. The dandy as construct has become a particularly fruitful trope in recent criticism, particularly for fin de siècle studies, but its origins lie with the famous Beau Brummel in the Regency period.42 Cecil’s narrator, however, makes celebratory use of the rather different term coxcomb, with its more specifically negative connotations of vanity, and in so doing claims self-centred spectacle as a way of living. Mocking traditions of biography, whereby biographers ‘are fond of attributing the dispositions of their heroes to heroic sources’, Cecil lays claim to the identity-shaping powers offered by an autobiographical voice: since

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‘it is my fate to tell my own story, I choose to tell it in my own way’.43 His moment of origin is the sight of himself, aged twelve months, in the mirror: ‘I looked, and became a coxcomb for life!’ (I. 7). Gore takes the silver fork novel’s fetish of commodity and spectacle to its ultimate conclusions. Self-created within his own admiring gaze – it is his aristocratic mother’s mirror, but she also looks only to see herself – Cecil’s self-fetishing identity becomes his greatest attribute and his worst curse. For whereas Pelham grows into emotional and material security during his narrative, Cecil’s development of himself as spectacle comes at the expense of those around him, and by the time of his narration he is pointedly lacking in any redemptive maturity which would gloss his worldly status. Yet in direct contrast to Blessington, Gore’s invocation of the spectre of poisonous aristocratic leisure generates, not a counterbalancing sympathetic engagement, but a troubling critique of sincerity. It is when Cecil’s narrative is most insistent upon the reality and depth of his past emotions that the most damage is done. Hughes notes the ambiguity with which Gore views the dandy’s bourgeois successors and their values. Self-awareness, ‘which Cecil has in abundance, does not bring about reformation of character, as it generally tends to do in Victorian fiction’.44 The respectable Gore had more scope to play with the conventions of moral plotting than upper-class contemporaries such as Blessington, particularly given the latter’s reputation, or lack thereof. Cecil contravenes moral narrative traditions in his startlingly miasmal effect on the good and virtuous around him, who drop like flies in proportion to their love for him and to his love for them, as Cecil himself flourishes. Even when he twice tries for a heroic soldier’s death in expiation for his involvement through carelessness in the deaths of Emily, his true love, and Arthur, his nephew and his elder brother’s only heir, he fails each time. Cecil becomes a sort of vampire figure, an emblem of the Regency speaking to a later age of the deaths which have produced his ongoing life and his commentating voice. What, then, is left for the age to come? And what does Cecil have to say about acts of authorship? Gore’s extraordinary capacity for ventriloquism raises troubling issues, for if the voice of the elite insider can so powerfully be re-produced across gender, class and time, then how can upper-class women authors make special claims to knowledge and authenticity? A further threat to the future of aristocratic writing is posed by Gore’s own politicised coding of the concept. Hibbard and Copeland read Cecil as Gore’s documentation


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of the momentous political failure of the Whig party, that most aristocratic of political parties, to capitalise on the extension of life for the aristocracy that the party had itself bought through the Reform Bill of 1832. Her narrator, both a participator in and an outsider to the consequences of reform politics, becomes her perfectly positioned observer.45 This sense of opportunities gained and lost, of the potential for an energising mode of post-Reform aristocratic politics that has been squandered, is extended in Cecil to the nature of authorship itself. Offering as it does one of the genre’s recurring fictionalisations of Byron in the wake of Glenarvon (others can be found in Disraeli’s Venetia (1837) and Bury’s The Devoted), Andrew Elfenbein reads Cecil as Gore’s way of foregrounding the cost to women of Byronic narratives.46 Gore’s fictionalised rendering of a friendship with Lord Byron becomes a means through which to offer a wry critique of Byron memoirs, and in particular, it would seem, Blessington’s Conversations. Cecil brings conversational exchange to the fore – ‘[as] my friend Byron said one night at Watier’s’ only to cut it off: ‘but no! – had he intended the mot for publication, he would have printed it himself’. (II. 163). ‘Byron has suffered enough at the hands of his friends!’, he later declares. ‘To see the public accept such a portraiture ... pearls and diamonds snatched from his mouth, and toads and frogs substituted in their stead!’ (III. 245–246). The novel satirises Blessington herself on various occasions; Bury comes in for more direct chastisement.47 In the ending, Cecil suggests his readers may expect a ‘Diary of a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, as a pendant to the Diary of the Lady. But I beg to assure them ... that I am a gentleman still ... They have consequently nothing to expect as regards the privacy of my royal master ... In my opinion, the world has nothing to do with the leisure of royalty’ (III. 345, my emphasis). This eminently aristocratic male put-down of Charlotte Bury is in fact a middle-class writer’s corrective to upper-class abuses of privacy, given further satirical edge by being transformed into the rebuke of a narrator who epitomises all that anti-aristocratic representation renders most dissipated and dilettante. Just as, in Gore’s representation, the Whigs have failed to formulate a re-energised mode of aristocratic politics, so too her upper-class contemporaries have failed to transcend their own privileged lives to produce art that can speak to the postReform world. Cecil’s tantalisingly highlighted silence about two of the defining figures in Victorian representations of the Regency – George IV and Byron – resonates in a book with such a distinctively


eloquent narrator. Such silence underscores the way in which the ‘worst’ form of aristocratic authorship, the sort that combines the morals of Cecil with the social sin of bad manners, is most readily coded as aristocratic female authorship. Gore had great success with Cecil and its hastily produced sequel, Cecil, A Peer (1841). Yet the very cynicism of the plot suggests the exhaustion of the genre, as one of its finest practitioners pushes it as far as it can go, strips it of its pretensions to moral education, and leaves it looking like an emblem of a faded past in which there was, its narrator claims, little good writing, but much good talking (I. 41). Cecil, and Cecil, A Peer leave one genre drained of life, but offer in turn no hopeful view for the fiction of the future. This signals the problem with Blessington’s hope for an upperclass claim to the reforming power of fiction. What literary space did the passing of the silver fork novel, with its dangerous legacy of dilettantism, leave for aristocratic women writers in the decades to come? This question is the focus of my next chapter.

3 Silly Novels and Lady Novelists: Inside the Literary Marketplace

The mid-Victorian literary marketplace was a crucial site for debates over the role and status of the author.1 In the post-1840 period, many of the factors often seen to facilitate increasing male domination of a seemingly feminised literary marketplace also operated to the benefit of upper-class women writers. This advantage over their middle-class contemporaries was, however, a short-term one only. Several critics have traced an inverse relationship between the rising status of authorship as a profession and the cultural valuation of women writers and women’s writing, particularly after 1860.2 Aristocratic women writers had the challenges of entering into the literary marketplace in the first place, producing commercially appealing products within it, and achieving literary and intellectual credibility for their work. Not all these aims were compatible. My examination of the fashionable annuals of the early Victorian period, followed by a consideration of George Eliot’s mid-century attack on ‘silly novels’, demonstrates that the cultural criteria through which intellectual arbitrators delineated high art could be particularly disadvantageous to women of elevated social standing. The high-ranking woman writer risked serving as a bogey(wo)man in opposition to whom middle-class men and women authors could construct masculine intellectual canons. Aristocratic women could thus be twicedamned and twice-excluded from the echelons of canonical literature.

Gaining access The changes industrialisation brought about in the publishing industry, such as increased literacy, new printing technologies, and greater 63

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mobility, fostered the increased concentration of literary and intellectual life in London. Gaye Tuchman points out how men tended to have far more intrinsic mobility than women did, since ‘most women’s geographic mobility was tied to the preferences of their husbands and fathers’.3 The same limitations generally applied to upper-class women, but their husbands and fathers were a good deal more likely to be sitting in the Houses of Lords or Commons, or joining their contemporaries. The demands of the Season – aristocratic society’s annual round of fashionable gatherings lasting approximately from April to August – would bring most families with an interest in socio-political activity or pretensions to fashionable status up to London regardless of expense. As the mid-century literary marketplace became more centralised, aristocratic woman writers were there on the spot. They were also moving in the right circles to take some advantage of the networks that facilitated male writers. ‘Intellectual and public affairs’, says Mermin, ‘were carried on by networks of interlocking groups, bound up with the centers of political and cultural power, that rarely included women’.4 Tuchman’s analysis of biographical and publishing information suggests that women writers were ‘less likely to have influential friends. They led more restricted social lives. Women may not have been able to convert their ties into the sorts of help that ultimately brought greater recognition to men’.5 Metropolitan literary networking, however, was by its nature innately congenial to the lifestyles and social skills of aristocratic women. As we have already seen with Blessington, social rituals could generate professional contacts. In her discussion of early century high society, Adburgham observes that literature, politics and fashion ‘were inextricably mingled in the shifting strata of society ... The way into politics was through the drawing-rooms; one of the ways into the drawing-rooms was to become a literary lion; and one of the ways to become a literary lion was to write a fashionable novel’.6 The widening social bases of literature and politics in the post-Reform 1830s expanded the available routes to political and literary power. However, if anything this intensified middle-class presence deepened the entanglements between fashion, politics and literature. ‘The Society of the 1850s to 1870s’, observes Davidoff, ‘was still small enough to be dominated by known individual personalities. In structure it resembled a vast pyramid of interlocking spiders’ webs’.7 Yet despite fashionable aristocratic society’s ability to retain its essential exclusivity of class identity well into the nineteenth-century, in terms of day-to-day social interaction this pyramid of spiders’ webs intersected with an expanding set of literary and political networks.

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Upper-class circles did not lose all relevance – they merely had to interact with a wider range of social possibilities. If political involvement or previous social standing failed to bring an author to an upper-class dining table, then the ‘lion-hunting’ of aristocratic hostesses would: the presence of noteworthy figures in the worlds of politics and literature conferred social cachet on a dinner or a party. Caroline Norton offers us an amusingly sardonic picture of society women’s quest for such human literary trophies: ‘Tib ... fed lions ... So when she found any new clever man wandering about the sandy deserts of good society, she baited a trap for him with one of these names; or she lassoed and brought him home’.8 Mandler notes Charles Dickens’s position as a Holland House literary lion and his connections with other Whig aristocrats such as Lord Normanby and the Duke of Devonshire.9 In his activities to improve the professional standing of authors, Dickens drew upon rhetoric condemning patronage, a traditionally aristocratic mode of involvement in the arts, even as he welcomed aristocratic support for himself and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s proposed Guild of Literature and Art from 1850.10 Dickens also became an intimate of Blessington’s literary salons at Gore House, the place which Sadleir associates with Blessington’s strengthened acceptance of herself as a working author as opposed to the socially aspirational inhabitant of Seamore Place, where she was from 1830–1836. Dickens contributed the poem ‘A Word in Season’ to her 1844 edition of the Keepsake; in 1846, Blessington became the first titled gossip writer for the Daily News, the new radical newspaper which Dickens initially edited; in May 1851 Dickens delivered a speech on Sanitary Reform in Gore House, at Blessington’s request. Jane Strickland comments that the entrance to London Society of her sister Agnes Strickland, both a contributor to the annuals and a popular historian, allowed her to meet influential editors such as William Jerdan of the Literary Gazette and John Mitford of the Gentleman’s Magazine, while her other sister Elizabeth met Colburn through Lady Morgan, and in 1830 became editor of the Court Journal.11 Even women of more exclusive status could acceptably meet not only authors, but also publishers, at dinner. Adburgham points out that while Colburn ‘never shook off the taint of trade’ (ironically, given his silver fork publishing), ‘Mr Constable, Mr Blackwood and Mr Murray were the first of the “gentleman publishers”, who dined with rank and fashion as well as with the most celebrated men of letters’.12 The position of upper-class women writers made them peculiarly able to access the benefits of centralisation and networking in ways unavailable to bourgeois women writers. Yet did

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these contacts assist them to enter the literary marketplace? If so, did this capacity allow sufficient control over cultural criteria to gain longer-term intellectual and professional credibility?

Becoming professional? – the annuals The annuals – fashionable, expensive, elaborately presented journals offering a choice selection of engravings, short prose pieces and poetry – provided upper-class women with an obvious route into the literary marketplace. Flourishing approximately between 1825 and the early 1840s, the annuals provide a useful bridging point between the silver fork mania of the early decades and the increasing professionalisation of authorship post-1840. As Sadleir observes, these ‘elegant volumes, bound in watered silk, in velvet or in full and elaborately tooled morocco’, seemed quintessential products of early nineteenthcentury dilettante aristocratic literary activity, with their engravings and their cosy circles of titled contributors.13 However, the annuals were also lucrative publications that in their heyday sold large numbers in Britain and to a wide readership in America and various British colonies.14 They were, therefore, professional commercial products that operated in a ‘fiercely competitive’ market.15 To edit an annual was to take on a recognised functional role in the literary world and acquire potentially valuable skills that could be transferable into other areas of literary endeavour. Such an opportunity was not easily available to middle-class authors: ‘to edit a periodical, one must have been appointed, and such appointments were frequently made through networks of friends’.16 As the annuals’ publishers became increasingly enthusiastic about what Sadleir terms ‘the substitution of snob appeal for at least a pretence of artistic selection’, aristocratic women were deemed the ideal editors.17 They could draw on their network of literary acquaintances for contributions, a use of socialised connections that entirely suited the way in which aristocratic women’s networks of interpersonal influence operated. In 1837, Blessington edited The Book of Beauty, and as Adburgham observes, ‘whereas aristocratic ladies would not dream of visiting Lady Blessington in Seamore Place, they were only too pleased to join her between hard covers’.18 The social and financial precariousness of Blessington’s position made her an unusually productive writer and editor, but this seems to have been a matter of a greater quantity of work than her more securely situated contemporaries rather than significant differences in


its nature and extent. Caroline Norton’s previous experience with editing the Court Magazine and Belle Assemblé in 1832 (a version of the older established magazines for women), and the English Annual from 1834 (to 1838) helped her to the high-profile editorship of the Keepsake of 1836 (which appeared in December 1835). Chase and Levenson contend that Norton’s annual publishing assisted her in the formation of a quasi-professional identity. Although her family history, her childhood milieu, her friendships, and her social pretensions placed her within the most exclusive drawing-rooms in the realm, the crisis in her marriage and the conditions of her labor marked her as a vigorous literary entrepreneur.19 Norton’s editorship was not, in fact, very successful, but this did not mean that the editorship for 1837 went to a middle-class writer: Norton’s successor was Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, poet, travel writer, and daughter of the Duke of Rutland. Fame bred fame. The annuals offered a transition into writing for the supposedly more serious literary journals that were springing up around the 1830s, journals which by the 1850s were highly influential in determining the criteria of the marketplace. Yet contemporary commentators almost obsessively encoded the annuals as the non-professional productions of dilettante aristocratic women. For all that they provided a foothold in the publishing world, the annuals were in themselves essentially transient and amorphous products. Moreover, as Margaret Linley observes, they ‘laboured to establish the look of middle-class leisure’. 20 This association with aping stereotypes of aristocratic values and lifestyles did no good for the annuals’ cultural credibility – or for that of their well-born editors and contributors. The widely read and influential literary journal the Athenæum reviews the Keepsake (1834) in the following terms: This is the Annual of the titled and the wealthy: it contains tales by lords, and poems by ladies of quality; and must, we suppose, be considered an aristocratic book. On closer inspection, we perceive in it a resemblance to a levee ... . By some, a mere enumeration of titled contributors will be held as proof sufficient of the excellence of the work: others, who look more closely into matters, will be apt to estimate the verse and prose rather by the natural talents than the artificial rank of the writers. Those who incline to this latter mode of judgment, will perhaps agree with us in opinion, that Miss Landon has excelled her titled associates in her life and character.21 (my emphasis)

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For the Athenæum, the Keepsake’s upper-class associations turn the annual into a site of elite socialised exchange, as distinct from a professional or even commercial product – which in turn privileges the critical gaze that ‘look[s] more closely’ and thus disregards the annual’s central attributes. The ‘titled’ status of most of the contributors becomes a point against which to praise the more middle-class poet ‘L.E.L’. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon). Norton’s one triumph in her editorship of the 1836 Keepsake was prevailing upon her old family friend, Thomas Moore, to contribute a piece. This action lies squarely in that liminal area of social interaction in which upper-class women were accustomed to operate. An upper-class editor exploits a personal and familial tie for a professional purpose – that is, precisely the way in which the Annuals usually operated. Yet Fraser’s, a journal that prided itself on its progressive conservatism and its combination of popular and intellectual articles, turns this interaction into farce: Mrs Norton magisterially advanced, with Thomas Moore’s head peeping from her reticule. Having drawn him forth, she made a profound curtsey to the chair, and requested that [the editor] ... would permit her poet to recite a very ‘nice’ poem from the Keepsake. This was readily granted, and fanned by his fair editress, the Miniature Bard addressed the assembly.22 Between payments to authors and the importance of engravings, annuals were extremely expensive to produce – the first Keepsake was rumoured to have cost eleven thousand guineas. 23 The temporal and financial pressures under which editors such as Norton and Blessington operated forced them to churn out material for such gaps as could not be filled by conscripted friends. Margaret Beetham’s discussion of the politics of publishing annuals reveals an ongoing tension between the professional and the social as differing constructions of literary identity. ‘Behind the scenes’, she notes, there were struggles over how far the magazines should continue to rely on unpaid readers’ contributions ... . These were dramatised in an editorial row in 1834 between the Lady [sic] Caroline Norton, who was editor of the Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée, and her proprietor, [John] Bell, over his insistence that the cost of the ‘literary portion’ be kept under 9–10 guineas, relying on ‘gratis performance’ for the rest. 24


Upper-class women, having been hired on the basis of their social networks, were expected to make those networks pay: the publishing venture was to be kept as much as possible in the realm of personal connections, for the commercial purpose of saving the publisher’s purse. This pressure in turn risked compromising the delicate balance whereby the socialised nature of these networks allowed upper-class women to mine them for professional benefit and personal standing: for example, as her financial situation worsened, Blessington began to alienate her friends somewhat by her relentless levying of contributions.25 Aristocratic editors in more secure personal circumstances were not much better off as regards long-term professional credibility. An 1858 Bookseller reminiscence tracing the deterioration of the Keepsake comments upon Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, who having much elegant leisure at her disposal, consented to work at what linendrapers call ‘a very low figure;’ and then it was that the principle of farming-out the literary contents of the book (that most fatal of mistakes) first commenced. After a year’s experiment, her ladyship, albeit the daughter of a duke, seems to have failed to give Mr. Heath satisfaction.26 (my emphasis) The anonymous author clearly takes pleasure in rhetorically lowering the editorship of a duke’s daughter to the level of a linen-draper’s transaction, and even more pleasure in recounting the professional inadequacy of a woman with so much ‘elegant leisure’ at her disposal. Like an incompetent servant, Stuart-Wortley has failed ‘to give ... satisfaction’ in the world of publishing. Beetham points to the doublethink of prominent authors, who would fulfil social duties by contributing to an annual while retaining cultural credibility by simultaneously sneering at them. 27 Fraser’s, employing several of the annuals’ editors, and complimenting them fulsomely on their beauty and charm, poured blighting scorn on the form itself. 28 Beetham concludes that the periodical press thus enabled the development of journalism as a profession and provided a space in which some women could earn their living ‘like men’. The growth and professionalisation of the press did not, however, produce a coherent discursive position for these women to occupy. Women writers – with few exceptions – were


less successful than their male counterparts both materially and culturally.29 There was a predominant sense that by the 1830s the annuals, while still flourishing, were – by their very nature – things of the past. Good and bad reviews alike insistently represented the medium of authorship and editorship most amenable to aristocratic women as an amateur relic of a bygone age.

Fiction, authorship and cultural canons The novel, by contrast, was rapidly developing as a genre and as a site for the period’s debates over the nature and status of authorship. It also offered a means through which aristocratic women writers could adapt to changing cultural mores. Inevitably, upper-class authors still tended to place their works in the social settings with which they were most familiar, especially since the name that gave them a footing in the literary world generated certain audience expectations. The ‘most popular form’, writes Mandler, was ‘the Society novel with the moral message, combining the exclusive world that aristocratic women knew best with the ideology they shared with their inferiors’.30 Yet their high society settings made these novels vulnerable to cultural marginalisation, while their moral messages lost impact in such exclusive surroundings. These fashionable settings’ detachment from the bourgeois domestic hearths and impoverished urban streets upon which mid-century realist novels were staking their claim to public status means that the universal gives way to the specifics of class. The popularity with the working classes, especially from the 1860s, of garish and usually inaccurate portrayals of high life in penny novelettes did not help the credibility of more aesthetically or intellectually ambitious novelists. We see a recurring theme: while apparent praise of knowledge of the world (that is, the fashionable world) may attract readers, it also damns the book as culturally lightweight. Aristocratic women’s fiction tended not to appear in serialised form, or at any rate not novels by the most high-profile writers. The silver fork successes had left a marketing legacy of upper-class novels as elaborate commodities in themselves, and the demands of serialisation would require a more professionalised, non-dilettante involvement in the publishing world than was consistent with elite social conventions. Such authors consequently largely avoided the mode most challenging to


‘the writer’s ability to claim immunity to the commercial transformation of society’,31 thus potentially retaining both individual social cachet and aesthetic credibility. Serialisation, however, was also the mode that had regenerated the literary marketplace and was proving crucial to the development of authors’ professional standing. To stand apart from it was also to stand apart from a central forum for artistic identity, and to put the onus on expensive two or three-volume novels to reach a wide audience. By mid-century, more and more aristocratic women writers were publishing under their own names, as authorship became an increasingly reputable occupation.32 Yet acknowledgement, by themselves and by others, as authors, did not necessarily equate to acknowledgement as good authors. Neither did it equate to the possession of a fully fledged professional identity. ‘It was a bad sign for these [the middle classes] when the manufacture of fashionable novels grew into a trade’, wrote Abraham Hayward in 1837. It ‘became worth a publisher’s while to offer a woman of title fifty or a hundred pounds for liberty to prefix her name to a book, complied with the aid of butlers and lady’s-maids in the back recesses of his shop’.33 Similar aspersions continued to hang over upper-class women’s writing in the following decades. A questionable actual identity could translate all too easily into a questionable vocational identity. If a ‘woman of title’ finds that her name stands in readers’ and critics’ minds as a commodity sold for fifty pounds to cover the work of ‘butlers and lady’s-maids’, then that name becomes a wholly commercial product, and a debased, fraudulent commercial product at that, rather than a guarantor of artistic integrity or the cornerstone of professional status. The deepening cultural distinction in the mid-Victorian period between ‘intellectually, psychologically and aesthetically demanding fiction, and that which primarily served the needs of escapism and relaxation’, as Kate Flint puts it, 34 tended to operate to the especial disadvantage of aristocratic women writers. Not all of these women necessarily produced lightweight romances of fashionable life, nor were all or even most writers of romances from the upper class. Nevertheless, as George Eliot’s scathingly funny 1856 attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ indicates, not only were there indeed a good few silly lady novelists, but also the impression of silliness was strongly enhanced by an association with high rank and leisured status. Eliot’s essay gives us a valuable insight into the cultural vocabularies available to a prominent intellectual figure, writing for the prestigious Westminster Review, who was seeking to distinguish between women’s fiction with intrinsic artistic merit, and women’s fiction that was


merely – silly. ‘It is clear’, Eliot notes wryly, ‘that they [the lady novelists] write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains’.35 Eliot does not leave this association unchallenged, of course, given her jibe at ‘the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live’. 36 Here again we see the ‘silver-fork syndrome’, whereby critics frequently derided individual novels of ‘high life’ on the grounds that their authors lacked the inside knowledge and elite rank they claimed, at the same time as these same critics considered the genre to be an aristocratic preserve and criticised it accordingly. I am not arguing that Eliot is deliberately setting out to target upper-class women writers as such when she situates the putative origins of ‘silly’ writing in ‘elegant boudoirs’. My interest is in the terms in which she characterises bad literature, and whether these terms place aristocratic women writers under a particular disadvantage. In other words, even if all the specific writers she attacks were middle-class, the cultural criteria laid down by Eliot’s essay would operate to the especial disadvantage of upper-class women. Actually, though, a significantly high proportion of the authors she attacks are upper-class, even titled, a fact that critical discussions of her essay frequently disregard.37 Eliot is targeting ‘lady’ novelists, a term that from around the 1830s could apply across upper- and middle-class ranks. To be a ‘lady’ was particularly resonant of an essentially non-economic identity. 38 Eliot’s famous attack, however, does the most long-term damage to novelists who are also ‘Ladies’. Eliot’s distinction between those who write, even badly, for a living and those whose novels are ‘less the result of labour than of busy idlenes.’39 exposes the real target of her review: dilettantism. Eliot is by no means saying that financial necessity alone is sufficient to produce adequate – or even non-silly – work. Nevertheless, she sees an ‘antiseptic’ quality ‘in the mere healthy fact of working for one’s bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of feminine literature is not likely to have been produced under such circumstances’.40 This emphasis on the silliness-generating powers of idleness has detrimental implications given the aristocracy’s traditional elevation of ‘the life of leisure to the status of a virtue’.41 Upper-class women were particularly vulnerable to the negative cultural weighting of unproductive, unregulated leisure that Peter Bailey identifies as a crucial aspect of middle-class thought, particularly around the 1840s and 1850s.42 Stefan Collini, tracing the shift from eighteenth-century valuations of ‘the moral and cultural


primacy of leisure’ to an ideal of work as ‘the chief sphere in which moral worth was developed and displayed’, links this transition with anti-aristocratic vocabularies.43 Acknowledging the financial imperatives of literature, while potentially damaging to aesthetic credibility, was a crucial aspect in the development of the writer’s professional status, allowing a specified value to artistic work and establishing the middle-class author’s independence from older traditions of aristocratic patronage.44 The work ethic was of especial importance to many middle-class women, who used it to challenge the cultural bias against them working.45 Elaine Showalter has pointed out also that financial necessity often provided middle-class women writers with an acceptable cover for their initial entries into authorship.46 For women who were also aristocrats, however, such constructions of work and leisure doubly disadvantaged them. The widespread view of the novel as an inherently frivolous genre, which altered only gradually as it gained in cultural credibility, owed much to images of cross-class female idleness.47 This theme is furthered by W.R. Greg in his 1859 National Review article, ‘False Morality of Lady Novelists’, when he claims that the vast number of lady novelists is because thousands ‘of women have nothing to do, and yet are under the necessity of doing something’.48 For Greg, though, the dangers of idleness extend also to the readers, who are, he claims, ‘mainly to be found among the rich and idle, whose wealth, leisure and social position combine to give to their tastes and example an influence wholly out of proportion to their mental activity or their mental powers’.49 Leisured writers, often of both wealth and rank, produce inferior products to the detriment of leisured readers of wealth and rank, who in turn exercise their disproportionate influence over the rest of society. The overriding cultural fear inherent in commentaries such as Greg’s is of the eventual corruption of middle-class women through reading fiction, luring them away from their hard-working domestic duties and towards a life of sloth.50 Yet the values that castigate this life are rooted in anti-aristocratic rhetoric. We cannot and should not read Eliot’s ‘Silly Novels’ as an uncomplicated internalisation of masculine cultural criteria. The essay’s basic tenet, however – the detachment of these authors and their admiring readers from the realities of life – indicates the extent to which, among London’s intellectual elite, silliness in novels and the dilettante status of their writers made for an inevitable rhetorical association. Incidentally, some of the novels Eliot discusses were anonymous, so that, at least rhetorically, she is reading backward from silliness to leisured status, based on the text’s internal evidence.


When it came to fiction, then, both the cultural values and the settings of much upper-class women’s writing militate against harmony with the mid-century bourgeois form. Aristocratic social settings and emotional authenticity seem incompatible in many critics’ minds, especially in the aftermath of Reform: the Athenæum wryly observes of Lady Scott’s silver fork novel Trevelyan (1833) that ‘[to] connect romance with Richmond ... was rather a daring effort’.51 A contemporary review separates Blessington’s The Two Friends (1835) from ‘those that have been distinguished as “fashionable”, although the scenes and personages are generally of the higher class’, and praises its representation of ‘points and people that are to be found in every place and station where Nature has influence’.52 The reviewer claims this universality for Blessington’s novel by defining it against the quintessential novel of fashionable social life. Another (fairly supportive) review of The Two Friends notes Blessington’s ‘great reputation for endowments and talents in private’. Yet the reviewer still insists that it ‘is seldom that the judgment of the coteries is affirmed by the supreme court of revision, public opinion, and we find no exception to the rule in the début of Lady Blessington as a novelist [The Repealers (1833)]’.53 In 1835, the New Monthly regretted that Caroline Norton had begun her fiction writing with ‘the worn-out wars of Mayfair scandal and everyday intrigue’.54 Kindly exonerating her from any intentional depravity – ‘Mrs Norton has laboured hard to make a moral tale out of an immoral subject’ – the reviewer nevertheless leaves us in no doubt that crooked morality is integral to the nature of the fashionable novel: ‘the miracle was beyond her strength’. This lofty tone seems particularly stringent when we consider that Colburn published the New Monthly, but its rising status as a critical journal apparently required disowning of the fashionable novel. The 1840s and 1850s saw the great development of the Victorian realist novel as both a commentary upon, and an intervention into, the great social concerns of the period: working-class movements, urbanisation, and (by the 1850s) the idealisation of and threats to middle-class domesticity. Where Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, could gain cultural authority – and help change attitudes – by initiating readers into the apparent mysteries of the northern industrial urban context, aristocratic women could claim no such innate societal value for revealing the mysteries of fashionable life. Nor did this impression alter over the century: if anything, it intensified. In 1863, with anxieties about fiction and immorality whipped into frenzy by the success of the sensation novel, the Illustrated London News uses a similar


alignment between settings and morality to lacerate Norton’s sensational Lost and Saved (1863). The review makes a clear correlation between ‘the story is one of high life’ and ‘the story is too full of scenes which border so closely upon which it is considered improper to write about’.55 Reviewers did not confine these judgments to writers such as Blessington and Norton with scandalous backgrounds. Lady Chatterton went beyond the domestic memoir (as Chapter 1 discusses) in seeking forms of cultural authority: her fiction stages a claim to morally redemptive, artistically powerful writing through the representation of fictional alter egos. Chatterton’s correspondence with Newman reveals her strong sense of a moral and spiritual purpose to her writing.56 Her novel Compensation (1856) sets up an alliance between morally reformative writing and high social rank, staged in a meeting between the middle-class author Susan Barton, whose writing reveals to her readers their own sinfulness, and the fashionable hostess Lady Rochford. Lady Rochford assures Susan Barton that ‘if a really leading person gives a dinner; in the important choice of who is to be invited to make it most agreeable, such as you would be placed on the golden list, and my name scratched out’. The middle-class author in turn admires the fashionable hostess: ‘the idol which fashion has set up is, in its way, so well worthy of being worshipped’.57 With the figure of Susan Barton, Chatterton is ostensibly inscribing the obsolescence, or non-relevance, of her own class, yet in the mutual admiration party of middle-class author and upper-class hostess, she is in fact shaping a cultural role for the aristocratic writer in the England of the 1850s. Her title pages suggest an increasing confidence in the social validity of a professional identity: unlike Compensation (1856), her later novel Grey’s Court (1865) has her name on it, if only as the book’s ostensible ‘editor’. Through her fiction, she becomes the real-life social reformer whose work represents the right type of author, regardless of class status: the author who is no longer the silver fork scribbler of old, but one who makes their readers aware of their moral responsibilities. In real life, however, the morally inspiring middle-class author is not so respectful towards her upper-class contemporaries: Compensation is George Eliot’s archetypal ‘silly novel’, the one with which she commences her review – and it is difficult to protest her designation, given that Compensation is, frankly, a very silly novel indeed. Significantly, though, Eliot’s description of it as ‘a wonderful pot pourri of Almack’s, Scotch second-sight, Mr Rogers’s breakfasts, Italian


brigands, death-bed conversions, superior authoresses, Italian mistresses, and attempts at poisoning old ladie.’58 places plot silliness and elite social settings in inescapable literary conjunction. Eliot’s comments suggest that Chatterton’s aspiring model is doomed to failure, a fact perhaps implicitly reflected in Chatterton’s Grey’s Court (1865), which despite its late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century setting confines the role of redemptive author to the middle-class woman, with no attempt to incorporate the world of high society. In what we may perhaps read as a gesture of defiance towards certain of her own contemporaries, however, Chatterton defines the social value of this authorial role at the expense of the male silver fork novelist. Grey’s Court, for all its old-fashioned tone and setting, is unquestionably a product of these later decades: in writing a three-volume novel about ‘fashionable people’ which only makes its readers feel self-satisfied, the villain, Audley, is enacting the same failure of moral duty as when he seeks to defraud and poison his wife.59 If Chatterton’s own fictional world leaves her behind, she makes sure that it will also leave behind the aristocratic men who gravitated from silver fork authorship so much more easily than women did. In Chapter 1, I discussed the impact of mid-century religious revivals on the upper classes, and the way in which personal religious convictions could become both an incentive and a justification for aristocratic authorship. Eliot, however, makes it clear that an upper-class drawing-room is no fit site for the Evangelical novel: ‘[it] is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist, than in any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of Evangelicalism ... lies among the middle and lower classes’.60 The target of Eliot’s comments is The Old Grey Church (1856), by Lady Scott. Scott’s transition from silver fork fiction such as Trevelyan to The Old Grey Church’s engagement with the reformative possibilities of the Oxford Movement is emblematic of the more general mid-century evolution of upper-class perspectives and lifestyles, and of the influence of Evangelicalism (largely indirectly) and Tractarianism on these. These transitions do not operate smoothly in Scott’s fiction, though: the struggles of her hero to lead a spiritually disciplined life do feel trivialised by the setting and its accompanying plot details, such as his possible succession to a landed estate. Eustace’s minor moral traumas are difficult to relate to against this background. A contrasting attack on Puseyism came from Lady Catharine Long, daughter of the Earl of Orford, and ‘that relatively rare specimen, an Evangelical noblewoman’,61 with her popular 1844 novel Sir Roland Ashton. Long transforms the


‘dissipations and vanities of the ball-room’, so often used to chastise the frivolity of upper-class women, into moral markers of Puseyite weakness.62 She, however, cannot shake off her class affiliations so readily. The Athenæum expressed scepticism at her view of fiction as a ‘good medium for religious discussion’ – scepticism closely if implicitly linked not with generic, but with class status: [it] is more than possible that Lady Long would deny our criticism by informing us that ‘Sir Rowland [sic] Ashton’ was written for a class to which we do not belong and of whose sentiments and meanings we have but dim and distant glimpses. Hence we do not anticipate any remarkable improvement in her future productions as works of art. As a book for a class, however, this novel is only feeble and second-rate.63 The association between settings in high life, and a lack of serious purpose, could have an even more damaging effect: traditional associations of aristocratic immorality could make such novels appear actively deleterious to an emerging bourgeois moral consensus. As production and readership grew over the decades, Flint contends, increasingly intense debates on the popularity of romance plots highlight their perceived debilitating effects upon their (woman) readers, rendering them morally (and even physically) unfit for the prosaic realities of life, particularly marriage.64 The figure of the aristocratic woman writer – particularly one with a scandalous name – unites two discourses of moral corruption. This cultural construction exercised a very definite practical effect upon a mid-century literary marketplace dominated by the prim standards of Mudie’s Circulating Library, whose purchases played a large part in a novel’s financial success.65 Although Mudie’s insistence on his library as ‘select’ conveyed social overtones that might assist upper-class women writers, the moral aspects of ‘select’ literature dominated over the social.66 Moreover, the necessity to maintain one’s ‘personal’ reputation imposed its own constraints upon movement – constraints never experienced by men. As Adburgham points out, Edward Bulwer could dine with Lady Blessington but Rosina Bulwer could not, nor could Blessington dine with the Bulwers.67 One further genre Eliot singles out is historical fiction, to which her review gives a very heavy cultural weighting, and with which the writers of silly novels are apparently least qualified to deal. Here again, the author of her targeted novel, Adonijah, a Tale of the Jewish Dispersion

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(1856), turns out to be from a family with aspirations, at least, to upperclass status: Jane Margaret Strickland, whose biography of her sister Agnes I referred to above. (The sisters were distant connections of the Stricklands of Sizergh Castle, Westmoreland.) Formal education provided male intellectuals with influential contacts and cultural credibility. The inadequacies of women’s education were a predominant source of concern and debate by the 1850s – Eliot’s ‘Silly Novels’ is itself a call for improvement in this regard – and women writers’ sense of this inadequacy tended to be an important factor in their approach to authorship.68 However, lack of formal education had a far more negative effect on women in the genres of poetry and non-fiction, the novel not being part of the classical tradition and more open to women.69 Proportionately more upper-class women had the potential resources to be well educated than middle-class ones: for example, several might at some point in their schooling share their brother’s tutor. This was unlikely, however, to happen to any level of intensive education; indeed, middle-class girls were more likely to have the unusual chance of possessing intellectual parents or of training for a potential working future. In Davidoff’s words, ‘the skills required for middle- and upper-class lifestyle rest on the ability to manipulate face-to-face relationships rather than achievement in any “universalist” sphere’.70 Upper-class women’s educations in particular prioritised the networking social skills of high society – skills that would assist them into the marketplaces of marriage and of literature, but which would not assist them in the intellectual capacities and knowledge that would enable them to exercise power over cultural criteria. This lack (or assumed lack) of education was but one of the factors that cemented the dilettante construction of aristocratic female writing, denying it the authority that adhered to supposedly objective masculine criteria. These negative associations between upper-class women’s writing, dilettante leisure and high society settings did not necessarily have a detrimental effect on initial commercial value or general reception – indeed, probably quite the opposite. After all, the Westminster Review was a bastion of mid-century intellectual life rather than a popular journal, and Eliot’s whole essay is predicated on the idea that that such ‘silly novels’ get more lenient treatment from reviewers than women’s writing of superior quality.71 This bears out my premise that upper-class women writers had, if anything, initial advantages over their middleclass contemporaries in the interconnected literary world. For example, Scott sold well enough to have her two earlier novels reissued after The Old Grey Church (A Marriage in High Life in 1857 and Trevelyan in 1860).


Returning to Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton in 1844, we saw in Chapter 1 that her social standing, which heightened her spiritual credibility in the eyes of commentators such as Newman and Gladstone, was also no detriment to success or initial praise. Indeed, The Times review comments admiringly on the ‘noble authoress’ and ‘high life’.72 A rather less positive Athenæum review still sees Fullerton’s status as an advantage: the novel has ‘excited great interest among an influential class of readers in the metropolis’ and she is ‘just the kind of writer who may do harm by her influence or example, and to whom criticism may do good’.73 It even suggests a more credible and wide-ranging audience for Fullerton, who is ‘so well qualified ... to make sterling additions to our light literature, and influence opinion in more extended circles than her own’. But (as with Blessington’s The Two Friends) praise for one aristocratic writer comes at the expense of ‘any ephemeral novelist ... [who] may happen to stimulate the jaded appetite of the London world of fashion’.74 The high-church periodical Christian Remembrancer tempers its own admiration with regret at the novel’s lapses into ‘what, for want of a better term, we will call the fashionable drawing-room tone: one utterly unworthy of the writer of Ellen Middleton’.75 The advantages gained in terms of access and commercial success were not necessarily any more long-term than those attached to the Annuals, while the intellectual centres in which cultural criteria were being debated and laid down could ensure that short-term sales would be accompanied by long-term neglect. These criteria had their most limiting effect in the area of highprestige, non-fictional prose, which, as Mermin remarks, was hardest for women to enter.76 In this respect, upper-class women again had certain initial advantages. They were, as Chapter 1 has discussed, far more likely to have access to family papers with intrinsically marketable political or cultural interest than were their middle-class counterparts. We have seen how writers like Chatterton or Bertie used such papers to carve out their own literary identities, albeit positioning themselves more as editors than as creators. This process could in turn grant cultural credibility by association with important public figures and with more prestigious genres than the novel. Lady Theresa Lewis (whose first husband was Granby’s Thomas Lister), though ‘unconnected ... by the ties of blood, or of long and early intimacy’, was bequeathed the task of editing the well-known Miss Berry’s papers. This, Lewis surmises, was due to Berry’s ‘very kind and flattering interest’ in her Lives from the Clarendon Gallery (1852) – Lives having been a familial project for the former Theresa Villiers.77 Agnes

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Strickland gained crucial access to the State Papers Office for her popular series The Lives of the Queens of England (1840–1848) through her upper-class familial and social connections.78 Lady Charlotte Guest, née Bertie and daughter of the Earl of Lindsey, produced her admired translation of the Welsh epic the Mabinogion (1838–1845) in unusual circumstances, having jeopardised her social standing by marrying Josiah Guest, a wealthy Welsh ironmaster. However, she spent the next few years assiduously working her way back into high society, and her journals recount several social occasions in which contacts assisted her publications.79 Inhabitants of country estates and bearers of heirs to a longpreserved line would be more likely to live in the physical presence of collections of papers, handed down as a legacy from fathers to sons, and as such to live in a world more prepared to value some forms of literary inheritance. This tradition was also more likely to preserve the writings of the women themselves. Letters of prominent aristocratic women like Lady Lyttleton, Lady Palmerston or Lady Holland became publishable legacies for friends and descendants (male and female). Yet we should not overstate this possibility: such patterns of inheritance tended to preserve men’s papers (often by the labour of wives and daughters), while perceiving women’s fictional and epistolary writings as private and unimportant, and destroying them accordingly.80 Moreover, as with the political involvement Chapter 6 discusses, those channels provided by male relatives could leave aristocratic women vulnerable to charges of excessive partisanship. The Athenæum describes Lady Trevelyan’s 1866 edition of her brother Lord Macaulay’s works as dominated by ‘a plan conceived in the spirit of respect for her brother’s writings and complete contempt for every other person’s feelings’, and as in sore need of a ‘competent and impartial editor’.81 Neither were upper-class women exempt from some of the conventional constraints that affected their middle-class contemporaries: the traditional associations of the aristocracy with lax sexual mores did not mean that they could write with impunity. They often needed to maintain their authorial modesty all the more assiduously given their rank. For example, Agnes Strickland resisted the pressures of Henry Colburn to include the Brunswick Queens in her Lives of the Queens of England. This was partially because she felt it to be disrespectful to Queen Victoria, but also because, in her sister Jane’s words, ‘the trial of the consort-queen of George IV involved particulars to which no female


authors could even allude’.82 By the mid-century, royal revelations had clearly travelled some distance from Charlotte Bury, Colburn’s other successful chronicler of queens; Agnes Strickland’s refusal (and Jane Strickland’s firm phrasing) may have been bolstered by the obliquity heaped upon Bury. Ideas of the corrosive effects of leisure also affected perceptions of the value and quality of non-fictional writings. Lady Wallace, daughter of a Scottish MP and wife of an army general, built a career and reputation for herself through her work as a translator, in particular with her translations of the lives and letters of contemporary musicians for Longman’s, which remained the standard English versions for generations.83 We can nevertheless sense a recurring undertone of deprecation in reviews of her work in the more prestigious journals. An 1866 Athenæum review of Wallace’s Beethoven’s Letters concludes disapprovingly that such an endeavour ‘is something more than a pastime or a task slightly to be disposed of’,84 while the Edinburgh Review chastised her work on Mozart for ‘perpetual repetition of the foolish expression “our maestro” ’ and ‘the musical blunders’.85 Wallace was not of particularly high social status and such attacks were no new thing to women writers of all ranks. The charge of dilettantism, however, of leisure hours misspent in the inadequate pursuit of literature, seems levelled most readily against titled authors. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the quintessential upper-class woman writer as enshrined in literature is Anthony Trollope’s scribbling Lady Carbury in The Way We Live Now (1875), whose relentless networking cannot conceal the vapidity and intellectual weakness of her historical writing. Notably, the acerbity of Trollope’s portrayal softens once an editor’s male literary authority has quenched Lady Carbury’s pretensions – even her threatened novel – and placed her within a romantic plot.86 Negative discourses of aristocratic literary dilettantism did not affect women alone. The year before ‘Silly Novels’ appeared, George Eliot reviewed ‘Lord Brougham’s Literature’ in similar terms. It is, she begins ominously, a

matter of very common observation that members of the ‘privileged classes’, who ... find their time hang rather heavily on their hands, try to get rid of it by employments which, if not self-imposed, they would think rather pitiable ... . Relieved from the labours of his chancellorship, Lord Brougham, we suppose, found a good deal of leisure


on his hands; and how did he employ it? ... by writing third-rate biographies in the style of a literary hack!87

The implications of these discourses were, however, very different for aristocratic men. Greater education meant that men could approach the more respected non-fiction genres with far more confidence: the work of Brougham’s under attack by Eliot is not fiction, but rather the reprinting of his weighty Lives of Men of Letters (1845). Such genres were seen as the special preserve of men’s viewpoints, represented as nonpersonalised and therefore both objective and universalist. Women, by contrast, as has been much discussed in feminist literary criticism, were often deemed ‘incapable of conceptual profundity, abstract thought, or sustained, shaping creativity’.88 Moreover, while upper-class Victorian women might inherit papers of cultural import, upper-class Victorian men were more likely to be in a position to create them: the memoirs and opinions of statesmen possess an acknowledged public status to which few women’s documents could lay claim. This is why the concept of dilettantism is ultimately so significant for aristocratic women’s authorship as distinct from men’s authorship. Quite simply, upper-class men could have (other) jobs. If Henry Brougham makes inadequate use of his hours of leisure to produce a sub-standard work, then his reputation remains (as it has) safely ensconced in a career of public service and reforming political involvement. If an upper-class woman produced a similarly sub-standard work, then this was often the only mode in which she would make a public appearance (other than in newspaper articles relating to her social activities, if she was fortunate, or her sex life, if she was not). Dilettantism was not constraining to male aristocrats – it could make literature, including ‘light’ literature, into a pleasant diversion from the cares of state. Brougham’s concealment of authorship for his one fictional work, Albert Lunel (1844), suggests anxiety about the hierarchy of genres, but for Lord John Russell, whose writings, like Brougham’s, were largely political, ‘his occasional belles-lettres were just one of his elegant accomplishments’.89 ‘Charles Granville’, the Earl of Ellesmere, made full use of his aristocratic status to enter the literary world: John Sutherland suggests that the publication of his late-century novels by John Murray, whose publishing house helped to foster a marked disdain for fiction, must have been a favour. Yet the Ellesmere family name remained firmly associated, not with fiction but with public projects such as the Lancashire canal system.90


Capital, work and property Does cultural capital matter in the marketplace? It matters because we cannot altogether separate it from other forms of capital: social, moral, professional and economic. ‘Because it has immediate exchange value in the literary market’, writes Tuchman, ‘a good reputation is ... a kind of “symbolic capital” ’.91 She goes on to argue that this reputation could translate into economic capital both immediately through publishers’ contracts, and long-term through the lasting power granted a work admitted to the intellectual canon. We have already seen that many of the circumstances Tuchman identifies as disadvantaging women writers could in fact benefit upper-class women. We have also, though, seen the extent to which high social rank could also operate to the long-term disadvantage of an author searching for cultural credibility or intellectual standing. Valerie Sanders’s more positive view of the late-century literary marketplace shows the degree of influence and acceptance achieved by women writers such as Mary Ward,92 but even this centrality depended on models of working authorship and professional engagement not readily accessible by women of higher ranks. Bailey claims that as the century wore on, attacks on aristocratic leisure became something of an anachronistic exercise ... in a new and ad hoc leisure culture, fashion rather than custom conferred its own legitimacy, and fashion was dictated by the rich and aristocratic – the magical ‘upper 10,000’ – whose appeal remained undiminished by the scandals for which a few of their number were still notorious’.93 Likewise, Hugh Cunningham suggests that mid-Victorian debates about the nature of leisure differed from earlier ones in seeing leisure as a possible tool of class conciliation.94 They nevertheless concur that the right type of leisure was key to middle-class thinking, rational recreation ‘validated primarily as an adjunct to work’.95 Poovey’s discussion of the mid-century professional writer draws attention to the importance of gendering authorial work. The author, she contends, purifies and displaces the labour of writing by the displacement of degrading effort, achieving this by constructing ‘the domestic sphere as an arena where work is performed as selflessly and effortlessly as love is given’.96 The dilettante model of authorship also incorporates an ideal of effortlessness, but it is the wrong type of effortlessness – it signals an absence of


committed labour, founded in self-centredly unproductive leisure instead of selfless dedication. Dilettante authorship rooted in leisure thus generates devalued literary property. The industrial era fostered a transition in the key bases of economic power: Elaine Hadley defines this transition as one in which the sources of wealth and power in the country became identified less with ‘real’ (that is, landed) property and more with ‘commercial’ (that is, fluid capital) property.97 This ‘progressing transformation of immobile into mobile property’, writes Arendt, removes the distinction between property and wealth, so that a ‘private use value which was determined by its location’ becomes ‘an exclusively social value determined through its ever-changing exchangeability’.98 Of all classes of women, aristocrats possessed perhaps the strongest connection to ‘real’ property – not simply through the possessions of fathers and husbands, but through their own ownership in the forms of inheritance and settlements. Joan Perkin contends that ‘upper-class Englishwomen with separate estates and income, provided for their benefit under a private system of law administered by the Court of Equity, were the most liberated group of wives in the country and perhaps the world’.99 That said, we should be cautious about viewing such women’s financial position as one of complete independence: in keeping with the role of upperclass women as channels for rather than recipients of familial inheritances, they tended to ‘own’ their property at one remove, in equity trusts.100 Poovey points out the recurring tension between the idea of literature as ‘real’ property – a non-marketable possession integral to the author – and the idea of literature as commercial, and thus alienable. The ‘problematic nature of literary property’, she insists, ‘revealed how slippery a concept “private property” could be’.101 Definitions and extents of copyright continued to dominate discussions about the standing of literature in the period, particularly between 1837 and 1841. Was a book something which could be sold outright, did the act of creation translate into a financial claim, could this claim be alienated or exchanged?102 Caught in this transitional process of redefinition is the ‘possession’ that is ‘real’ in being integral to one’s sense of selfhood, but ‘commercial’ in being a potential commodity – that is, a name. Specifically, in the case of upper-class women, a title or an honorific tended to accompany this name, which bound them (even at one remove) to an inalienable and inherited familial identity. Ironically, though, as Stone notes, upper-class status could in fact generate dispossession from one’s family name in order to maintain the family connection to real property: ‘the


very desire to keep family surname and seat attached to each other resulted in a striking degree of impermanency about personal surnames among the landed elite after 1750’.103 A name, however, can also become an individual commercial property – one associated with varying degrees of success, intellectualism, and/or social prominence – a commodity upon which the author and the publisher may speculate in the literary marketplace. Yet if such speculations primarily turn upon the integrity of the name (is this really an aristocrat writing?) and the private life of the author (given the appeal of scandal in high society), then the property is implicitly devalued, even as the end product of upper-class authorship is associated with settings and themes deemed of lesser intellectual value. The greater privileging of male intellectual canons over the course of the century conjoins the debates about property and the vote generated by the 1867 Reform Act, particularly the question of women’s suffrage. These debates allowed working-class men’s possession of property to confer active political selfhoods in the form of the franchise, even as they in effect consigned the property of women of all classes to the realm of the social, denying its full economic function and hence its capacity to confer a ‘high’ political identity. (The 1867 Bill extended the franchise to all adult male urban householders, as well as male lodgers paying £10 a year or more for unfurnished rooms.) Potential voters who translated their financial capital into property ownership could attain a measurable, but constrained, stake in the political world. The transmutation of capital into property serves as both a realisation and a loss, in that it takes on a definable form, but loses the fluidity that made it capital. Authors who translate their cultural capital into artistic property (by invoking copyright) own their work more thoroughly, at the cost of rendering that work more tied to the world of economics. The right kind of labour vindicates both artistic and political identities by generating the right kind of property. The author’s labour produces the work of art, whose status is limited but crystallised by its translation into property through copyright. The labour of the thrifty, dedicated working-class man envisaged by the proponents of the 1867 Bill produces the property qualification that marks him as a suitable political subject worthy of the franchise. Possession of the vote marks out the voter as political subject even as possession of copyright marks out the author as artistic subject. For aristocratic women authors, by virtue of holding names and property at one remove, their labour is doubly disadvantaged in terms of cultural and intellectual credibility. As women’s labour, it can be inscribed as

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effortless; as aristocratic labour, it can be inscribed as valueless. The increasing professionalisation of the publishing industry over the course of the century further marginalised aristocratic women’s distinctively interpersonal spheres of representation and influence in the literary marketplace. Yet, as my later discussion of Norton’s fiction suggests, the fluidity of these spheres – their key strength and their fatal weakness – continues to generate forms of resistance that have their own part to play in examinations of nineteenth-century discourses of property and power.

Part II Writing the Nation State

Part II explores another aspect of the process whereby the social becomes political – specifically, considering whether the socialised nature of aristocratic women’s experiences and authorship could translate into explicitly politicised interventions into the state of the Victorian nation. Riley and Benhabib have both queried how, in Benhabib’s phrase, one can ‘translate an identity under attack into a political project’.1 Does a quest for universal relevance or sympathy require the transcendence of a privileged class identity, or can aristocratic ideas and vocabularies actually further this goal? If, as Rogers argues, ‘the discourse of radical movements in nineteenth-century Britain was primarily populist in its appeal, invoking inclusive imagined communities’,2 then aristocratic women’s privileged social status placed most of them outside such communities. Those who sought to influence specific aspects of public life therefore needed to construct new forms of imagined communities based on, but not limited by, the interpersonal dynamics of elite socialisation. The next two chapters consider two upper-class women writers and their high society marital scandals as a case study of how such experiences could become the basis for texts with explicitly polemical intents. Chantal Mouffe, drawing on Carl Schmitt, sees the political as an essentially antagonistic arena, in contrast to Habermas’s and Arendt’s more positive emphases on its discursive possibilities. Mouffe suggests a distinction between politics and the political: ‘by “politics” I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political’.3 In this sense, my Part II applies the political as discussed in Part I – the articulation of values and pursuit of interests – to the realm of politics, with regard to more specific institutions of law 87


and governance. Chapters 4 and 5 show two women, seeking to achieve both individual interests and specific policy changes, consider whether to formulate their own models of the political on antagonistic or discursive terms. My study centres upon the writing of Rosina Bulwer Lytton (Lady Lytton) and Caroline Norton (the Hon. Mrs Norton). Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Caroline Norton differed from the majority of their upper-class contemporaries in their social backgrounds, their Irish origins, the nature of their most effective writing, and the intensely public disasters of their marriages. Yet newspapers, readers, contemporaries, and they themselves, saw them as women of high rank. As such, their polemical literary presences make visible cultural constructions and assumptions about the relationship between individual affliction, social status, and political action. Chapter 4 takes up the socialised dimensions of life-writing to ask if aristocratic women’s narration of their own lives can become the basis for Benhabib’s ‘political project’. Chapter 5 discusses these women’s autobiographical fiction in light of the cultural limitations that critics placed upon aristocratic personal experience. Finally, in Chapter 6, I explore the socialised basis to aristocratic women’s involvement in parliamentary politics, and the conflicting understandings of political identities that this involvement generates. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, born in Ireland in 1802, in Ballywire, Co. Limerick, was the daughter of Francis Wheeler, alcoholic owner of a crumbling estate, and Anna Wheeler (née Doyle), later a prominent feminist and Owenite socialist. Wheeler took her two daughters and left her husband in 1812, finding a circle of followers in Caen. By 1825, Rosina Doyle Wheeler had settled in London with her greatuncle, becoming a protégée of Lady Caroline Lamb. She met Edward Bulwer Lytton (then Edward Lytton Bulwer) in April 1826 and they married on 29 August 1827.4 They had two children, Emily and Edward Robert, born in 1828 and 1831, who were to become wretched instruments in their parents’ mutual torment. Though initially happy, the marriage swiftly disintegrated; the Deed of Separation signed on 19 April 1836 proved the prelude to a life-long battle of startling mutual viciousness. Having lost custody of her children in 1838, following allegations of drinking habits and unsuitable acquaintances, the wife struck back in 1839 with her ostensibly autobiographical novel Cheveley, ruthlessly parodying her husband and his family and friends. This was the opening salvo in a decades-long war of lawsuits, pamphlets and polemical novels directed towards regaining custody,


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gaining a larger allowance, and defending herself against what she perceived as her husband’s murderous conspiracies. Matters reached new levels of bitterness with the death from typhoid of their daughter Emily on 29 April 1848 at the age of nineteen. The situation came to a climax on 8 June 1858, when Rosina Bulwer Lytton swooped down upon her husband’s election rally in Hertfordshire, postered the town with descriptions of him as ‘Sir Liar’, drove him into ignominious flight from the hustings, and addressed the appreciative assembled crowd about her wrongs and his misdeeds. Edward Bulwer Lytton, then Colonial Secretary for Lord Derby’s Tory government, arranged for his wife to be committed for insanity. On 22 June 1858 she was removed to a private asylum, but the public outcry that followed seriously embarrassed the government and forced her release on 17 July 1858. New financial agreements generated an uneasy and limited truce. The death of Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1873 seems to have brought her no peace; Rosina Bulwer Lytton died on 12 March 1882, angry to the end. Caroline Norton was of rather higher social status, but caused even more scandal in her time. Granddaughter of the Anglo-Irish playwright and devout Whig Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she was born in 1808 and married the Hon. George Norton in 1827, probably largely for convenience. The couple had three sons, but George Norton was an increasingly brutal and violent husband. In 1836 he took away the children and brought an action for criminal conversation against William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, who was his wife’s close friend, his own patron, and the then Prime Minister, as a preliminary to divorce. The evidence at the trial, which contemporaries widely saw as a product of Tory manoeuvrings, was scanty and the jury dismissed all charges, but it left Caroline Norton’s reputation in tatters. Already a well-known literary figure, she launched a campaign that eventually led to the 1839 Custody of Infants Bill, the first legislation to grant maternal custody rights, albeit limited to children under seven. However, it took the accidental death of her youngest son, William, in 1842, for George Norton to allow her any real access to her own children, and their financial squabbles continued. With divorce law reform becoming a major concern of Parliament, Norton resumed her polemical writing to canvass successfully for clauses in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 ensuring a separated wife’s economic rights. She continued to write poetry and fiction until shortly before her death in 1877. She was the model for George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways


(1885), drawing on an old (probably baseless) scandal about political information leaked to the press during her relationship with the politician Sidney Herbert. On many levels, the Hon. Mrs Norton’s story has all too much in common with Lady Bulwer Lytton’s. Both were of Irish background and ambiguous social standing. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s claim to upper-class identity is probably the shakiest as the daughter of impoverished Anglo-Irish gentry, who spent her later years on the margins of good society. But she still writes as, and is perceived as, ‘Lady Lytton’, the wife of a baronet, and her work is haunted by the social position that ought to be hers – the spouse of a noted novelist, politician, and peer, and the mistress of a country estate, Knebworth. As for Caroline Norton, whereas several unimpeachably aristocratic families might have their roots in the ruins of country houses, the ruins of Drury Lane Theatre hardly ensured security of social standing for the granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The recurring contemporary response is that they did not quite belong in the high circles in which they moved, as evinced by the comments of Melbourne’s sister Lady Cowper (later Lady Palmerston): ‘I suppose she [Mrs Sheridan] cannot stop the old blood coming out.’5 The fact remains that they were in Lady Palmerston’s orbit to be criticised. Due to their grandfather’s friendship with the Duke of York, they grew up in apartments in Hampton Court; they came out into the highest echelons of London society; and two married into the heart of the aristocracy, with Norton’s sisters Helen and Georgina becoming, respectively, Lady Dufferin (herself an admired poet) and the Duchess of Somerset. Their broken marriages shadow, and ultimately define, each woman’s life and writing – marriages which foundered on marital violence and financial squabbles, and whose bitter aftermaths extended over decades. These marriages both caused public uproar through the Bulwer Lytton lunacy committal scandal and the Norton criminal conversation trial. Both women lost access to their children under the then custody laws, and both suffered the death of a child through what they saw as the carelessness of the proxy carers. Above all, both women came under ferocious attack for their insistence that what took place in their domestic lives was a matter for public discourse. Yet given all these common factors, they had different levels of success in their goals. Rosina Bulwer Lytton had initial commercial triumph with her roman à clef exposures of her husband, and public outcry forced her swift release from the asylum. However, she became


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increasingly marginalised over the years, as both her supporters and her sales declined. Caroline Norton’s reputation never fully recovered from her husband’s allegations of adultery, and battles over custody and money made much of her life unhappy. She managed, however, to claw back a relatively strong social standing and built a reputation as a noted author, particularly for her poetry. Most importantly, twice in Norton’s life her writing helped to influence important legal changes, with the 1839 Custody of Infants Act and several clauses of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. If (for the moment) we define the mark of success as making a specific and lasting intervention into the affairs of state, Caroline Norton won and Rosina Bulwer Lytton lost. These next two chapters ask why this was.


4 Wrongs Make Rebels: Polemical Voices

This chapter considers the problem of public speech for aristocratic wives. The factual works of Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Caroline Norton draw on the various forms of authority which life-writing made available to upper-class women. The spiritual autobiography’s central narrative of a persecuted innocent bearing witness in the face of evil becomes a means of conceptualising their marital conflicts. By bringing their intimate lives into the public exposure of life-writing, however, Bulwer Lytton and Norton go well beyond the scope of writers of wifely domestic memoirs like Combermere, while they must replace Bury’s Queen Caroline and Blessington’s Byron with themselves as the central figures of scandalous memoir. In transforming their autobiographical experiences into writings, and being transformed in turn themselves by crossclass responses to their lives and writing, they enable different articulations of otherwise amorphous or assumed concepts of class and gender.

Rosina Bulwer Lytton Autobiography and myth In a valuable discussion of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s position in literary biography, Virginia Blain points out the domination of ‘two competing myths ... the major one of which dismisses her as a Madwoman, while the minor one apologises for her as a Tragic Victim of Fate’.1 The ‘major’ myth features Edward Bulwer Lytton as a figure of melancholic genius against whom Rosina Bulwer Lytton stands little chance. His faults, however honestly detailed, become tragic flaws in a noble character. Her faults, by contrast, all go towards forming the final annihilating 93


judgement: that Rosina Bulwer Lytton was no lady. The ‘minor’ myth positions her as a wronged and persecuted innocent, driven by desperation to disturbingly extreme responses – Blain notes ‘the embarrassment factor’ of responses to her campaigning.2 Recent years have seen feminist reclamations of Rosina Bulwer Lytton: Marie Mulvey-Roberts views her as a groundbreaking radical incarcerated for ‘her failure to carry out her wifely duties’ and ‘shunned by society after breaking the cultural codes governing femininity’.3 Enjoyable as we may find her avenging advent upon the scene of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s election campaigning, however, it surely requires a rather more pungent description than a mere failure of wifely duties. Like aristocratic women more generally, neither Rosina Bulwer Lytton nor Caroline Norton fits easily into a feminist tradition. In Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s representations, her social exile springs from her committal of an ultimate (female) transgression: the act of public speech. She refers to the ‘anathema’ awaiting any woman who exposes the ‘sacred vices of a Husband’.4 Yet this aesthetics of complaint generates, not a homogeneous autobiographical identity, but a variety of conflicting self-representations, differently shaped by the varied forms her protests take. The texts I am examining are distinct autobiography in being factual rather than fictional in generic intent, but they still do not lend themselves to clear categorisation. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s friend and literary executor Louisa Devey prints sections from an uncompleted manuscript autobiography, together with extracts from the characteristically entitled ‘Nemesis’, possibly written as early as 1833.5 ‘Nemesis’ is autobiography in being Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s undisguised tale of her life – and yet it intriguingly erases the crucial central presence of herself as autobiographer, presenting itself as a narrative ‘in the form of letters, addressed by “the shade of Lord Byron” to “the rising and risen male generation of Great Britain” ’.6 The pamphlet Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal to the Justice and Charity of the English Public (1857) details her husband’s mistreatment of her before and after their separation, and recounts the death of their daughter. Around 1866, she probably wrote A Blighted Life (1880), an energetically scurrilous account of the 1858 committal scandal, possibly in response to the novelist Charles Reade’s investigations into the abuse of lunacy laws.7 Its 1880 publication was without her knowledge, she claimed, and led to another pamphlet that refutes, not authorship but knowledge of publication. As Mulvey-Roberts points out, abandoning the protection of fiction allowed Rosina Bulwer Lytton to make more directly personal attacks, but it also left her legally vulnerable.8 A Blighted Life’s intended audience remains uncertain.

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According to Louisa Devey, the manuscript was inscribed ‘[d]isseminate these facts everywhere, short of publication’.9 Rosina Bulwer Lytton asserts that this text ‘was written as one would write a private letter ... and never, beyond the mere facts, intended for publication’.10 She seems to draw a distinction between the facts recounted in A Blighted Life, available for public consumption, and the language of the text. Her uneasy relationship with direct autobiography may also be rooted in the lack of generic traditions for the dynamics of rage and exposure that drive her writing. ‘The expression of anger’, writes Carolyn Heilbrun, ‘has always been a terrible hurdle in women’s personal progress’.11 As spiritual autobiographer, Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s testimony is not of God’s grace but of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s wickedness. In particular, she explicitly depicts her persecution as founded upon class factors. The status of ‘Lady Lytton’ is both an empowerment and a burden, as other titled women experienced in a less dramatic fashion. Rosina Bulwer Lytton constantly attributes her sufferings to the fact that she is the wife of a rich and important man: in a grim reversal of convention, the husband’s status becomes the means of tormenting rather than raising the wife. His supposed personal wealth only exacerbates her poverty by cutting off the avenues of resource available, as she bitterly claims, even to the wife of a chimney sweep.12 The more defiantly she claims her status (contested by her husband) as ‘Lady Lytton’ (in opposition to the false claimants who are her husband’s mistresses), the greater her oppression; the greater her oppression, the more she will claim her status. In A Blighted Life, she turns the staple persecution narrative of spiritual autobiography into a means of affirming that she is both a lady and a ‘Lady’. Her persecution springs from, and is therefore an endorsement of, this identity. Rosina Bulwer Lytton consciously draws upon the traditions of the domestic memoir – but she is in fact writing an anti-memoir, a parody of the form that turns its most basic assumptions back upon itself. She writes as a daughter, as a mother and above all as a wife, but unlike her contemporaries, she is attempting to destroy, not to build up, a family legacy. Railing at her son Robert for his betrayal, insisting that his real legacy from his baronet father is moral cowardice and a tainted name, A Blighted Life simultaneously seeks to construct an alternative matriarchal inheritance through listing the various aristocratic and literary associations of the objects she will leave her son in her will (48–49). In effect, her narrative itself becomes this legacy, claiming to offer an enduring testimony of maternal devotion and the hope of a pure

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maternal inheritance. Sadly, though, her attempted construction of a mother-son line of descent failed. Her eventual last will and testament bequeathed her papers to a non-familial line of female support (the Devey sisters) and explicitly forbade their integration into the literary inheritance of the Bulwer Lyttons or even of her own male relatives, the Doyles.13 Furthermore, she makes use of the revelatory promise of the scandalous memoir. The scandalous memoirists ‘function, in large part, outside the family. Excluded from it, they also pose a threat to it’.14 However, Rosina Bulwer Lytton strongly resists any identification of herself with ‘fallenness’, despite the fact that she, like several of these sinning memorialists, has entered the public sphere both as a woman (at the Hertfordshire hustings) and as a writer. For Rosina Bulwer Lytton, autobiography becomes a means of reshaping such scandalous action into a signifier of her essential purity. Peterson notes that the exemplar scandalous memoirs are those of actresses, who accentuate deep-seated nineteenth-century concerns about roles and role-playing.15 The vocabulary of acting and disguise permeates Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s attacks on her husband. She continually contrasts his maintenance of a public mask with her open warfare, his disguises with her sincerity. His joint production with Charles Dickens of Not as Bad as We Seem in 1851 for the Guild of Literature and Art was menaced by her parodic advertisements for a work to be called Even Worse Than We Seem, or The Real Side of Our Characters.16 Yet this anti-theatrical rhetoric means that her work bases itself upon a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, there are the proverbial negative constructions of women’s sexuality in terms of both prostitution and acting (which she herself draws upon in her allegations about her husband’s mistresses).17 On the other hand, there is her desire to lay claim to a stage, in life and in writing. In a world where, as Richard Sennett argues, appearances were becoming signs of ‘true’ character, the ability to perform one’s ‘real personality’ was paramount.18 On the platform at Hertfordshire, she must perform the melodramatic role of injured wife, since only by this performance can its truth be recognised. Then she must again reshape her actions, this time through autobiography, into the mode most appropriate for gaining the support of her putative readers. Madness and motherhood Through the role-playing of melodrama Rosina Bulwer Lytton asserts herself to be a lady. However, since her autobiographical voice emerges by definition through a supposed violation of the domestic hearth, she


can claim this genteel identity only through an uneasy engagement with different class constructions of the nature of sanity. Ideas of madness have played an increasingly important part in critical examinations of Victorian gender constructs and representations of the working class.19 Yet critics have placed less emphasis on the extent to which breaches of correct class manners can also be characterised as forms of insanity. A woman’s rage is problematic only in the wrong subject: a chimney sweep’s wife may harangue in peace but a lady says just what she ought. ‘ “Moral insanity” ’, comments Elaine Showalter, ‘redefined madness, not as a loss of reason, but as deviance from socially accepted behaviour’.20 Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s supposed insanity arises not merely from the fact that she is a woman, but that she is a lady. As Blain observes, the ‘insistence on seeing her rage as a form of dementia is very understandable, given its social context’.21 Her committal for insanity is only the real-life climax of her decades-long textual struggle over the power to define the social parameters of madness. Helen Small, discussing a tradition of aristocratic insanity in literature, suggests that madwomen ‘were moving down the social hierarchy in British fiction of the 1820s and 1830s’.22 Certainly the intensified associations between madness and the (breaching of) the domestic hearth – or rather, the intensified social significance of the domestic hearth – ensure the appropriation of madness as a concept to the performance purposes of middle-class ideology. The private hearth becomes the testing-ground for the public metaphor. When one of the attendants urges her to speak like a lady as she protests against her committal, Rosina Bulwer Lytton insists on viewing speech constraints as relative to circumstance rather than as absolute criteria of individual (ladylike) identity: ‘I am treated so like one, that I certainly ought’ (Blighted 35). Her violent language, she argues, ‘is my only safety-valve, my only relief. For, gorged as I am with ever-increasing and never-redressed outrages and insults, I should have burst long ago but for it’.23 In her acts of writing she is prepared to embrace madness – or the breaking of private domestic bonds socially construed in terms of madness – as selfempowerment, the generator of her crusading public voice. Rosina Bulwer Lytton offers a template for feminist readings of madness as an expression of the anger of the creative self against patriarchal structures.24 Yet in her discussion of these perspectives, Showalter has cautioned us against ‘romanticising and endorsing madness as a desirable form of rebellion rather than seeing it as the desperate communication of the powerless’.25 Rosina Bulwer Lytton does not fall into this trap: her writings are actually assertions of sanity. Even as she incorporates


ideologies of madness in her writing, she simultaneously accepts the ideological alignments of stable class status, ‘true’ womanhood and unimpaired sanity implicit in society’s critique of her behaviour. Her work effectively accedes to these values and aims to co-opt them. When she recounts the death of her daughter Emily in April 1848, and her own committal for lunacy in June 1858, she draws upon discourses of madness only to obviate them in favour of an overriding discourse of class-centred sanity. Mary Poovey has explored the way in which nineteenth-century medical discourses regarding childbirth, hysteria and physiology gave associations between madness and motherhood new credibility for the Victorian period.26 As the century progressed, motherhood became an increasingly charged concept. Placed as the foundation stone for the developing bourgeois domestic ideal, it is an ideal for which there is no neutral ground. One is either a good mother, and hence an angel, or else a bad mother, and to be able to construct someone as a bad mother is, in effect, to construct them as a madwoman. So when Rosina Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of her novels of ‘the minor and highly popular little pastime of outraging a woman at every source, till she curses not only the blasphemous mockery of the name of wife, but the still greater one of mother’, to her contemporary readers she was, in effect, declaring herself a madwoman.27 Yet when it comes to autobiography, Rosina Bulwer Lytton uses the act of writing about motherhood as a means to assert rationality. Toni Bowers argues that the ideal of motherhood became an increasingly private one – that is, removed from participation in a public world – during the eighteenth century. 28 This privacy, though, does not prevent the maternal ideal from becoming the platform for a public voice, as Bowers demonstrates with the tale of Lady Sarah Pennington. Pennington, estranged from her husband who denied access to her children, coded her public voice as a private address: she represents her bestselling conduct book, An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters (1761), as a personal letter to her daughter. Yet while she ‘exploits the public forum of print in order to engage in an intimate communication with her daughter’, she also ‘exploits her intimate relationship with her daughter in order to make public her grievances against [her husband]’. As a result, the ‘duties of motherhood, that most private of relations, take place in print, that most public of spaces’. 29 Through the public articulation of private motherhood, Pennington gained respect for her maternal devotion, and thus could re-inscribe herself as a chaste woman.30 This outcome suggests an aristocratic tradition upon which Rosina Bulwer Lytton could draw.


Unlike Pennington, however, her insistence that she is addressing ‘the English Public’ rejects any reading of her work as an intimate, interpersonal communication. Catherine Hall notes that a recurring aspect of middle-class critiques of aristocratic culture was that ‘society women’ neglected responsibilities to their families in favour of more worldly pursuits.31 In reality, aristocratic familial relationships varied dramatically depending on the individual families.32 Nevertheless, whereas the perceived responsibilities of the middle-class woman centre upon the individual home, those of the aristocratic woman are towards a whole (adult) social circle.33 Rosina Bulwer Lytton remained caught between the two. Following their daughter Emily’s death, each of the parents blamed the other. Both narratives align Rosina Bulwer Lytton with a discourse of madness. In her husband’s representations, she is the dangerously unstable wife who forces her way into the house and terrifies Emily into relapse and death.34 In her own representations, her husband’s exactions and neglect bring the daughter enslaved to a father’s career to this squalid end – but her narrative is a discourse of frenzy. Even as Emily Lytton lies on her deathbed, her mother longs to shriek in agony, and the physical sufferings of the daughter are re-enacted twofold in the anguish of the mother’s mind.35 Why does Rosina Bulwer Lytton claim precisely the sort of unstable frenzy that her enemies attribute to her? The answer lies in the use she makes of contemporary constructions of madness. Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal (1857) gives her first (public) account of Emily’s death. The frenzy of anguish that she describes herself as enduring links the role of motherhood with the iconoclastic discourses of insanity underlying her breaching of the barriers of private life. Edward Bulwer Lytton and his supporters (in suppressing the first edition of her novel Very Successful!) can declare the truth to be a libel, which, continues the Appeal, is analogous to declaring a mother to be no relation to her child.36 Yet the mother’s narrative in fact insists upon a fundamental sanity, one that directly contradicts the father’s construction of manic and ultimately murderous motherhood. (Ironically, Edward Bulwer Lytton himself pre-empted this construction with Lucretia; or, the Children of the Night [1846].) In Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s narrative, the delirious girl remains unaware of her mother’s presence due to the mother’s own self-restraint: ‘I bit my lips through, til the blood came to prevent a shriek of agony escaping me.’37 The real linguistic emphasis lies not upon frenzy but upon suppressed frenzy: maternal anguish kept stifled by maternal care, insanity kept bridled by sanity – and uncontrolled behaviour held in by


the natural self-control of the well-bred woman expected to rise to any crisis. This is the point upon which the Bulwer Lyttons’ narratives divide, with the male story representing an uncontrolled female rage (not even anguish) that is truly mad in its overwhelming of maternal care. Most damagingly, this rage is an indecorous one: the outburst of an unstable and inherently vulgar woman who in the crisis cannot control herself and so brings about her daughter’s death. Leslie Mitchell notes the dramatic variations in Robert Lytton’s (unofficial) versions of his sister’s death.38 This death clearly caused Edward Bulwer Lytton great sorrow, but at least some rebuke was owing to his carelessness. 39 The fact remains – and, in Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s narrative, becomes paramount – that the only daughter of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton should not have died of typhoid fever in a London boarding house. In the accusations that Emily’s mother flings at him, the squalid surroundings in which she dies form a major charge. Emily becomes the ultimate receptacle, daughter of a much lesser Milton ‘slaved to death over her father’s German Translations’, eventually shut out even from the comfortable death that her inherited social status ought to have given her.40 The notice stating the place of her death to be the family estate, Knebworth – and Edward Bulwer Lytton’s furious response to the counter-notice, inserted by his wife’s supporters, stating the exact location and cause of death – makes clear that we cannot separate Emily Lytton’s wretched death from the social aspect of her parents’ warfare.41 So even as Rosina Bulwer Lytton seeks to play off the failure of bourgeois domesticity (as represented by diseased paternity) against the ultimate triumph of the domestic hearth (as represented by heroic maternity), she must do so by resorting to constructions of sanity rooted in upper-class values defining lady-like behaviour. Loss of status is the way in which she can hurt her husband most, but it is also less likely to appeal to a bourgeois exaltation of motherhood as a redeeming, cross-class, and privatised force. A further grim twist emerges from the recurring theme of inheritance and fatality, in her claim that Edward Bulwer Lytton ‘set forth that both my father and my mother died mad’ (Blighted 41). Rosina Bulwer Lytton herself highlights the traditionally negative characterisation of maternal inheritance in her acute observation that her husband absorbs even his own son in the remorseless logic of descent: ‘this unscrupulous demon would, without one touch of remorse, brand with a triple hereditary taint of insanity his only son!’ To her husband’s invocation of a diseased maternal legacy, she opposes a corrective


image of corrupted paternal inheritance: ‘at least’, she continues, ‘his only legitimate son, who will have the quite sufficient misfortune of inheriting the name of so infamous a father’ (Blighted 41–42). A matriarchal line of descent, however, whether biological or intellectual, does not necessarily offer the woman writer an uncomplicated escape from the traumas of inheritance. Sadleir characterises Anna Wheeler as a ‘repellent sibyl’ who ‘stoked with the solemn cruelty of her fanaticism the fires of her daughter’s hatred’,42 whereas Mulvey-Roberts redeems this intellectual inheritance as part of a legacy of feminist empowerment (one that also includes Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s granddaughter, the suffragist Constance Lytton).43 Yet Mulvey-Roberts also acknowledges the tensions of this alternatively estranged and supportive mother-daughter relationship. These differing interpretations suggest the more general complexities of this relationship for aristocratic women, for whom convention really only marks out paternal descent.44 Significantly, while the sanity of her mother (feminist and socialist writer) is a casually dismissed matter of common sense and personal witness, Rosina Bulwer Lytton defends the sanity of her father (an unstable alcoholic) in explicitly class-oriented terms. ‘Now my father had had one of the most absurdly splendid public funerals for a Commoner that ever was seen, being Grand Master of some Masonic Lodge – and ostentatious burials are not generally bestowed on lunatics; and my poor mother having been only ten years dead, anyone could have refuted that lie’ (Blighted 42). The unease with which Rosina Bulwer Lytton characterises the class connotations of maternal inheritance reflects the experience of upperclass women in possession of an individual literary heritage that may be incompatible with their roles as channels of family property and the family name. The notorious episode of the 1858 lunacy committal generates a similar pattern of ostensible madness, actual sanity, and fundamentally unsettled class relations. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s own accounts represent it as the climax of a systematic process of persecution in which her husband exercises his influence in political, literary, and social life to beset her with spies, destroy her reputation, and possibly even murder her. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s defenders themselves refer to it with some sheepishness.45 Whichever way we look at it, there can be no doubt that even in a country with such notoriously lax lunacy laws, Edward Bulwer Lytton was unlikely to have been able to commit his wife with such speed had he not by then been Sir Edward, Lord Derby’s newly appointed Colonial Secretary. He also drew upon the services of John Forster, man

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of letters, literary circles’ chief busybody, then Secretary to the Lunacy Commission, and later himself a Lunacy Commissioner. (Forster had previously been active in searching for divorce evidence against his friend’s troublesome wife.46) The Daily Telegraph contends that ‘the baronet’s wife may be released from the terrible captivity ... but what of humbler persons? What of the domestic victims in whose name no publicity is involved.’47 Rosina Bulwer Lytton, by contrast, insists that her status as baronet’s wife is precisely the root of her sufferings. The extent of the husband’s power becomes the means by which to define the boundaries (geographical and figurative) of the wife’s sufferings. For all the extremity of A Blighted Life, newspapers hinted at conspiracy in high places in a manner disconcertingly similar to that of the victim’s supposedly paranoiac point of view.48 Moreover, as Marilyn Kurata notes, Edward Bulwer Lytton had been inquiring into the possibilities of committing his wife in March 1858, well before the election scandal – and had accumulated several written opinions supporting a diagnosis of insanity, despite the fact that none of the surgeons concerned had met or interviewed his wife.49 Ironically enough, Kurata suggests that the news of her husband’s previous inquiries about having her committed may have prompted her actions 50 Yet, as Rosina Bulwer Lytton herself sardonically recognises, editors’ recognitions of the newsworthy potential of the committal of ‘Lady Lytton’ fuelled the public outcry that procured her swift release (Blighted 42). Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s accounts of her false committal feed back into long-standing literary traditions of aristocratic madness. Yet they also form a distinctively upper-class intervention into a newer discourse about sanity. By 1858, the ease with which family members (particularly husbands) could obtain a committal was a source of increasing public concern, which the Hertfordshire scandal intensified. This concern became a staple of the sensation novel in the 1860s, most famously in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Indeed, the Bulwer Lytton committal may have directly influenced Collins’s plot, in which a wicked baronet shuts away his inconvenient wife in an asylum.51 (Rosina Bulwer Lytton herself – unlike her husband – approved of Collins’s novel, but considered Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco ‘mere sucking doves compared to the fiends I have to deal with’.)52 Such developments mean that A Blighted Life is written in the context of (and possibly in direct response to) such sensational fictional exposés as Charles Reade’s Hard Cash (1863). When A Blighted Life appeared in 1880, it also followed on the impact of Georgina Weldon’s How I Escaped from the Mad Doctors (1879). These narratives are stories of sanity, of sane virtue


fighting off the attacks of villains so malevolent that the true madness lies in them. In A Blighted Life Rosina Bulwer Lytton makes use of classic melodramatic tropes, but these co-exist with an ongoing burlesque undercurrent, thus allowing her to achieve dual goals of re-inscribing her disruptive behaviour within the sanctions of class and gender ideals and of deriding her husband. She makes full use of the ‘psychic symbols’, details of behaviour or feeling, through which, claims Peter Brooks, stage melodrama constructs immediately recognisable character types.53 Edward Bulwer Lytton himself is physically abhorrent – ‘what a fiendish past and what a hellish future are written in that worst bad man’s face’ – and continually shrinks from his wife’s presence, as does the melodramatic villain from the pure light of the melodramatic heroine’s presence (Blighted 26).54 Her actions take to an extreme the way in which the role of melodrama’s traditional female protagonist, despite apparent weakness, is actually an enlargement and intensification of the hero’s.55 The key to the text lies in the two scenes of confrontation between the husband and wife – at the electoral hustings and during her committal in London – each aborted by Edward Bulwer Lytton’s flight. A Blighted Life heavily codes these scenes as the archetypal confrontation between good (in the form of the heroine) and evil (in the form of the villain) that Hughes identifies as the ideological crux of melodrama.56 Yet Edward Bulwer Lytton is a ludicrous as well as an abhorrent figure, whether bounding from the Hertford hustings through a flowerbed, or lurking behind a door as his lackeys gather around to seize upon his heroically defiant wife. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s representation of herself as the bringer of truth and justice is inseparable from her instinctive perception of the embarrassing comic potential of her husband’s undignified flight. If the events themselves are supremely dramatic, the way in which they are characterised ensures the exploitation of their melodramatic – and burlesque – potential to the highest degree. Her initial accounts of her ordeal were in letters to friends (letters whose return she requested for herself and others to refer to). She reproduces these accounts in A Blighted Life, but the later narrative includes far more specifically descriptive detail.57 For example, her husband acquires ‘cold, pale, fiendish, lack-lustre eyes’, enhancing his representation as a melodrama villain, while the added detail of his fleeing through some flowerbeds also renders him supremely ridiculous (Blighted 28). In shaping autobiography through melodramatic representations, Rosina Bulwer Lytton seeks to have her breach of social conventions (re)

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read as pure moral action. In so doing, she might appear to be enacting a rejection of class affiliations. Her account highlights the supportive response of the crowd to her speech. Display, as we see in Chapter 6, was a vital component of electoral rituals, and both Vernon’s and Joyce’s investigations of political vocabularies emphasise the inclusive function of melodrama.58 Hadley, analysing the control functions of theatricalised displays of state power, nevertheless insists that the ‘melodramatic mode’ could become an expression of lower-class protest and a means for the formation of a communal identity.59 In foregrounding her husband’s sexual immorality, Rosina Bulwer Lytton is accessing melodrama’s anti-aristocratic discourses, aligning herself with the working-class against evil aristocratic seducers.60 Melodrama’s radical potential has, nevertheless, definite limitations. ‘The language of melodrama and the idealization of domesticity that underwrote it’, contends Poovey, ‘worked against both a genuine recognition of the interests women shared, especially across class lines, and the entry of women as a group into the “public” sphere of politics and business’.61 Although Rosina Bulwer Lytton may wear the guise of anti-aristocratic solidarity, her narrative actually functions as an affirmation of her essential sanity and consequently, as we have seen, her essential social status. For all that she attacks ‘our putrescently rotten and profligate Aristocracy’ (Blighted 29), she insists throughout upon her good breeding and integral quality in opposition to that of her persecutors. The function of ‘the mob’ is not to meet her on equal territory; it is, rather, to bear admiring witness to their social superior’s sanity. When she tells them of her husband’s accusations of madness, her tale produces (in her narrative) cries of ‘that won’t do ... now that we have seen and heard you’ (Blighted 29). In her fiction, she can supply her alter egos with heroes, but in autobiography (especially given her cynicism about the motivations of the Press and her supporters) Rosina Bulwer Lytton has to cast herself as heroine and hero both. She is the imperilled and the rescuer, menaced by her pure resistance to villainy but rescued by her own rationality – or rather, her ability to perform her rationality for the commissioners (Blighted 39–40). This duality of role brings to the fore the representative problem that autobiography poses for her. ‘Melodrama’, writes Walkowitz, ‘offered a powerful cultural resource for female political expression, but it set limitations on what could be said, particularly in relation to female agency and desire’.62 The defining feature of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s authorship is her seizure of agency. Her writings must lay claim to innate class status, unstained femininity and unimpaired


sanity, through recounting actions that the vocabularies available to her can only categorise as vulgar, unwomanly, and mad. Melodramatic language offers a persuasive means of asserting her social and moral standing, but it brings with it a tradition of passive victimisation. This does not make it wholly incompatible with the capacity to claim a public voice. Both Caroline Norton and, later, Josephine Butler use the melodramatic mode in their successful campaigns to bring about legal reform. However, they justify their public interventions by projecting tropes of victimisation onto other, generally lower-class, women.63 Rosina Bulwer Lytton, in contrast, disregards many potential bonds of gendered alignment, even those that would endorse both her agency and her supposedly paranoid perspective on the literary world. As John Sutherland observes, by the end of 1858 the three leading novelists of the age, Thackeray, Dickens, and Lytton ... had all put their wives away ... . The private lunatic asylum was an actual (or in Dickens’s case an obliquely threatened) weapon in all three husbands’ establishing their social and authorial freedom from vexatious spouses and their in-laws.64 Rosina Bulwer Lytton frequently praises Thackeray’s writing, although she parodies him in her novel Cheveley (which Thackeray then turned down as reader for the publisher James Fraser, and denounced).65 Similarly, the plight of Catherine Dickens seems not to merit attention (even though her treatment by Dickens rather enhances the appeal of furious resentment as a wifely option). Unlike Caroline Norton, Rosina Bulwer Lytton does not really position herself consistently as the spokesperson for other sufferers: for her, autobiography remains a highly personalised genre. Its function is to tell her story. Rather than melodrama’s usual saintly sufferer – who features in her fictional self-representations, as I show in the next chapter – her autobiographical writing around 1866 casts her as the protagonist of a sensation novel. Instead of a passive, angelic sufferer, she emerges as the violently deviant figure of a genre obsessed with questions of madness and identity. Small discusses the increasing mid-century tendency in literature to create surrogate figures for the violence associated with women’s madness: ‘many of these women act out revenge plots from which the novels’ more aristocratic heroines are carefully distanced’.66 Rosina Bulwer Lytton is in this respect far from her fictional creations: she takes on the project of revenge herself, formulating a public voice so forceful as to appear insane. Unlike Walter Scott’s maddened Bride of Lammermoor, the

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infliction of (figurative) violence upon her husband brings her not to incoherence, but to the articulation of further protest. The taunt implicit in Lucy Ashton’s solitary ‘so, you have ta’en up your bonny bridegroom?’ becomes the recurring theme for Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s repeated perpetration of violence upon the private life and public character of her husband.67 These disrupted representations of a gendered and class-based sanity must also grapple with questions of race. Her compatriot Lady Blessington makes the correlation between Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s public campaigns and a racialised insanity. Writing sympathetically to Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1836, Blessington observes that I pity her exceedingly, because to understand her wrong-headedness, one must be Irish ... the violence inherent to all who owe their birth to it, a violence originating in imagination so excitable and temper so irascible that poor Reason can but rarely govern its victims. You cold English cannot excuse the faults of us hot-headed Irish, but we have many victims [sic?] to atone for them.68 Just as Blessington could identify with Byron and yet sympathetically project emotions of pride and unhappiness onto Lady Byron,69 so too she can imaginatively align herself with both her friend and his wife. Blessington’s language echoes her novel The Repealers, which establishes sympathy for the Irish rebels of 1798 by contending that in ‘the Irish character all the elements of good are to be found in abundance, but these are turned into instruments of destruction by the demagogues who know how to apply the spark to inflammable and evil passions’.70 Evil passions, then, can belong to male and female ‘rebels’ alike, and women’s rage could be as great a, if not a greater, source of fear as women’s sexuality. ‘Still, I admit’, Blessington’s letter continues, abruptly discarding her previous identification in favour of a curious selfalignment with her male English correspondent, ‘that though I should like an Irishwoman for my mother or sister, for Irishwomen are naturally chaste, I should be afraid to have one for my wife, because they are all cursed with fiery tempers’.71 Blessington’s earlier ‘us ... Irish’ becomes ‘they’ in the face of a woman’s rage. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s ‘deviance’ remains outside easy critical categories. The need to contain all forms of supposedly anti-domestic behaviour within ideas of sanity and insanity fragments constructions of feminine domestic ideals. Bulwer Lytton herself was profoundly ambivalent about her Irishness, itself a questionable entity given the ambiguities of


Anglo-Irish identity. Sadleir notes an anecdote of her flinging open the windows of her London drawing room after a dinner for Daniel O’Connell and his supporters, claiming to be ‘fumigating’ it of the brogue.72 Yet she remained proud of both her mother’s and her uncle’s Anglo-Irish connections, particularly their association with the statesman Henry Grattan, Anna Wheeler’s godfather. A sense of difference, of non-Englishness, can become a means of linguistic empowerment in her fiction, as when her closest alter ego Miriam Sedley asserts her right to privacy by writing a letter in ‘the most classical Clanfuddle’, as she assures her bemused headmistress.73 A central trope of colonial discourse equates empire and sanity, thus coding unrest or opposition to colonial rule as insanity.74 It is, therefore, too gloriously appropriate to pass over that in 1858, the carefully nuanced and vainly reassuring reports in The Times regarding the Bulwer Lytton committal scandal lay side-by-side with the latest reports from India regarding the Sepoy Rebellion. The announcement that ‘the friends of Lady Bulwer Lytton, who has recently been placed in a lunatic asylum near London, are about to take steps to endeavour to establish her sanity’ shares the same space as a sharp rebuke regarding ‘the folly of restoring weapons to native regiments’.75 The most double-edged example of all is the text of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s speech to the electors of Hertford on 8 June 1858, printed and contextualised by The Times without the slightest reference to the descent of his enraged wife. Instead, the reader is told, the ‘right hon. baronet concluded by proposing a vote of thanks to the High Sheriff’, and after being seconded ‘the vote of thanks was passed by acclamation, and the proceedings terminated’.76 An organ of the discursive public sphere elides the voice of rage – particularly the voice of unladylike rage – that nevertheless remains as the classic suppressed text of the colonised subject. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s speech declares that the ‘all-important and paramount consideration immediately before us is the pacification of India, and the construction of an administrative system under which capital and civilisation may become the quiet but certain agencies for confirming our rule and allaying disaffection’. The example that he cites is Ireland: ‘there is now no more tranquil or more flourishing part of her Majesty’s dominions than Ireland ... We must first convince the natives that a rebellion is as hopeless and delusive for them as the idea of repeal proved to the Irish’.77 It is unlikely that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, newly appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies, appreciated the irony when, raising his eyes in the middle of his associate’s speech shortly afterwards, he beheld the advent of a far from tranquil Irishwoman not


pacified by capital and civilisation. Human nature, Edward Bulwer Lytton assured his auditors, ‘remains the same, whether in Europe or in Asia; and wherever you find a man you find a creature who can be tamed’.78 This shift between ‘human’ and ‘man’ enables the structures of elision and categorisation that wipe Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s speech from the record and that place her in a madhouse. It also suggests the extent to which women’s public rage lies outside easy structures of categorisation – in an uneasy position between several worlds exemplified by that of Rosina Bulwer Lytton herself. Anglo-Irish by birth, aligned with the revolt of the colonised through her actions, in her autobiographical self-fashioning she is performing what Chase and Levenson identify as ‘another influential “mutiny” [that is, Sepoy Rebellion] topos: the British woman roused to righteous violence’ (my emphasis).79 In light of my discussion, I consider Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s representation of herself as alienated exile in a corrupt world of interlocking conspiracies to be unreliable, disproportionate and, especially in her later work, paranoiac. Yet we cannot simply dismiss her depiction of social, political, and literary worlds enmeshed in symbiotic interaction as a fantasy. It is, rather, a gothically extreme perception of the essential interconnectedness of these mid-nineteenth-century circles of power.80 There is nothing paranoid about Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s depiction of a married woman’s financial dependency, lack of legal identity, and consequent vulnerability. Her representation of a society dominated by male selfishness and venality can also be read as a gendered personalisation of universalising Owenite social critiques (such as those of her mother Anna Wheeler), which see society’s prioritising of individual interests over union and co-operation as ruinous.81 This universal system requires a universal cure, a belief in curative possibilities that highlights the paradox underlying Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s attacks: if society is as uniformly hostile as her tirades suggest, then her capacity for complaint is valueless. Although dominated by male wealth and male power, social, literary and political worlds must retain some point of access, some means through which her complaint can have an effect. These worlds therefore are not so much sealed spheres of privileged access as disputed territory. Attacking society as corrupt, she must also conciliate it by the forming of strategic ideological alliances, which she so conspicuously fails to do. Rosina Bulwer Lytton carries her logic of universal conspiracy to such an extent that her rhetoric of alienation and exclusion runs the risk of becoming a selffulfilling prophecy. Yet her failure on one level of politics is a sign of


her all too successful wider political vision: she represents the exclusionary power dynamics of her not-so-imaginary nation with a bitter clarity that ultimately obstructs her chances of inclusion.

Caroline Norton Leading the nation state I am in broad agreement with Mary Poovey’s definitive discussion of Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, but Poovey’s categorisation of Norton as ‘upper middle-class’ (which in the rest of the chapter generally becomes ‘middle-class’) evades the vital aspect of Norton’s self-representation as a member of the aristocracy.82 Recognising this adds another dimension of social control to the omnipresent class barriers Poovey identifies in Norton’s texts.83 The pragmatic and rhetorical uses Norton makes of her social status, however, add an underlying threat to the essentialist gender divisions that Poovey (rightly) sees her rhetoric as upholding. Both Norton’s suffering and her success undermine ideals of women’s apolitical symbolic influence, instead prioritising socialised modes of action to produce specific political effects. Norton’s use of the prose pamphlet as a mode of protest writing allows her to combine an explicitly politicised voice with strategic use of her interpersonal networks of social and literary connections. My examination of Norton’s autobiographically inflected writings traces a transition between her custody law pamphlets of the 1830s, which construct a model of progressive aristocratic leadership, and her divorce law pamphlets of the 1850s, which transform this into a model of aristocratic women’s leadership. I view Norton’s 1830s pamphlets as invoking a Whig vocabulary of progressive continuity in calling for upper-class leaders to defend middle-class domestic values, and thus protect English mothers within their separate sphere. Her 1840s pamphlets addressing social problem issues foreground the control functions of this model of cross-class moral union in maintaining the power of the state. By the 1850s, however, her analysis, not just of the marriage laws, but also of the nature of marriage itself, brings the hegemony of this control into question. In expanding her call for protection from mothers to wives, and from maternal claims to economic claims, Norton reworks her earlier model to transform herself into an aristocratic leader for victimised womanhood. Her depictions of the sufferings of wives are successful because they hold out the politicisation of women as a threat. Rather

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than have this threat fulfilled, male legislators yield to her less alarming demands even as they throw out the Married Women’s Property Bill of 1857. The agonising explosion of her private life into the public news with her husband’s suit against Melbourne, and the separation from her sons, left Norton with two choices in 1836: socially and legally, she could fight or she could flee. On both fronts, she chose to fight. Refusing to allow the 1836 trial to drive her into social confinement, she instead remained exposed to the view of the fashionable world. Ironically, the party political intrigues that had helped to put her domestic hearth upon a public stage were of some assistance to her own self-staging: her initial re-acceptance into society became a party question.84 Her decision to fight her legal position, however, meant exposure of herself to a wider reading audience, and so could damage her precarious social position amongst her elite contemporaries by keeping the scandal before the public eye. Even Norton’s closest supporters largely discouraged this action. She had, therefore, ample incentive to choose a genre that would offer her private life some protection. Unlike Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Norton was already a well-known writer when she began campaigning in 1837, yet she explicitly rejected fiction as a satisfactory medium for polemical writing. Perhaps more surprisingly, she also rejected poetry. Her reputation as a poet stood high enough by 1840 for Hartley Coleridge to hail her as ‘the Byron of modern poetesses’ and rank her above Elizabeth Barrett Browning.85 Poetry had already served Norton both as a channel for her personal sufferings – male betrayal and female wretchedness were frequent themes – and as a means of claiming public authority – her long 1836 social problem poem A Voice from the Factories is an attack on child labour. Nor would she abandon this route to polemical authority in later years: The Child of the Islands (1845) is Norton’s own ‘Condition of England’ address, coming out in the same year as Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil. Poetry was also a highly acceptable medium: ‘it was possible to be a poet and a lady ... As a poet [Norton] is praised for her life of “elegant retirement”; eight years later when she becomes a polemicist ... she will be reviled as a “monster” and a “she-beast” ’.86 So why, then, did Norton select prose pamphlets as her mode of addressing the public on the topic of reform to the custody laws? This choice of genre seems close to kamikaze: she is courting public notoriety without the shelter or even the financial benefits of fictional or lyric narratives. The first-person voice of an autobiographical pamphlet is inevitably more directly vulnerable to personalised attack than the ‘I’ of either


fiction or lyric poetry, and there were no shortages of such attacks on Norton as the Infant Custody Bill went through Parliament. Yet for all that, her choice of form was astute. The pamphlet form allows Norton to direct her public voice towards laws rather than people; unlike Rosina Bulwer Lytton, she carefully subordinates the demands of autobiography to her calls for specific legal changes. She can still tell her life-story, but as a legal case study: ‘I have learned the law respecting women, piece-meal, by suffering from every one of its defects of protection’ (LQ 61).87 In this respect Norton possesses a more flexible voice than MPs in Parliament, who (in keeping with Habermas’s definitions of appropriate nineteenth-century public discourse) spoke under injunctions forbidding ‘too personal’ statements.88 This is the pamphlet form’s great strength: instead of the imaginative excess so often associated with women’s fiction at the time, or the subjective, emotive irrationality associated with poetry, particularly ‘feminine’ lyric poetry like Norton’s,89 the writer can claim the factual, rational authority so often denied to women’s texts. This was especially the case for her 1838 pamphlet A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor, for which she assumed the detached male identity ‘Pearce Stevenson’. Margaret Forster notes that Norton’s ‘prose style, which had always been clear and direct, adapted itself well to polemic’.90 With such a voice, she can address matters of state. Yet she can incorporate other generic models within the same form to ‘reverse’ this movement towards objective public speech, claiming for her public utterances a moral authority founded in the privacy of individual feeling and the domestic hearth. She thus attains communal relevance and hence politicised import, through an appeal to specific experience. Poovey emphasises Norton’s invocation of melodramatic rhetoric in factual writings, thus capitalising ‘on the greater latitude granted literature to explore these matters’, yet also deciding that ‘to remain within literary discourse was to be excluded from the political realm where legislation ... was formulated’.91 Melodrama, as Hadley’s study of Norton puts it, ‘is the ideal genre for the narration of the woman’s personal story’.92 Whereas Rosina Bulwer Lytton, as we saw, struggles to reconcile melodrama’s reinstatement of gender differences and inscription of women’s passivity with her own disruptive agency, Norton embraces these limitations in her cry for protection. She figures herself as the archetypal Angel in the House that Coventry Patmore celebrated in his poetry, and she accordingly laments the violation of her hearth. Although she faces the same problem of having to play melodrama’s heroic defender, where Rosina Bulwer Lytton pushed herself

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onto the public stage, Norton can (not unreasonably) represent herself as having been reluctantly hauled there by the 1836 legal action. Her central insight, Chase and Levenson maintain, was that ‘having fallen into the theater of publicity, she would find her best hope in performing on that open stage’.93 She thus replaces the epistemological uncertainty that Barbara Leckie sees as intrinsic to the divorce court spectacle with melodrama’s moral clarity.94 In her fine discussion of Norton’s writing, Yopie Prins draws attention to another generic model, nineteenth-century sentimental lyric, which allows the ‘self-conscious performance of the female complaint’. The lyric model, Prins says, underlies Norton’s circulation in the public sphere, because the sentimental poetess ‘has the implicitly political function of representing public concerns as if they were private ... Norton is transformed not from but into “the private sufferer” ’. This figure of the private sufferer can utter an appeal for help ‘that seems personal but is detached from the expression of any particular person’.95 As I see it, the narrative possibilities of the pamphlet form allow Norton to combine both melodrama and sentimental lyric in order to personalise and soften the pamphlet’s primary function: a mode of addressing specific aspects of public policy. Yet simultaneously she can make the association of her chosen form with objective rationality a justification for making autobiographical experience into an affair of state. The pamphlet form fits easily alongside the networks of interpersonal connections and influence upon which Norton drew to promote her cause. Looking back, she notes: ‘I was aided in my first battle against fortune, by persons of great rank and influence’ (LQ 99). Although her main works on the Infant Custody Bill were anonymous or pseudonymous, Norton seems to have made little if any effort to conceal her authorship, and, from an early stage, print discourse closely identified her with, and attacked her on, the issue. This was a campaign fought out in the public view. Yet alongside this, Norton was waging another campaign far more in keeping with traditional forms of aristocratic women’s political action. She carefully targeted an influential readership that included several members of the Lords and Commons, methodically distributing her pamphlets to them. Despite the fragility of her post-1836 social position, Norton was still a political and literary insider. As Whig devotee, intimate of (some of) the top drawing-rooms including those of her loyal and well-connected siblings, granddaughter of Sheridan, and an established figure in the literary circles of the day, she had far more influential resources of support to draw upon than did Rosina Bulwer Lytton. Through these


connections, she could indirectly speak in the Parliament from which her sex shut her out. Her introduction by her friend Abraham Hayward to the eminent barrister, dramatist and MP Thomas Noon Talfourd in 1837 led to their partnership in getting the Custody of Infants Bill passed. Talfourd, who had been junior counsel for Melbourne, was also a significant figure in the London literary scene.96 He was an important mover in amending the laws of copyright, and Dickens dedicated The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) to him (Bardell v Pickwick may have been inspired by the ludicrousness of the evidence presented against Melbourne, which Dickens witnessed when reporting on the trial for the Morning Chronicle). Again, we see that Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s apparent paranoia is not without foundation: her allegation that Talfourd returned a statement of her custody case unread because he was a literary insider is probably quite true (Blighted 6). Norton, in contrast, was one of the alleged ‘clique’, and she could gain his support. Her networks retained their potency later in the century. During the 1857 divorce debates, Lord Lyndhurst quoted extensively from Norton’s Review of the Divorce Bill of 1856 (1857), although he referred to it only as the work of ‘an eloquent writer’.97 Impressive as her analysis was, it was the fact of Lord Lyndhurst being another old friend that allowed the ventriloquising of her polemical voice in the House of Lords. Norton also resorted to classic upper-class women’s methods of informal canvassing, which she had previously used in her party’s cause during the Reform Bill agitation.98 Advising her friend Mary Shelley on how best to obtain a pension for her stepmother, Norton tells her: ‘I have long observed that though people will resist claims (however just), they like to do favours. Therefore, when I beg I am a crawling lizard, a humble toad’.99 Without perhaps using quite these terms, we can certainly characterise her individual canvassing of MPs on behalf of the Bill as impressively strategic. A correspondence with Edward Bulwer Lytton, begun under the impression that his children were still in their mother’s custody, is a fascinating, though unsuccessful, example. Her continued pressing of the argument for reform, even after he corrects her mistake, is a remarkable balance of sympathy, diplomacy, insistence and logical argument.100 In both the 1830s and 1850s, she used her social standing as a tool by which to make her voice heard. The connections born in the drawing-room ensured that this voice would eventually change what took place within the nation’s courtrooms, from which her lack of legal identity had shut her out in 1836, and within the all-male Houses of Parliament, whose party machinations had been the most likely cause of her personal disaster.

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Despite delays and some hard-fought opposition, Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd’s Custody of Infants Bill passed the Commons in May 1838 by 91 to 17. It was, notes Jane Perkins, not made a Government measure and hence not a party matter, so ‘the Tory Disraeli was found ... side by side with the Whig Charles Villiers and the Radical Daniel Harvey, among those who voted in its favour’.101 It had survived political rivalries in the House of Commons; it was not so fortunate in the House of Lords. Conflicts between Lord Lyndhurst, who was introducing the Bill, and the ex-Chancellor Brougham (who also bore Norton a grudge) helped make the generally reformist Brougham into its most bitter opponent.102 The Law Lords rejected the Bill in August 1838. In the same month, the Tory British and Foreign Review launched a viciously unbalanced attack upon the Bill in general, and upon Caroline Norton and Serjeant Talfourd most certainly in particular, sexualising Norton’s legislative involvement with Talfourd: ‘the intimacy of connection between these two literary friends – we mean the Speech and the Pamphlet’.103 It was in response to these parliamentary and extraparliamentary attacks that Norton brought out A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor, in December 1838. Printed for private circulation among the Members of Parliament, its focused distribution makes it into a political address to the nation’s chosen legislators – and an engagement with the very nature of the State. Norton’s self-representation takes up at the point where that of Rosina Bulwer Lytton breaks down: the necessity to achieve a compromise between upper- and middle-class domestic values. Unlike Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Norton negotiates these conflicting demands by negating the necessity for conflict: she grounds her pamphlets upon an unhesitating acceptance of the terms of the supposedly middle-class domestic ideal. Her satire of an outdated House of Lords matches rhetorically with her praise for the energy, enthusiasm, and ‘young warm blood’ of the House of Commons, but Norton’s alignment with the middle classes is not a gesture of class defiance.104 She makes strategic use of anti-aristocratic rhetoric, but does so to enlist herself both on the side of a growing middle class and on the side of a vibrantly reforming aristocracy. We need to read Norton’s 1830s pamphlets in light of the vocabularies and alliances generated by the Reform agitation in which she had so enthusiastically taken part. Chase and Levenson argue that the 1836 trial ‘staged an exemplary tableau of aristocracy in the age of reform’, polarised between George Norton as ‘a rogue [Tory] aristocrat’ and Lord Melbourne as ‘the Whig ideal of a reforming aristocracy at once refined in manners and responsive to change’.105 Norton exploits this polarisation in her


writings, turning party allegiances and ideologies to gendered polemical ends. A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor maps out a confident narrative of reform, invoking a quintessentially Whig vocabulary of continuous progress and development. ‘Political tradition was a living thing’, J.W. Burrow notes of the English Whig of the period, ‘prompted and nourished by its past moments but not circumscribed by them’.106 The ‘Whig interpretation of history’, to adopt Herbert Butterfield’s famous phrasing, committed its adherents to accepting the ongoing necessity for change and constitutional reworking to promote the cause of individual liberties.107 Butterfield’s loose definition of ‘Whig’ historians should not obscure for us the very real effects that such ideas could have on a specific party’s self-perceptions and modes of government: the ‘importance of the mythology lay in the Whigs’ acceptance of its main precept as fact’.108 We can best understand Norton’s model through Mandler’s view of the galvanising effect of Reform agitation on the Whig aristocracy after 1830.109 Norton can identify with bourgeois values because she purports to speak, not merely for herself as a figure isolated from older upper-class values, but rather as the voice of a progressive (and implicitly Whig) aristocracy prepared to reject the values held by a few (Tory) unregenerates. This identification reformulates upper-class values, but Norton’s revivified elite do not just obediently follow the middle-class domestic example to survive. Instead, they lead the middle classes towards a more progressive civilisation – a civilisation in which the state offers mothers the protection they deserve. Norton carries the war directly to her opponents, Whig and Tory alike. The Whig Brougham’s upholding of civil liberties, the defence of the poor by the Tory Lord Wynford (her husband’s guardian and one of the probable instigators of the 1836 action), give the Custody Bill’s most eloquent opponents a social responsibility to support it. Neither Brougham nor Wynford, she writes, think more of the difficulties surrounding their crusading reforms ‘than they would of the roots and shrubs which it might be necessary to clear away, to turn a tract of wild country into arable land’ (PL 120). The task of cultivating the wilderness haunted Victorian social visions.110 Henry Mayhew’s mid-century crusading journalism paints the dark places of London as urban wastelands crying out for civilisation, while as late as 1872, Tennyson’s Arthur sends ‘a thousand men/To till the wastes, and moving everywhere/ Clear’d the dark places and let in the law’.111 Norton’s polemic genius lies in her capacity to extend this wilderness to the domestic hearth. The most immediate project for a reforming, modern Parliament, she

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insists, lies no further and no nearer than the wilderness that Norton’s personal history proves the domestic hearth can become. If any MP needs reminding of the fragility and importance of the domestic ideal, Norton is there to remind him (for it would of course be a ‘him’) of the devastating consequences that any threat to the hearth poses to the nation state. To threaten the family is to threaten the state. The opponents of the Custody Bill flung this formulation at Norton and Talfourd outside and inside Parliament. Very well, responds Norton, but the family is under threat from the present system, and without the moderate reform for which I am calling, the state risks far greater disaster. A Plain Letter’s construction of the nation state takes the centrality of the family to social cohesion in deadly earnest. Ironically, in this Norton shares common ground with the British and Foreign Review. Since the family, according to her attacker, is ‘the first element and very foundation of the state, – the state in miniature, and the state itself nothing more than a system of co-ordinated families, it is plain, that if the chief bond of the faith of families be weakened, the faith of society at large is weakened in the same degree’ (my emphasis).112 Norton turns precisely this logic back upon the opponents of the Bill. She accepts the primacy of the intact family unit in any construction of the nation state, but does so to insist on the necessity to enshrine the security of that unit and of the motherhood upon which it is based within the legal structures that define the newly Victorian England. Norton refuses to accept any reading of the question of infant custody as either a matter best left to private arrangment or as a matter best left to the Law Lords. The wit that lights up her letters and appears so rarely in her novels and poetry is used to devastating effect upon those members of the House of Lords whose negligence ensured the Bill’s initial defeat. She observes that ‘they are disturbed at the preposterous importance set by the women on the society of their infant children’, and that they find it a relief to consider it as a technical problem, shift the responsibility, and ‘sink back in a cushioned carriage’ (PL 122). But this attitude, as Norton makes clear, is no longer acceptable in the progressive world of midnineteenth-century England – and it is both of and to England that Norton speaks. In an earlier pamphlet, The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of ‘Custody of Infants’ Considered (1838) – its very title a heart-rending appeal to emotional values – Norton presents an essentialist ideal of motherhood that seems to transcend all considerations of or involvement in the structures of statehood. Yet this very essentialism effectively


transforms the mother from homemaker to kingmaker. ‘How many worthy and celebrated men’, she asks, ‘have asserted that they owed all they were, to that earliest and holiest guidance?’113 All the more menacing is the counterpart to this assertion. Without motherhood at its foundation, patriarchal rule cannot function: ‘they who were little loved, may be supposed to love little in return; that anomalous infancy may recoil on the father himself’.114 Elizabeth Gruner points that the 1839 Infant Custody Act was the first act of Parliament ‘to focus especially on mothers as a separate class of citizens’ and in which ‘the interests of husbands and wives were dealt with separately by Parliamentary law’.115 However, Gruner continues, for this to occur ‘the wife had to be recast in legal terms as primarily a mother’.116 Refusing to accept categorisations of women as intrinsically separate from legal and political concerns, Norton sets up a series of parallels that claim a place for women – a place for mothers – within the protective mechanisms of statehood as for any other subservient group. To treat them any differently, she argues, is to create a legal anomaly unacceptable to a progressive rationalising nation. Pointing to soldiers, sailors, and apprentices, A Plain Letter equates their relationships with colonels, captains and masters with the relationship between wife and husband (PL 6–7). Gladly endorsing men’s authority, Norton points out the ‘very wide difference between being subject to authority and subject to oppression’ (PL 6). Her analogies make this distinction integral to the security of the State. The institution of marriage takes its place alongside the power structures of army, navy and trade – the institutions that help to define English identity and England’s relationship to the rest of the world. Norton continually falls back upon the language of colonial construction to illustrate her message of the need for domestic reform. The alienation of a domestic wilderness is as crucial to her model of nationhood as the domestication of an alien wilderness proved to be for imperial expansion in the period.117 Like Rosina Bulwer Lytton, she too develops powerful imagery of exile – but the exile Norton plays up is the emotional one of deprived motherhood, a ‘far more bitter exile’ even than that of men working in colonies longing for news of home (PL 108). Countering the argument that the paucity of relevant cases makes reform unnecessary, she ironically suggests the parallel of a governor of a newly established colony informing the British Government that they ‘have, as yet, comparatively few instances of theft; and those of murder are still more rare; consequently our code contains no reference to these two crimes’ (PL 110–111). Nothing less than the structures of colonial government are at stake in the need to encode and uphold motherhood

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within the laws of the land. England develops a curiously shifting gender role: a country that must identify itself with motherhood in order to speak with the moral authority of the righteous father.118 The moral and rational integrity of England is of vital importance to the role of England on the world stage. Norton forces her readers to challenge their own value schemes: ‘We read ... wild stories’, she writes, ‘and exclaim “Such are the acts of the savage!” But I fear, if all were told, we might find savages more cruel in our own civilised country’ (PL 99–100). With the emancipation of slaves in British territories fully completed only in 1838, A Plain Letter’s invocation of the slavery controversies as a benchmark of civilised progress comes at an opportune time to posit women as the next logical targets for reform (PL 98). The comparison between the position of women and the position of slaves – and the consequent clay feet of England’s international moral authority – was a frequent motif in calls for changes to women’s legal position. It had been put to powerful use in 1825 by William Thompson and Anna Wheeler (Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s mother), referring bitterly to marriage as imposing such a contract ‘as the owners of slaves in the West Indies and every other slave-polluted soil, enter into with their slaves – the law of the stronger imposed on the weaker’.119 Norton strongly repudiated radical views like those of Thompson and Wheeler, disclaiming any involvement with ‘the illadvised public attempts on the part of a few women, to assert their “equality” with men’ (PL 91). Yet she holds the possibility of these views over the heads of the legislators to whom she speaks. In her view, a country that does not protect motherhood within has no moral voice without. Motherhood, for her, remains aligned with sanity and nationhood, whereas Rosina Bulwer Lytton, as we have seen, finds her imperial motherhood entangled with discourses of colonial frenzy. ‘Where was the mother of this man?’ Norton asks of the British and Foreign Review’s unknown author. Lacerating his implicit representation of all English wives and mothers as ‘animals who required caging’ (PL 96), she appeals instead to images of loving motherhood, sisterhood and wifehood. She makes England’s possession of a voice upon the international stage, and even its possession of an Empire, dependent upon a mother’s spiritual possession of her children. If a worthy mother cannot educate her children in preference to a neglectful father, then what right has England to lecture other countries, or to educate newly acquired subjects? Norton encounters the same paradoxes in her representation of class as Rosina Bulwer Lytton does: her social standing may prove the cause


of or the solution to her suffering and in either case may shut her out from identification with other wives and mothers. Her insistence on the fundamental importance of the family unit, however, allows her to draw together these paradoxes into a vision of progressive cross-class harmony. In A Plain Letter, she points out bitterly how swiftly the law intervenes against the father when there is property involved, a protest against social injustice that her later pamphlets will extend to the whole nature of marriage (PL 33). Yet she also reiterates Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s insistence that lower-class women receive better protection than herself. Norton reminds her readers of Lord Wynward’s eloquence on the cruel separation of near relatives under the New Poor Laws. Does he, she demands, believe it ‘to be a hardship on the labourer’s wife and the aged pauper to be parted from their offspring, but thinking it no hardship at all on the mother, whose rank in life, and exemption from toil, left her no real and fit occupation but the education of her children?’ (PL 118).120 Here Norton is reworking the traditional models of detached and distant upper-class motherhood, using the very leisure which so often, as we have seen, fuelled negative representations of the aristocracy, to cast the aristocratic mother as the apex of dedicated maternity, because of her ‘exemption from toil’. Norton is able, however, to reconcile these conflicting readings of social injustice: her insistence on the fundamental status of the hearth makes these points two halves of the same shell. They both represent a failure on the part of the legislature to rationalise and encode the domestic ideal. Ultimately, then, for all her sarcasm, Norton aspires to a vision of cross-class harmony achieved through the protection of progressive male lawmakers. She closes A Plain Letter with an expression of faith in a universal male rationality: ‘and I never will believe that the different social position of men, will so utterly change their relative opinions on a subject which simply addresses itself to clear judgement and good feeling’ (PL 124). In Norton’s representation then, the private space of the domestic hearth can be cultivated only within the protective structures of constitutional statehood. This insistence takes on wider implications in the context of the call in her 1850s pamphlets for state protection, not just of mothers, but also of wives. Before moving onto Norton’s writings on the marriage laws, we need to realise the social control functions that this politicisation of motherhood can exert. Her responses to the social upheaval of the 1840s carry an urgent sense of moral purpose. In The Child of the Islands (1845), a social problem poem addressed to Edward, Prince of Wales, Chase and Levenson contend that she speaks as ‘a Whig


poetic mother, a public mother resolved to teach the lessons of reform ... The poem is one long scene of maternal instruction, Norton gently but firmly displacing that other mother, that queen’.121 She looks to the leadership of men who ‘set in the temptation of High Class,/Keep the inherent deep nobility/Of a great nature’ to heal the gulf between rich and poor.122 The socially conservative functions of this poetic maternity are clear in the light of 1848’s Chartist upheavals and Norton’s Letters to the Mob, written in a man’s persona under the alias ‘Libertas’.123 Chase and Levenson read the 1836 trial as staging ‘a resonant scene of social transition, in which middle-class merchants passed judgement on aristocratic virtue by evaluating and finally repudiating the testimony of servants. Here is an emblem of the great rapprochement’.124 Poovey’s discussion of Norton’s work centres on George Norton’s ‘Greenacre correspondence’: letters to his estranged wife signed jestingly with the name of a notorious murderer. This macabre jest becomes the basis for Caroline Norton’s rhetorical identification with the working-class victim, Hannah Brown, an ‘identification’ that, Poovey contends, in fact defines itself through separation from the working-class woman. By 1848, Norton’s model of aristocratic leadership has evolved into a celebration of upper- and middle-class unity in the face of unruly social upheaval. ‘Superiority is not a thing of man’s devising’, she insists, ‘but of God’s appointing. Gradation is His law ... . By whom have the measures of improvement, already undertaken in behalf of the people, been urged and carried? By the aristocracy’.125 The middle classes align themselves under aristocratic leadership in opposition to working-class revolt – revolt that Norton positions as counter-productive to the processes of rational reform: ‘to revolt is to overshoot the mark of reform’.126 The moral value of motherhood becomes a rhetorical means through which to persuade working-class dissidents of the unsoundness of their political demands. ‘I write, because I feel ashamed as an Englishman [sic] of the recollection of that paltry riot ... at the very gates of the palace where a Queen and her new-born babe lay sleeping.’127 Under rational male aristocratic leadership, men can also exercise their patriarchal role within the family in security, knowing that society and the hearth are organised according to consistent principles. Yet for all this stated faith in aristocratic male leadership, by the time Norton is producing her finest polemical work in the 1850s she has cast away all masks and is writing openly as herself.128 She signs herself ‘C. Norton’ for English Laws, and for her finest achievement, Letter to the Queen, as ‘The Hon. Mrs Norton’, her husband’s name that she has


turned into a declaration of her professional and of her class status. Her choice of male identities like ‘Pearce Stevenson’ and ‘Libertas’ (however thinly disguised) in the 1830s and 1840s to address social issues indicates a residual sense that polemic prose is still an essentially masculine form of public speech. This sense may have been fostered by her affair with the reforming aristocratic statesman Sidney Herbert through the early 1840s.129 (Herbert, whose wife’s conversion struggles featured in Chapter 1, was George Meredith’s model for Percy Dacier in Diana of the Crossways.) In writing on the marriage laws in the 1850s, however, Norton formulates a distinctive crusading authorship founded upon both her professional and her social attributes. Yet another courtroom drama prompted these pamphlets: the suit a tradesman brought against George Norton in 1853, when his refusal to honour the terms of their 1848 settlement agreement made him, his wife argued, liable for her debts. Ironically enough, this time Caroline Norton was able to appear in court, unlike the criminal conversation action in which the accused wife had no role – only to have the Melbourne allegations dragged up all over again by her husband. Non-suited on a technicality, her initial resource was The Times, through whose letter columns the Nortons conducted a lengthy, embarrassing and unproductive squabble.130 It is interesting to note the ineffectiveness of these letters to a far more diffused and non-elite newspaper-reading class. Clearly, letters to the newspapers are both too public, in that they cannot be geared to the individual reader as Norton does her personal letters, and too private in being almost exclusively about her own grievances, therefore failing to claim communal resonance. With demand growing for reform of the laws relating to divorced and separated women, Norton turned to the other forms of letter-writing that had served her so well in the 1830s – the public pamphlet combined with the socialised personal campaign. Writing in the mid-1850s, however, entailed subtly different vocabularies. With the impetus of Reform fading and the evolution of the Liberals, Norton could no longer call with the same confidence on a party identity fuelled by reformist enthusiasm. Moreover, contemporary discourse was far more firmly rooted in the bourgeois ideals of domesticated womanhood that had been taking shape in the 1830s, as with Sarah Stickney Ellis’s immensely popular addresses to the wives, mothers and daughters of England through the 1840s.131 Yet the spectre of 1848 had given a new relevance to vocabularies of revolution, and the increasing confinement (in ideology and in fact) of women to the supposedly private domestic sphere coexisted with an increasing presence in the public sphere, not least in

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terms of literature. The 1850s was, as Barbara Taylor has pointed out, a defining decade for the women’s movement, given the rapid growth and politicisation of feminist reform movements.132 Even seemingly quintessential celebrations of the separate spheres like Ellis’s were often marked by qualms as to the attainability of the ideal and the true nature of (unsupervised) ‘woman’.133 Placing the ideal of the protected domestic sphere at the heart of rational statehood, Norton still makes the aristocracy the natural leaders of the movement to realise this ideal. She assigns, however, a new role to women in this construction, whereas previously in her work they were largely passive martyrs. While she confidently represents all classes as working in harmony towards their domestic goal, she draws upon a concept of aristocratic women’s leadership to realise fully the leading role of the upper classes in this process. In response to a legal nonexistence, Norton constructs a polemic presence. She recreates herself as a social crusader, who will use her gift for writing in the service of women of all classes, in order to defeat men’s oppression and gain them the men’s protection to which their roles as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters entitle them. By ostensibly accepting the private standing of women in the bourgeois world, she turns this privacy into a political asset. In her acquiescent construction, the true woman remains the unknown woman. Once forced into agonising public prominence, however, Norton turns the tables and instead, in her words, ‘sentenced Mr Norton to be KNOWN’.134 As with Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s similar resolve, the appeal and fear of publicity is peculiar to the social standing of the parties, and so it is that Norton as aristocratic leader of a woman’s cause can insist upon the relevance of private suffering to public life. She is different from other women, she avers, only in her capacity for self-expression. However, Norton’s gift for writing goes alongside the aristocratic standing that enables her to have this writing read and acted upon by her connections. Contemporary responses to Norton’s campaigns echo this imagery interestingly: one supportive article by J.W. Waddington depicts Norton as a warrior goddess wielding her lance in defence of her sex. However, we are coyly reassured that ‘the lance of gold, though wielded by a powerful as well as beautiful arm, cannot penetrate into any vital part’, hence it is time ‘for all good Knights to hasten to the rescue of this gallant Lady’.135 By the 1850s, though, Norton has given up waiting for her knight – even rhetorically. This personalised model of aristocratic women’s leadership was not congenial to all. One of the grounds on which her critics frequently


attacked Norton was that her campaigning was personally motivated – especially given her readiness to ease her pressure for Infant Custody when George Norton had reopened negotiations with her about their sons.136 As Chapter 6 demonstrates, personal motivation recurs as a charge to deny politically involved women the right to make a legitimate contribution to public discourse. In Habermasian terms, an individual’s private interests should not become the topic of public discourse, and should certainly not be the basis for bringing about legal change. Harriet Martineau, herself a noted reformer, derides Norton’s successes on these grounds in her Autobiography, written in 1877. ‘When I see an eloquent writer’, fumes Martineau, ‘violating all good taste by her obtrusiveness in society, and oppressing every body about her by her epicurean selfishness ... she is the worst enemy of the cause she professes to plead’.137 As Alice Acland observes, reformers like Martineau were ‘rather in the position of generals of an orthodox military school seeing their battles won by a picturesque, and, to them, highly suspect amateur’.138 Martineau is in effect deeming Norton a dilettante reformer, in contrast to her own public voice which she codes as masculine, rational, and objective – the classic voice of the public sphere.139 It would be tempting to posit from this a simple opposition of inadequately committed upper-class personalised involvement versus sincere middle-class reformist objectivity, especially given aristocratic women’s experiences in the literary marketplace. However, politicised vocabularies continue to prove resistant to neat pigeonholing: male and female middle-class intellectuals also defend Norton on these very grounds. ‘That the published work [Letter to the Queen] deals largely in private matters we do not complain’ declares the noted historian J.W. Kaye. ‘The redress of many great public wrongs has been brought about by the exposure of private grievances.’140 George Eliot, who scorned the marital travails of the high-class protagonists of ‘silly novels’, and who was later to pass pained comment on the ‘little wisdom’ of Norton’s public arguments about plagiarism with fellow authors like Ellen Wood, feels no such aloof disdain for her campaigns on the marriage laws.141 Instead, chastising the ‘unreasonable prejudice against this blending of personal interest with a general protest’, Eliot references Letter to the Queen in no less a context than Milton’s divorce doctrines, deliberately aligning Norton’s text with Eliot’s own reading of Milton as visionary social reformer.142 In 1854, Eliza Lynn (later Linton) issued a defence of Norton in Household Words (Dickens, its editor, had been a friend since the 1840s). In contrast to Kaye and Eliot’s measured legalistic remarks, ‘One of


Our Legal Fictions’ is a highly sentimentalised rendering of Norton as martyred wife and mother (the role she herself claimed), yet it is also a curiously complex article. Lynn uses pseudonyms to tell the story of the Nortons’ marriage, but in such detail that it must have been immediately recognisable to most readers.143 Caroline Norton’s writing features only in a passing reference to her having ‘laboured hard to show [the law’s] cruelty’, yet the very vagueness of the reference assumes awareness of this work.144 Finally, Lynn demands ‘Justice to women’, yet apparently finds this wholly reconcilable with asking for ‘no mingling of women with the broils of public life ... no high-flown assertion of equality in kind’.145 Such support from the later creator of the ‘Girl of the Period’ (Lynn Linton’s 1868 attack on the women’s movement) suggests the acceptability of Norton’s revised vision of aristocratic women’s leadership founded in personal grievances. Norton’s vision is acceptable because it invokes a similar vocabulary of feminine duties and responsibilities as that through which so many middle-class women could justify extending their domestic sphere into public roles. Norton’s language of suffering motherhood and persecuted wifehood suggests a spiritualised leadership based on her femininity, but this leadership is actually a practical polemical one based on her writing and connections. A similar elision takes place in Florence Nightingale’s famous rebirth as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’, despite the fact that Nightingale’s success was founded upon strategic use of her upperclass connections (including her working partnership with Norton’s onetime lover Sidney Herbert) and her impressive administrative capacities.146 Yet the very fact of Norton’s success, the necessity it posits for this aristocratic leadership, has troubling implications. In her 1848 appeal to ‘the mob’ to recognise a natural order of aristocratic leadership, Norton fatally blurs her definitions of representation. ‘Are our people unlinked from, or oppressed by, our aristocracy? Are they unrepresented, any section of them, in Parliament?’ she asks ‘the mob’. ‘Are they compelled, from the utter want of sympathy and justice in those above them, to seek assistance from those beneath them?’147 If she were to put these questions to women, then from the evidence of Norton’s own writings the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ to all. The problem that Chase and Levenson identify in Norton v. Melbourne’s tableau of reform and reconciliation resonates throughout Norton’s analysis of the state of marriage: ‘where was the woman within this allegorical spectacle?’148 Nowhere – the only appearance the woman can make in the national re-conceptualisation of marriage is through the public exposure of


scandal. The knowledge that haunts the 1850s divorce debates is that the logic of protection and chivalry has failed. Norton would probably have welcomed most gladly and gratefully the appearance of a knight-errant upon the scene of her marital and legal distress. Yet the stark biographical reality is that no knight-errant does appear to save the wounded wife and desolated mother. There is no ‘Pearce Stevenson’ to write A Plain Letter, only a mask for Norton herself. In both the 1830s and the 1850s, Norton preaches her gospel of rational progress. Nevertheless, the historical injustices she cites multiply exponentially in English Laws and A Letter to the Queen, suggesting a legacy of male oppression and brutality stretching back over the centuries. The soothing domestic imagery of Letter to the Queen is abruptly fractured by Norton’s exposure of the reality behind the ‘legal fiction’, when man and wife are ‘about as much “one” as those ingenious twisted groups of animal death we sometimes see in sculpture; one creature wild to resist, and the other fierce to destroy’ (LQ 28). The very necessity for a woman’s voice to point out the irrationalities and incipient chaos of much of the nation’s marriage law suggests that men are failing in their duty to be the rational sex. Even Norton’s most reassuring and deferential writings play upon male fears. Throughout the debates on the marriage laws, the upholders of the status quo recur to the implication that this status quo centres, not upon happy wives in no need of disruptive change, but upon women in chains. In these representations, wives and mothers need only the smallest degree of freedom to break out, spending money, divorcing husbands, seizing children, exploding into deranged sexuality.149 As a way of subduing these fears, Norton offers soothing reassurances of the inviolability of women’s domestic attachments – reassurances that in fact have a deeply unsettling effect. To describe Norton as calling the patriarchal bluff is to attribute to her a probably anachronistic degree of awareness and cynicism as to the nature of domestic power relations. Yet the very eagerness with which she insists upon the enactment of the logic of domesticity – in a culture that exalts the wife and mother, what harm can protecting them do? – exposes the reluctance of its sternest defenders to countenance the implementation of the ideal. The more Norton urges the necessity to build the Jerusalem of the bourgeois haven, the clearer it becomes that England’s green and pleasant land can offer no adequate planning permission. Ultimately, symbolic power is not enough. No matter how venerated womanhood is, women’s sanctified status needs defining and protecting by the laws of the land. Yet for public law to define the private

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hearth – the basis of Norton’s entire polemical career – is to admit the defeat of any hope for a non-politicised area. Whereas her earlier writings confined themselves to the relative and specific category of motherhood, in moving from mothers to wives, Norton irrevocably politicises womanhood itself. Her celebration of maternity figured unmothered children as potential insurgents against patriarchal authority. Two decades later Norton shifts her vision of revolt to women themselves: ‘WRONGS make REBELS’. Letter to the Queen abruptly reverses Letters to the Mob’s vision of cross-class harmony due to the overriding universality of family: women become themselves a dissident and potentially disruptive social group, with their own form of Chartist petition presented by their leader, Norton. ‘Madam’, she informs the Queen in the classic social campaigner’s tones of threat disguised as concerned warning,150 ‘in families, as in nations, Rebellion is a disease that springs from the malaria of bad government. WRONGS make REBELS. Those who would dwell submissive in the wholesome atmosphere of authority, revolt in the jail fever of tyranny’ (LQ 124). This vision of female and, implicitly, colonial rebellion does not cancel out Norton’s essential lack of cross-class identification. Indeed, she does not intend it to. Caroline Norton no more identifies truly with the middle-class housewife than she does with the dismembered body of the working-class Hannah Brown. Instead, she adopts the rhetorical paradigms of these figures to foster her own insistence on an aristocratic leadership. The direction this leadership will take, however, remains uncertain, with the threat of rebellion upon the hearth shaking the foundation of the state. Norton restores rank as a paradigm through which to conceptualise women’s experience. The networks accessible by her in place of democratic representation remain closed off from women of other classes. This exclusive access strengthens her enactment of aristocratic leadership but suggests the ultimate social and temporal limitations of this mode of response: Norton’s ‘style of personal influence’, contends Dorothy Stetson, ‘was soon to become obsolete with the growth of the strong party government after 1867’.151 The Matrimonial Causes Act’s property provisions for separated and divorced women brushed aside the suggested provisions of the 1857 Married Women’s Property Bill for all wives. The Property Bill’s proposals simply went far beyond what a male Parliamentary body was prepared to grant to wives not portrayed as martyred victims to husbandly brutality. The Property Bill can be conceptualised as essentially middle-class in origin and intent: Lee Holcombe notes that the 1856 women’s property petition had only one


leading signatory from a noble family, the Hon. Julia Maynard.152 The petition was certainly based on bourgeois domestic ideals: the moral standing of the signatories was of primary importance, which was presumably the reason why no one asked the prominent but scandalous Norton to sign.153 Norton’s Letter to the Queen influenced the middleclass feminist Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), who campaigned for the Property Bill,154 but a feminist agenda of equality and individual empowerment found little support at a point when the only really ideologically acceptable form of female power was symbolic. In theory, middle-class women could exert moral influence through their roles on the hearth, but actual political change based on such ideals could take place, it would appear, only through Norton’s access to still potent upper-class networks. Such indirect modes would prove inadequate to the progression of feminist movements in the second half of the century. While the campaigns for married women’s property rights, largely conducted through formal channels, made steady but painfully slow progress,155 swifter success took place when the symbolic power of the domestic hearth combined with direct engagements in the form of public protests. Probably the most notable example is the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1870s and 1880s. These largely middleclass campaigns combined Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s insistence on the aligning of private and public morality with imagery of suffering and imperilled womanhood similar to Norton’s. Yet the campaigners made use of less personalised, more explicitly political strategies of organisation and combination.156 Like Rosina Bulwer Lytton, the campaigners took to direct action, claiming public platforms, holding public meetings and thus causing public disruptions. But where Rosina Bulwer Lytton took to public action alone, middle-class women’s public protests tended to be organised and communal – setting up their own platforms rather than invading those of others – and thus (somewhat) less easy to be disregarded or coded as insanity. In her assertion of aristocratic identity, in her restoration of hierarchical structures to the vision of universal womanhood and above all motherhood, Norton exposes the political content of idealised concepts of womanhood. Her insistence upon the need to cultivate the domestic wilderness highlights the inadequacies of symbolic gendered influence as an exchange for the social networks of indirect but practical power to which upper-class women had access. In highlighting her necessity to transform her professional authorship into a process of social engagement, she restores the elided role of economic factors to


the representation of the family. In the brilliant final peroration of Letter to the Queen, it is on the question of copyrights that Norton most directly throws down her crusading gauntlet to her husband. ‘Meanwhile’, she writes grimly, my husband has a legal lien ... on the copyright of my works. Let him claim the copyright of THIS: and let the Lord Chancellor ... cancel, in Mr Norton’s favour ... my right to the labour of my own pen and brain; and docket it, among forgotten Chancery Papers, with a parody of Swift’s contemptuous labelling. ‘Only a Woman’s Pamphlet.’ But let the recollection of what I write, remain with those who read. (LQ 153–154) This is the moral and social challenge that my next chapter takes up, considering the fate of these two women in the literary marketplace.

5 The Spectacle of Fiction: Self, Society and the Novel

Autobiographical fiction could become a valuable means of both attack and defence, offering the commercial possibilities of large sales feeding off aristocratic scandal, and the artistic and polemical possibilities of being able to construct a range of identities through characters within the text. The negative aspects of upper-class women’s experiences in the literary marketplace, however, could take on even more damaging implications for novelists seeking to turn their individual experiences into statements about wider society.

Marketing scandal When Rosina Bulwer Lytton published her marital roman à clef Cheveley in 1839, it caused a sensation in social, political and literary circles. Her story of husbandly violence and adultery, interposed with ruthlessly entertaining parodies of the Bulwer family and friends, garnered scathing reviews and large sales. Cheveley offers its early Victorian readership an endorsement of evolving bourgeois values in its performance of the collapse of upper-class domesticity. Rosina Bulwer Lytton strategically utilises melodramatic tropes to mould her fictional self into the pure wife of bourgeois ideals. Yet this tactic leaves her ideologically open to cross-class condemnation and hampers her long-term professional authorial identity, while the behavioural expectations that deprive her of her readers’ ideological support also operate within her writings, compromising her literary self-representations. The violent exposure of her authorial project exposes the fragility of contemporary class alignments; the strains of spectacle prove too much. 129


In turning her personal domestic dissension into public polemic, Rosina Bulwer Lytton is moving beyond the established role of the aristocratic woman writer as purveyor of the surface socialised world of the haut ton. She retains, however, the commercial potential that arises from the promise of revelations from behind the scenes of high society – backstage disclosures assimilated into programme notes for the performance of bourgeois domesticity. Chase and Levenson explore the performative implications for the family scene through their ‘spectacle of intimacy’: the cultural performance of an ideal bourgeois domesticity. Yet this spectacle, they argue, feeds best off the display, not of success, but of failure: the ‘norm needed and cultivated the disturbance. An eagerness to display home virtue fed an appetite for domestic failure’.1 This sense of horrified fascination at the publicly displayed collapse of private life fuels Cheveley’s commercial success, albeit with rather different class connotations. Rosina Bulwer Lytton is offering a spectacle of different class identity to a middleclass readership at a point of cultural flux: a spectacle of aristocratic failure. The performative energies that drive her campaign of exposure display the collapse of upper-class domesticity. ‘Examples of aristocratic vice’, note Davidoff and Hall, ‘provided potent lessons for the middling ranks’. 2 In putting Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, baronet, on display as a licentious and brutal husband, his wife is aligning herself with evolving ideologies of bourgeois domesticity. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s call for public men to have moral private lives is not antithetical to, but in keeping with, Victorian socio-political trends – trends that, as James Hammerton points out, could unite both radical feminists and die-hard conservatives. 3 Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s career from 1839 integrates the silver fork novel’s fashionable appeal with serious commentaries upon the state of society (as distinct from Society). In so doing, she is following the pattern laid down, ironically, by her husband himself after Pelham, as well as by Disraeli after Vivian Grey. Disraeli’s mid-1840s Young England trilogy (Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1845)) shares common tactical ground with Rosina Bulwer Lytton, to what would be their mutual disgust (he was a friend of the couple, but after the separation came under the same attacks as most of her husband’s associates). Disraeli combines the commercial appeal of a supposed portrayal of upper-class lifestyle with his political manifesto; Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s message to the nation is the inevitable conjunction between England’s toleration of domestic abuse and England’s moral and social corruption. The silver fork commodification of the novel

The Spectacle of Fiction 131

becomes an integral part of Cheveley’s moral urgency. Beneath ‘the plethora of miscellany and the fetishising of commercialisation’, writes Mulvey-Roberts ‘lies the ultimate commodity of the wife, who can be tossed aside like last year’s fashion’.4 By transforming her manifesto into a commodified literary spectacle, Rosina Bulwer Lytton can reach the wide audience that autobiography denies her. One of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s chief advantages in their struggles was his prominent position as landowner, politician and successful novelist, an advantage that the commercial appeal of the roman à clef turned back upon him. The more widespread his prominence, the more sensational the (alleged) exposé, and the more people bought the book (it went through three editions in six months).5 An anonymous retaliator’s repulsively sententious poem Lady Cheveley; or, The Woman of Honour (1839) only furthered the controversy.6 Nevertheless, while Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s fiction offers its wider middle-class readership the delightful and ideologically valuable spectacle of the failure of aristocratic domesticity, her public voice is also a part of that spectacle. Cheveley’s reviews unite in their condemnation of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s revelation of her private life, even as they revel in the spectacle thus provided. In the Athenæum, Lady Morgan (later to feature in Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s Very Successful! (1856) as ‘Lady Gorgon’) reworks upper-class vocabularies of taste in order to uphold supposedly middle-class morals: ‘if there be one more salient quality than the rest, among the attributes of what is called fashionable life, it is vulgarity’.7 Whereas in her 1851 Letter to Cardinal Wiseman Morgan identifies fashionable life as a bastion of progressive thought and action, here she views it with ostentatious disdain to condemn upper-class revelations for a middle-class readership. Fraser’s settles for jocular scepticism about Cheveley itself and contempt for the novel’s targets, ‘the puff-hunting clique of Whig litterateurs’.8 Yet, given the viciousness of Fraser’s own regular attacks on Edward Bulwer Lytton, it says much for the unacceptability of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s breach of conventions that it still dissociated itself pointedly from her campaign.9 Other journals take a far more austere view, such as we find in the Monthly Review’s outraged thunderings. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, it declares, has descended to employ fiction, or a web of fiction and truth ... as a vehicle for exposing domestic irritations, jealousies, and malignant bitterness; that domestic abode, which must or ought to have


been at one time the sanctuary of her own peace, love and happiness ... [takes] the present form of unmitigable hostility and rancorous detestation.10 The mixture of voracious consumption and lofty condemnation evident in the periodicals echoes private responses to what was clearly the must-read book of the year in social and literary circles. Elizabeth Barrett, comparing notes somewhat shamefacedly with Mary Russell Mitford, considers that ‘the book, if not the reader, is without excuse. It is wonderful in unwomanliness’.11 Thomas Carlyle later annotated Jane Welsh Carlyle’s amused quotation from Cheveley as by ‘poor Lady Bulwer ... in a mad mood’, despite the couple’s sympathy for her.12 No one, of course, matches the furious repugnance displayed by the novel’s main victim, Edward Bulwer Lytton. For him, as for his wife, Cheveley’s reception is indeed a comment on the state of the nation, but in his view reviewers failed to condemn the book sufficiently: ‘what a country this is, when one who, as I have, makes his land and his age his debtors, can have no protection in public feeling from such an outrage!’13 His outrage peaks at her open use of his name: ‘this monster, whose only distinction is the name she bears in order to degrade’.14 In publishing, and publishing under her own – his own – name, Rosina Bulwer Lytton enacts a ‘monstrous’ revenge upon her husband: instead of being a badge of distinction and prestige, she devalues the family name, associating it not with prestige but with obliquity.15 The Monthly Review spells out the conclusion that it advises Cheveley’s author – and any wife with similar ideas – to reach: ‘[b]etter would it be that the art of writing and the scope for publication did not exist, than the hothouse of strife that such perversions and indulged revenges would inevitably beget’.16 A puzzling aspect of reviewers’ responses to Cheveley is their obsessive castigation of the hero Augustus Mowbray, and Julia De Clifford, the author’s supposed alter ego.17 As Rosina Bulwer Lytton herself observes with justifiable irritation, they ‘designate resisted sin as the adultery of the mind!’18 The reviewers’ tones feel ridiculously sanctimonious: this resisted love affair seems to channel their unease at the scandalous nature of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s public voice – an extreme paradigm of the sexually censorious discourses endured by her more famous contemporaries.19 Yet the popular appeal of tales of aristocratic vice – the same appeal upon which Rosina Bulwer Lytton founds her career – makes the upper-class woman writer peculiarly vulnerable to this elision between sexuality and authorship. The alignment of women’s


promiscuity and women’s protest even appears in one of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s own novels, Bianca Cappello (1843), in which she explicitly depicts Bianca’s sexual fall as a perversely masochistic revenge upon her indifferent husband. Rosina Bulwer Lytton consistently represents her own writing in similar terms: an act of revenge to which the husband’s callousness drives the wife. Of course, if the public chorus of disapproval continued to exist sideby-side with (and help to generate) large sales, this would facilitate some of her personal goals – greater financial resources and humiliation of her husband. This was, however, not the case. The declining sales of Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s novels were partially owing to Edward Bulwer Lytton’s influence – for example, he refused to let Bentley reprint four of his novels unless Bentley agreed never to publish any of his wife’s.20 Cheveley’s witty satire also gave way in later novels to more erratic narratives and diatribes. Above all, though, as the century progressed, a growing middle-class readership stood in far less ideological need of a demonstration of aristocratic depravity. Rosina Bulwer Lytton finds herself trapped within a spectacle of failure: the name that launched her literary career with its promise of intimate revelation can stand in the way of any attempts to develop her authorial identity into a wider vocational construct. She disclaims authorship altogether in a characteristically acerbic (and deliberately unconvincing) preface to her third novel, The Prince-Duke and the Page (1841). This disclaimer may signal a desire to develop an authorial identity independent of her husband: PrinceDuke is a readable and intelligent historical novel largely devoid of her standard autobiographical polemics. Nevertheless, probably motivated by a combination of further conflicts and poor sales, Bianca Cappello (1843) re-enacts her previous themes of marital disintegration, and the portrayal of the debauched Sir Augustus Craven in 1844’s Memoirs of a Muscovite gives the final blow to the truce, if truce it was. She notes that she had originally intended affecting editorship of Behind the Scenes (1854) and calling it ‘Lay Sermons’ by ‘Alciphron’, but was ‘bullied out of this and the anonymous by my publisher’.21 Even writing with less autobiographical intent than usual, her historical novel about Moliére has the teasing title The School for Husbands (1852). As she rather disingenuously complains, the public would read any villain she depicted as Edward Bulwer Lytton.22 Although towards the end of her life she resorts to a (male aristocratic) pseudonym, the Hon. George Scott, for Clumber Chase (1871), she recycles the same obsessions. Despite having founded her career upon a rejection of aristocratic decorum and the normative patterns of aristocratic writing, Rosina


Bulwer Lytton cannot wholly free herself from the social position that she exploits. Nor does she altogether wish to. Significantly, she links her alleged necessity to claim only editorship of The Prince-Duke, not to her position as a woman writer, but rather to her prominent status: ‘the Reviewers – who did they for a moment suspect that I had attempted to baffle their penetration by taking refuge in the Incognito of Editorship, would naturally hurl upon the devoted Author, all the impartial imputation, only due to one who like myself, have anomically managed to combine all the neglect of obscurity, with all the persecution of celebrity.’23 In ostentatiously insisting that ‘as I merely write for bread, I shall continue to write, and to publish what I do write’, she is both jibing at the inadequacy of her husband’s allowance and laying claim to the commercial aspects of a professional identity.24 This insistence upon the financial necessity of her authorship separates her from upper-class dilettantism, as we saw with George Eliot’s insistence on the valuable effects of such necessity. Rosina Bulwer Lytton also uses economic need, however, to separate herself from the concept of vocation. She frequently represents herself as forced to authorship, and as being prepared to tone down or yield up her profession in return for a higher allowance in keeping with her social position. (She makes this literary blackmail explicit in Memoirs of a Muscovite, when a character defends the writer Lady Craven, another fictional alter ego, on the grounds that ‘had she money enough to live without, I am very certain she never would write a line’.25) Having acquired such glorious real-life material as her 1858 committal ordeal seems, if anything, to have detached Rosina Bulwer Lytton all the further from a professional authorial identity. The sporadic and largely pseudonymous nature of her post-1858 publishing indicates the influence of the (later disputed) settlement agreement. Rosina Bulwer Lytton never does write the quintessential sensation novel shadowed out by her factual narrative. In contextualising her career as an unpleasant necessity, she is detaching herself from an artistic identity claimed to some degree by the majority of her middleclass contemporaries. As we have seen, women authors frequently used economic necessity as justification for their writing (and work in general), but they rarely separated this necessity from some concept of vocation. 26 Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s insistence on her authorship as an unnatural imposition indicates continued deference to the subtle


aristocratic perception of professional authorship as something inherently a little vulgar. Although she may at one moment deride the English reverence for rank – ‘a large Bible on one side, and “Debrett’s Peerage” on the other, bound uniform, as they generally are in most people’s minds’, at another she firmly aligns herself with an aristocratic identity abused by vulgarians, who ‘impose so much on anything in the shape of rank’.27 Her authorial identity becomes a dangerously fluid concept, stranded in the no-man’s, and more especially no-woman’s, land between the classes. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s logic of universal conspiracy makes her unable to forge rhetorical alliances with other women writers as fellowprofessionals, since any degree of social, political or literary success suggests complicity with the inner circles in which her husband lurks. She enjoyed a close friendship with the novelist Fanny Trollope, a relationship acknowledged in The Budget of the Bubble Family’s dedication.28 Yet even this is of a piece with the use of her dedications throughout her career – as a means, not so much of honouring the dedicatee, as of attacking her critics. A Blighted Life savages Caroline Norton as a viceridden brothel keeper for high society (to be fair, she does refer to Norton’s home as an ‘amateur’ bawdy-house, which may or may not be deemed to mitigate the accusation).29 The success of Charlotte Brontë is explicable, in Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s worldview, only through the power of the elite clique that dominates the literary marketplace. Shirley, unlike Jane Eyre, ‘has not even cleverness to redeem it, and is, without exception, not only one of the most disgusting books I ever read (unless indeed I except “The Wortheringheights” [sic])’. She exempts Villette from comment only because she has not then read it, a fact that the reader cannot but view with some relief.30 Rosina Bulwer Lytton therefore reaps initial commercial and polemical success from the display of aristocratic domestic failure, but the very factors that drive this success work against her long-term cultural credibility.

Melodramatic selves The problems Rosina Bulwer Lytton faces in formulating a coherent authorial identity also inflect her fictional self-representations. Her fiction utilises the melodramatic plot devices of seduction, illegitimate children, concealment, swindling, and villainous plots, to enhance sympathy for the oppressed and long-suffering women that feature in almost every one of her novels. The sympathy that the reader feels for these characters therefore belongs by right to the author who – in


accordance with the reading logic of the roman à clef – is herself each of these brutalised and deserted wives. Correspondingly, of course, if Rosina Bulwer Lytton and her avatars are suffering angels, then by all the laws of melodrama her husband must be the blacker devil. This is the point where the fictional form fully comes into its own as a weapon, since she can interweave biographical facts with imaginatively unbounded narratives of conventional villainy. Fictional villainy needs no verification and knows no bounds. Her key insistence that ‘as long as men can, with impunity ... violate every private virtue, they may ... assume, but can never be capable of, any public virtue’ is given force by the increasing range of wrongdoing available from melodramatic narrative structures. 31 Cheveley’s villain, Lord De Clifford, is Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s representation of her husband. In the novel, however, De Clifford’s treatment of his wife is the other half of the sexual coin to his adultery with his daughter’s governess, as well as his seduction and abandonment of the village girl Mary Lee. This cross-class sexual delinquency is the foundation for De Clifford’s scheming opportunism as a politician, his physical cowardice, and his framing of Joseph and Mary Lee on criminal charges. Likewise, The World and His Wife (1858) arraigns its villain Lord Portarjis as a cruelly neglectful husband and sexual predator, but also implicates him in political skulduggery, a kidnapping, and even a shady racecourse murder. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s fictional villains nonetheless tend to receive their comeuppances through the consequences of their private misdemeanours. De Clifford’s fatal fall from his horse is due to his headlong flight from the revelation of his seductions and plots (Cheveley 409). Portarjis suffers an understandable nervous collapse following his daughter’s abortive elopement with the novel’s hero, Walter Selden, who is in fact his son by one of his Mary-Lee-like seductions. The World and His Wife’s other villain Sir Fulke Greville (also an Edward Bulwer Lytton figure) dies following the shame of exposure, when a convicted murderer turns out to be his illegitimate son (the villains in this novel are very fertile).32 Sir Fulke’s death is clearly a deliberate rewriting of a similar courtroom scene in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830). In her husband’s novel the (legitimate) criminal son was abducted in infancy, whereas Rosina Bulwer Lytton has a far more realistic take on the ways in which upper-class men are likely to ‘misplace’ sons. Behind the Scenes’s Ponsonby Ferrars is exposed through his neglected wife and family, while the worthless husband in The Peer’s Daughters (1849), Vernon Howard, is murdered by his maniacally Borgia-like mistress.


Through the surrounding plot structures of crime and evil, Rosina Bulwer Lytton is able to focus the reader’s anger on the clearly delineated villains. Her resolutions can then privilege her real concern, their sexual wrongdoing, with all the weight of conventional moral anger and moral sympathies that the ‘moral crimes’ alone might not otherwise generate. The fates of these characters also demonstrate her more general warning to society: take these domestic crimes seriously or they will turn back upon the state as a whole, as is happening even now with their perpetrators’ corruption of English public institutions. As a weapon, then, quasi-autobiographical fiction widens the potential range of attack immensely through fictive possibilities. Yet it remains hampered by its status as fiction. ‘How is the unenlightened reader to draw an accurate line between her reality and her fiction?’ asks Morgan, ‘he must believe all, or reject all; for all stands on the same authority’.33 For De Clifford’s villainy to reach its melodramatic height, Mary Lee must be a betrayed innocent. This requires a false marriage scheme whose devilish ingenuity, risk, and acts of class disguising seem completely out of keeping with the cowardly and arrogant De Clifford.34 Consequently, those aspects of De Clifford’s marital behaviour drawn from real-life experiences take on a flavour of fictionality. The combination of melodrama and burlesque that Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s factual writings succeed in balancing to her husband’s overall detriment, undermine each other in the context of a fictional plot. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s novels clearly ask her readers to perceive every suffering, ill-used wife as a reproduction of herself, yet this multiplication of the archetypal figure of maltreated womanhood begins to destabilise her own construction of the role. In Miriam Sedley, Miriam effectively begins her narrative as the voice of the author herself, cracking her characteristic acrid jests – ‘the only really free state that exists – that of widowhood’35 – and looking set to come to similar grief at the hands of the arrogant Philip Vavasour. Yet the locus of identification shifts: Philip’s mother Mrs Vavasour comes to resemble Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Philip becomes less an Edward Bulwer Lytton than a Robert Lytton, and Miriam seems an Emily Lytton prepared to reject the values of her father. Miriam eventually functions more as a figure of autobiographical fantasy, an alternative path traced in fiction that real life could have taken (a reading borne out by the ‘survival’ and married happiness of Miriam’s elder sister, whereas Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s sister Henrietta died unmarried in Paris in May 1826, aged twenty-six). Miriam Sedley also reverses the real-life father- daughter relationship: an alienated and rather disdainful relationship with her


alcoholic father in real life becomes in fiction a narrative of paternal remorse and filial succour.36 Likewise, in Clumber Chase (1871), Gilbert Broderick, the poet son à la Robert Lytton [Owen Meredith], sacrifices his chance at publication rather than endorse his villainous father as her own son did in his dedication to his Lucile (1860). Historical romance complicates the received picture even further. With 1841’s The Prince-Duke and the Page, she is again following her husband’s career pattern: as early as 1829 with Devereux, Edward Bulwer Lytton was moving from contemporary settings to the historical novel, achieving his commercial and critical apotheosis with The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835). Husband and wife share a conviction of the value of the historical novel as a means of considering issues relevant to the modern condition of England.37 Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s later historical novels universalise women’s suffering through time in the same way as all her novels, contemporary and historical, universalise it through class, with the predatory villains victimising women of every rank financially and sexually. This means that the roman à clef element of ‘character spotting’ tends to be exercised through the intersection of fictional characters with famous historical figures. Thus we see Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s (apparent) fictional prototypes conversing with Madame de Pompadour and the Gunning sisters in The Peer’s Daughters (1849), or with a disconcertingly dog-adoring Titian in Bianca Cappello. Moreover, her fiction often has a curious subterranean factual narrative, which at various moments explicates her autobiographical story within the fictional world.38 She herself never quite settles where she stands in relation to her own long-suffering creations, tantalisingly observing that ‘I should indeed be a bungler if I were to mould any fictitious character which had not its type in nature and reality’.39 Faced with this mesh of potential readings, we can see that to insist upon biography as a direct key even to autobiographical novels is to brush over the ideological tensions inherent to claiming fiction as mimesis. Narrowly biographical readings also disregard the range of different narratives on which the roman à clef can draw. Intertextual reading highlights one of the most powerful biographical narratives informing Victorian meditations on the failure of marriage, and particularly aristocratic marriage: the story of Lord Byron. We have already seen how often silver fork novelists used Byron as an iconic figure against or around whom to define characters and eras. The title of Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour poses an initial enigma for the reader – we begin to suspect that the ‘man of honour’ is, like the object of the novel’s


dedication, ‘No One Nobody, Esq., of No Hall, Nowhere’ (v). However, although the author claims that this is ‘the only man whose integrity I have found unimpeachable’, a happier fate lies in store for her fictional self, Julia. Cheveley is the title inherited by the hero, Mowbray, over halfway through the novel. The name ‘Mowbray’, however, is itself a puzzle. It is presumably a tribute to her mentor Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816). Curiously, though, Cheveley’s Byronic lover Mowbray, is named after Henry Mowbray, Lord Avondale, the noble-minded and long-suffering husband of Lamb’s alleged alter ego, Calantha. Thus the Byronic hero is aligned with the honourable husband, even as, ironically, in the same novel Avondale’s real-life prototype William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, is satirised as the manipulative Lord Melford. Still more confusingly, Cronin points out that ‘Glenarvon’ is simply a Celticisation of ‘Avondale’.40 Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s fictionalisation of her own marriage, then, is also an engagement with probably the most famous marital collapse of the nineteenth century. The story of Byron’s marriage reads like that of the Bulwer Lyttons’ writ large and infinitely more glamorous: a welter of scandal, rumour, accusations and counteraccusations, and furiously partisan defences from supporters of husband or wife.41 During their marriage, Edward Bulwer Lytton encouraged an identification between himself as a tortured Byron and Rosina Bulwer Lytton as Annabella Byron, the (in Annabella’s own representations) angelically martyred wife (Blighted 76).42 This inevitably raises the question of how much the narratives of the Byron marriage shaped Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s own self-representations. And, more confusingly, how much were the couple’s own actions in their private lives influenced by the desire for this identification? Like Anne Brontë a decade later in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Rosina Bulwer Lytton is reshaping the Byronic marriage in the context of mid-century concerns about the nature of domesticity.43 The frequent correspondences between Tenant’s and Cheveley’s narratives of marital misery are especially interesting given Small’s tracing of imagery in De Clifford’s death that foreshadows Rochester’s punishment in Jane Eyre.44 As she notes, it is unlikely that their father would have allowed the Brontë sisters near Cheveley, but a mutual absorption with the Byron legend offers common ground. Both Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Anne Brontë confront the problem of representing a Byronically bad husband without endowing him with Byronic glamour. However, Brontë rejects this glamour and its aristocratic associations: her protagonist finds happiness with a hard-working gentleman farmer, Gilbert Markham. In contrast, Rosina Bulwer Lytton is unable to yield up either Byronic

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glamour or its class affiliations. For her, Byron is in fact the epitome of the good bad husband, the aristocrat who at least had the decency to flee the country and leave his wife with a proper allowance.45 Lord De Clifford rides to a death strongly reminiscent, not of Byron’s actual fate, but of Lamb’s Glenarvon (as well as of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s eponymous hero in Godolphin (1833)), while Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s Julia finds her eventual ‘man of honour’ in Augustus Mowbray, Marquis of Cheveley, the aristocratic and Byronic hero who also makes a doting husband and father. The problem is that, while her fictionalised self-representations cast her as the angelic Annabella, in the act of writing Rosina Bulwer Lytton becomes the scandalous Caroline Lamb. Given Lamb’s brief affair with the young Edward Bulwer and her mentoring relationship with the hero-worshipping Rosina Doyle Wheeler, her later involvement in bringing about the couple’s engagement is grimly ironic.46 She remained, moreover, an admired authority figure for Rosina Bulwer Lytton. Glenarvon gave Lamb’s protégée an important, if dangerous, lesson in the art of self-creation. If Cheveley’s Augustus Mowbray indeed owes his name to Glenarvon’s Henry Mowbray, then what sort of wife does the second Mowbray eventually acquire as the Marchioness of Cheveley? The wild, impulsive and ruinously passionate Calantha is very different from Julia De Clifford – but not perhaps so far removed from Rosina Bulwer Lytton. So how, then, does she see fit to construct her supposed alter ego for public consumption? Is Julia De Clifford the fictional avatar of Rosina Bulwer Lytton? However autobiographical the sufferings might have been, however she may desire the less informed reader to interpret the book, the author could never have seen Julia as a direct representation of herself. The question hinges upon the talent for mimicry that Rosina Bulwer Lytton possessed to so high a degree.47 Cheveley offers several seemingly extraneous defences of mimicry (as does Miriam Sedley), an issue which was clearly a bone of very great marital contention indeed.48 Mimicry is central to Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s authorship: her novels engage with her husband’s works in a sustained process of pastiche and parody. We have seen the ways in which her choice of genre followed his; direct parodies of his writing recur throughout her fiction, as for example with Miriam Sedley’s annexation of Paul Clifford’s notorious opening sentence: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.49 The issues at stake here are ones of class, gentility and power. Mimicry is appealing, entertaining, and potentially, as for the young Miriam Sedley, empowering. It is, unfortunately, also ungenteel, a perception that emerges from the undertones of regretful disapproval


even Devey adopts on the matter.50 Mimicry, we can see, is dangerous: it disrupts, it challenges, it parodies. While Rosina Bulwer Lytton writes of mimicry in the most literal sense, modern critics can read her use of the term through Homi Bhabha’s identification of mimicry as the means through which to disrupt and challenge seemingly hegemonic colonial power structures.51 However, the author bestows one of her most distinctive abilities not upon Julia, but upon Julia’s lively younger sister Fanny Neville. In other words, the disruptive, parodic energies associated with mimicry are not suitable qualities for the fictional protagonist through whom the reader’s sympathies will be channelled. These energies are, ultimately, those that drive Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s whole experience of authorship. She needs to reconcile the radical subversion with which she characterises her act of speaking out and destroying the image of model wife, with the image she seeks to construct of a model, long-suffering wife. She must make enduring complaint of her uncomplaining endurance. Even as she derides society’s conventional views of women as either fragile angels or sensual devils, she must construct a continual thematic opposition between herself as angel and her husband as demon. Ultimately, then, the literary marketplace fails her, both as a source of financial support and as a source of ideological vindication.

Reputation in the literary marketplace For Caroline Norton, who in June 1836 found her name spread across every newspaper in the land, reputation remained a perpetually double-edged concept. The damage that George Norton did to his wife as a woman, she insists, also injured her as an author. ‘I have a position separate from my woman’s destiny; I am known as a writer’, she declares proudly. ‘I will, as far as I am able, defend a name which might have been only favourably known, but which my husband has rendered notorious’.52 This name is ‘the Hon. Mrs Norton’ – that is, her husband’s name – but in Norton’s work it implicitly encompasses the Sheridan heritage. Whereas Edward Bulwer Lytton laments his wife’s public degradation of his name, Caroline Norton’s writing defends the married name that she has made her own against the notoriety her husband’s actions gave it. The scandal that could smash a personal reputation could do wonders for commercial reputation. In exchange for the loss of social capital, the victim received a certain ‘scandal capital’: the dictum of ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ could be as relevant then as now. As

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Rosina Bulwer Lytton discovered, however, ‘scandal capital’ was an essentially short-term investment. A scandalous personal reputation could prove culturally lethal in the long-term. In 1852, Norton wrote to The Times protesting about advertisements of another author’s forthcoming work as by ‘the Hon. Mrs E. Norton’.53 Her letters make clear that this dispute is about control of her name, both as a literary property and as the marker of her professional reputation. In social terms, however, a woman’s ‘name’ and ‘reputation’ also stood for her sexual virtue, or rather, for society’s perception of her virtue. Once scandal embroiled an upper-class woman, her name – and the loss of her ‘good name’ – became a communal property handled by the world, literally in terms of printed sheets revelling in the gory details. Aristocratic women, unlike most of their middle-class counterparts, had to contend with the scrutiny of the popular press, which throve on scandal in high life regardless of accuracy. We can see this sense of surveillance in Norton’s anger at Edward Bulwer Lytton over his alleged intrigue with a woman staying in her house.54 (This, incidentally, may have been the source of his wife’s ‘amateur bawdy house’ allegation.) Norton is brutally honest about the fact that in her position, she simply cannot afford to have it said that she provides a shelter for immorality: ‘It was unfair and unkind ... to add to the awkwardness of my position, by any renewed scandal in my house’.55 Reputation, with its shifting definitions in an industrial era, is one of the many staging-grounds for the transitions between ideas of ‘real’ and ‘commercial’ property traced by Hadley and Poovey. Ironically, it was the middle-classes, to whom illegitimacy presented somewhat less threat to inherited propertied power bases, which were most anxious to construct domestic virtue as ‘real’ property. Unlike the middle-class domestic ideal of intrinsic purity, reputation for the upper-class woman in fashionable society traditionally rested upon the appearance of purity. As Norton bitterly demonstrates through the intrigues of Milly Nesdale in her sensation novel Lost and Saved (1863), the key to maintaining one’s reputation is discretion, not morality. A possession couched in the language of supposedly intrinsic and personal virtue is in fact a social construct. The reputation of the upper-class woman rests, not upon inherent moral worth (‘real property’), but rather upon the perceptions of the world around her. As such, if subjected to a capitalist economy unregulated by protective considerations of ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour, it becomes an alienable possession. It is vulnerable to the fluctuations of the general market, as Norton’s reputation became when George Norton saw the chance of economic


capital (from his claim for damages) and his Tory associates saw the chance of political capital (from the embarrassment of Melbourne). Reputation is also, as Norton’s novels obsessively trace, alienable by the machinations of spite or ill chance. Once Norton’s sexuality provokes financial and verbal speculation – by George Norton, by the Tories, by gossiping Society, and by newspapers making their printed speculation into a saleable property – she loses two forms of capital. On the one hand, she loses aristocratic social capital: the multi-layered, discreetly socialised hearth of the upper-class woman emerges wholly into the public realm. On the other hand, she loses bourgeois moral capital: the pure hearth of the wife and mother becomes the staging-ground for the prototypical depraved aristocrat whose ‘knowledge of the world’, as in the reviews of Norton’s novels, signals her incompatibility with the then embryonic values of the domestic ideal. The real damage done to Norton’s ‘moral capital’ comes, however, not from the corruption of sexuality, but rather the corruption of finance. The pure hearth is the insulated hearth – insulated, that is, from the variables of capital. In 1836, however, the market invaded Caroline Norton’s hearth. ‘By seeking damages from the current prime minister’, writes Hadley, George Norton showed Caroline that he, supported by English law, considered wives to be the private, personal property of their husbands rather than inalienable guardians of the family name. In a sense, they had been a form of real property but were now managed as commercial property.56 Norton’s mid-century pamphlets on the marriage laws cast George Norton as the real enemy of bourgeois value schemes, for he has committed the ultimate sin of bringing speculation onto the hearth. In the 1853 financial lawsuit, George Norton brutally exposed the links between the ideal of domestic purity and the marketplace when he revived the Melbourne scandal in order to deny his economic responsibilities towards his wife. Her rendering of this moment is superb in the sense of horror it captures, as she sees the hardly won degree of social and moral capital she has clawed back publicly shattered by her fight for economic credit. I felt ... that he saw in me neither a woman to be spared public insult, nor a mother to be spared shameful sorrow, – but simply a claimant to be non-suited ... All flashed upon me at once. I felt that

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I no longer stood in that Court to struggle for an income, but to struggle against infamy ... he was once more going to brand me before the world!57 The melodramatic tone of her narrative recasts the roles, turning her (back) into the morally pure heroine, and her husband into the villain who seeks to befoul this purity with his sordid financial speculations. Social capital and commercial capital meet in the question of authorship. Responding to interrogation about her annual literary earnings during the 1853 lawsuit, and also while discussing the tempestuous career of her grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Norton insistently figures literary income as a fluid and commercial commodity, fluctuating according to the free market and the labour of the author.58 In insisting on setting an unrealistically high level to her literary earnings, both George Norton and the Court that rules him not liable for her debts are forcing her into the role of financial entrepreneur. Instead of giving her the support as wife and mother that would make her literary income a luxury rather than a necessity, George Norton speculates upon her earnings. He thus pollutes wife, mother and artist alike. When at the end of Letter to the Queen she (temporarily) rejects all further nonpolemical writing, Norton is enacting an ostentatious refusal of the role of literary entrepreneur. Breaching aristocratic canons of discretion, she will enter the public world, but only to insist on the protection of the wife from the market. Yet the result of Norton’s campaigns was not to enshrine her in a protected zone insulated from economic speculation, but rather, in a climate of new-found commercial speculation, to allow her to take on the power of financial entrepreneurship. Norton’s main influence on the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act – and one of the key points of hostility to it – related to the issues of economic empowerment and separated wives’ right to control over their own money.59 Norton expresses her resentment at being cross-examined as to her expenditure during the 1853 trial; the point is not whether or not she has given too much to charity or been wilfully extravagant, but rather ‘that whatever I had expended, was mine to expend’.60 In his use of his wife’s income as much as in his speculations upon her social reputation in 1836 and upon her literary reputation in 1853 – the ‘names of my publishers occur as if they were Mr Norton’s bankers’ – George Norton has lost the patriarch’s rights of economic knowledge and control.61 He has forfeited the right to apply the dichotomy between wives and (commercial) property. The result of


Norton’s appeal to law, then, is not to reinstate a private sphere of womanhood whose freedom from financial constraints makes it the complement to a male public world of economic fluctuation. Rather, her appeal brings this ideal sphere within regulation. The new laws granted separated wives such as Norton the right to the privacy of an autonomous individual – a ‘privacy’ that incorporates the right of economic self-management and financial control.62 As specified in Clause 26, the (separated) wife could represent herself directly. No longer would her husband’s signature – on a lawsuit or on a contract – effectively represent her financial interests. Of course, this power was very carefully limited to separated women. The quashing of the 1857 Married Women’s Property Act that went alongside Norton’s triumph highlights how much more appealing than the Property Act campaigners’ individualistic language was Norton’s demand for ‘recognition of her independent legal personality not as a right, but as a remedy against a husband who had violated his obligation of support’.63 Nevertheless, certain married women acquired independent financial identities, and thus a capacity for direct financial selfrepresentation quite unlike the traditionally oblique patterns of settlements and dowries that shaped aristocratic women’s economic identities. Such patterns, however, offer a guide to the extent to which contemporary processes of economic expulsion and grudging economic empowerment are not so much paradoxes as inevitable halves of the same coin. Norton’s pamphlets overturn the insistent polarisation of femininity and finance and take the first steps towards women’s economic self-representation; we shall now consider the ways in which her later fiction transforms the language of protection into the conceptual foundation for a broader moral economy.

Making a moral economy In Norton’s Lost and Saved, the humble Miss Parkes starts the search for another position, the callous Marchioness having sacked her for helping the protagonist Beatrice. The Marchioness ‘did apparently wish Parkes to starve’, and on application gives her faithful servant as bad a ‘character’ as she can. This episode gives Beatrice ‘ample opportunity of seeing the value of “character”, even when that character which governs a whole destiny is subject to the vilest and most capricious exercise of power’.64 The ruthlessly commercial – and inexorably alienable – value of ‘character’ does not simply affect those ‘surplus women’ like

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Parkes so disproportionately troubling to the mid-century bourgeois mindset.65 Collini emphasises the increasing importance in a capitalist marketplace of a businessman’s ‘good name’: ‘to be known as a man of character was to possess the moral collateral which would reassure potential business associates or employers’.66 This ‘good name’ is not simply a matter of economic standing, but rather a question of overall habits and behaviour. Significantly, as Collini puts it, the ‘increased circulation of the language of character also represented part of a wider reaction against the alleged vices and indulgences of the territorial aristocracy, especially in their metropolitan form’.67 Likewise, critiques of (upper-class) fashionable life sharply distinguished between external concepts of ‘reputation’ and the internal worth of ‘character’.68A formative factor in a bourgeois businessman’s character, then, was the extent to which his family life came up to the prescribed ideals of his class. Domestic stability offered an implied guarantee of financial stability. For all the mystification of the hearth, the reputation of the financially successful businessman’s domestically successful wife has its own economic significance. So if the character of the bourgeois wife is a matter not so much of priceless worth as of precise credit-worthiness, upon what foundation can Norton build an appeal to inalienable moral worth? As with her concept of aristocratic leadership towards middle-class values, Norton appeals to seemingly outdated patterns of social interactions in order to challenge an acutely contemporary way of thought. Over the course of her career, Norton became embroiled in several exchanges involving the vexed topic of copyright – the benchmark of authors’ professionalisation and the most realised representation of intellectual property. She deliberately makes the question of commercial property a matter of far broader concerns regarding honour and morality. As with her (more successful) polemic writing, she grounds her appeal in an ideal of protection. ‘Now, what I, who am also a sufferer, want to know’, she informs The Times in October of 1871, ‘is, at what point protection is to begin, and what sort of protection can be granted?’69 Writing to her publisher Alexander Macmillan, she declares that ‘I cannot but think, under the circumstances, you are bound (in courtesy and gentlemanlike feeling) to write a brief letter on my behalf to The Times ... . I do expect so much as a matter of honourable dealing’.70 She appeals to protection and gentlemanlike feeling, values resonant of a moral rather than financial web of interaction. Gentlemanlike feeling was certainly not a determining factor in her relationship with Macmillan, who was not going to get embroiled in this squabble.


Norton’s letters to him swiftly become legal demands (politely disguised as reluctant requests) for the details of her various copyright agreements.71 In her July 1859 review of George Eliot’s first two works for the Edinburgh Review, Norton references the Eliot-Liggins-Blackwood controversy about Adam Bede’s true authorship, contending that anonymity has always carried with it the dangers of speculation: an author desirous of it ‘must take his chance of intrusive conjecture and stolen laurels’.72 In Norton’s reading, to write anonymously and/or under a pseudonym – that is, to withhold your name – does not guarantee protection from the marketplace. Instead, to be nameless is a condition unacceptable to a predatory economy, which acts to enforce naming upon you. Moreover, even though Norton constructs the author as the put-upon victim of speculation, it is arguable that a pseudonym does not so much ward off speculation as encourage it.73 To declare yourself without an identity is to lay yourself open to speculation, whether it is the speculation of simple identity-guessing (not so simple when we consider the critical implications of gender-assigning), or the financial speculation of false authors receiving subscriptions on the strength of Adam Bede. However, Norton’s view is that such speculation may be inevitable, but this does not make the controversy any less unseemly. Nor does it undermine the right to withhold one’s name from the marketplace.74 (In keeping with the commercial value of an upper-class name, Norton herself rarely exercised this right, terming her anonymous successes ‘a severer test’.75) The key to Norton’s review – and to her overall conception of questions of representation – is not merely that the speculative values of the marketplace are essentially wrong, or even that they can be defeated. Rather, she claims that commercial values simply do not matter – that is, that the flurry of speculation around the identity of the author of Adam Bede is merely a distraction from the real issue: the true worth of the novel. This worth finds its measure not in a name or in financial success, but in the achievement of artistic truth. In a paradigmatic statement of key mid-century literary values, Norton contends that a novel ‘is good in proportion to its truth to nature ... Paradoxical as it may sound, that which is false in fiction never pleases’.76 Norton’s writing makes the same implicit plea as Rosina Bulwer Lytton: although the narratives may adopt the melodramatic mode, they nevertheless tell the truth. Following the verdict in the 1853 trial, George Norton accused his devastated wife of ‘acting’ her distress.77 In order to defend herself against her husband, Norton must indeed ‘act’, transforming herself

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into a melodrama heroine to ‘act out’ her sincerity in the courtroom, and taking action with her factual writing to put this self-representation before the public.78 Despite the bourgeois aspects of Norton’s polemical self-staging as wronged wife and mother, this imperative to performance has its roots in her aristocratic upbringing. As Kieran Dolin observes, ‘female performance was central to social life in the class to which Norton belonged’.79 Yet the implication of herself in theatricality is not as problematic to Norton’s self-representations as it is for Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who so consistently invokes acting and performance as negative moral markers. Through her fiction, Norton formulates a positive language of theatricality as a channel of truth. Stuart of Dunleath argues that ‘the actress copies nature’, while ‘Woman’s Reward’ presents acting as ‘a representation of what we should be if not polished and chilled back by the customs of society’.80 The insincerity associated with acting, and linked – heavily in George Norton’s representations – to the actor’s economic motivations, gives way to the intrinsic truth of art. The stage actor is closer to truth than the social actor, for whom the cost of existence within society and Society alike is a yielding up of natural selfhood. As with Cheveley, to read autobiographically is only to deepen our awareness of the complexities of the act of self-representation. The trials of Mary Dupré in ‘Woman’s Reward’ (published in 1835, part of Norton’s first prose work The Wife; and Woman’s Reward), are very different from those of her creator, but her heroic self-immolation in the care of her supremely selfish brother is clearly an early refiguring of the marriage that was foundering even as Norton wrote. This story offers yet another engagement with the figure of Byron in terms of marriage and selfrepresentation: Lionel Dupré, the villain of ‘Woman’s Reward’ unites the fictional aspects of a Byronic demon to the petty fussiness of a George Norton – as Melbourne himself told her, to rather improbable effect.81 Chase and Levenson claim it is impossible to know when she realised that her growing antipathy to Byron had merged with hatred of her husband ... [‘Woman’s Reward’] traces a double narrative in which her unhappy triangle with her husband and Melbourne overlays that spectacle of twenty years earlier played out by Byron, Melbourne, and Caroline Lamb.82 To this we can add still another triangle – that formed by Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer, and Rosina Doyle Wheeler. Norton, like Rosina Bulwer Lytton, is fond of re-staging her marriage with herself cast as the


martyred wife. Stuart of Dunleath’s coarse and brutal Sir Stephen Penhyrn is an obvious figuring of George Norton, married to the pure and tortured Eleanor Raymond. In Old Sir Douglas (1868), the impeccably angelic Gertrude Skifton marries the upright and noble Sir Douglas Ross, but undergoes her own martyrdom in the form of a maliciously unfounded allegation of adultery. Yet together with these conventionally meek figures, Norton offers us more subversive (and probably somewhat more accurately autobiographical) protagonists.83 Susan Dalrymple, the eponymous ‘wife’ of the novel accompanying ‘Woman’s Reward’, emerges as loving helpmeet only (in true silver fork style) after her nearseduction by fashionable life and the rakish Henry Egerton. The quicktempered impulsiveness of Lost and Saved’s Beatrice would seem to doom her to the death or perpetual wretchedness usually reserved by the mid-century novel for its intensely passionate women. Norton, however, brings her disruptive protagonist through misery to marriage, renewed motherhood and a happy ending.84 Norton’s choice of pamphlets over novels as her main instruments of protest may reflect poorly on fiction as a tool of social intervention, but it also removes some of the ideological pressure on the genre. Since novels are not the chief channels of her campaigns, as they are for Rosina Bulwer Lytton, she can afford to explore a wider range of moral constructions for her protagonists. The differences between Norton’s angelic and unruly women further her inscription of her fate as expressive not of personal fault but of a more universal societal disorder. As Leckie insists in her analysis of Lost and Saved, ‘injustice is socially and politically (as opposed to fatefully and naturally) constructed’.85 Suffering, like reputation, bears no relation to actual intrinsic moral worth: it is instead an almost inevitable fate for those who lack power in a society obsessed by rank and money. If passive and passionate protagonists alike are overtaken by malice and disaster, however, what solution can Norton’s fiction offer? Norton’s solution re-conceptualises the economic structures of midcentury society. Whereas Rosina Bulwer Lytton, defiantly locating her writing in economic deprivation, frequently refers to conflicts over money in her novels, Norton’s fiction largely purges its disintegrating marital and familial relationships of the taint of the sordid financial squabbles intrinsic to her own marriage’s breakdown. The pressure that economic forces can exert on people’s lives renders even more necessary an ideological resistance – through literature itself – to the constitution of the mid-century individual, and especially the mid-century writer, in terms of alienable financial forces alone. Poovey argues that ‘practices


that we now associate with finance and commerce were once conceptualised as part of a more capacious social relation’.86 Poovey points to the earlier use of ‘economy’ to refer to the management of a household – a concept with broader implications for inheritors of the role of ‘lady of the manor’ in a feudalised local community. Norton draws on these older concepts to construct a moral economy or, more specifically, a moral currency. When George Norton sends their son to discuss financial issues with her, when his lawyers cross-examine her on her charitable expenditure, when he revives the Melbourne scandal in order to avoid being held liable for a debt, he is reducing human relationships and obligations to matters of financial transaction. In response to her husband’s insistence on the pre-eminence of financial currency, Caroline Norton’s fiction insists upon the lasting relevance of a moral currency. ‘What would Dunleath cost?’ asks the doomed Eleanor Raymond about David Stuart’s beloved and lost ancestral home, and the novel is itself an answer.87 Stuart’s real failure as a guardian is not his loss of Eleanor’s fortune (in speculations designed to give him the purchase price of Dunleath), but rather his inability to locate a higher set of priorities than her financial status. Obsessed with the financial damage he has done to her – and so to her value in the upper-class marriage market – his true abandonment of his responsibilities comes when he brushes aside her confession of love for an unnamed Other (in fact himself) and insists that she marry Sir Stephen.88 Stuart should not have speculated with her fortune, but he ought to have speculated on her emotions. Disregarding the debts he owes in moral currency, he instead spends years seeking to make Eleanor a financial restitution that proves worthless to her, since she cannot even use her inheritance for the one thing she wants to buy: Dunleath. Money proves worthless to both the protagonists. ‘What would Dunleath cost?’ Far too much, the novel answers, and a price that cannot be quantified in financial terms. Yet there remains an unassimilated element in these discussions of both the polarised constructions of the commercial marketplace and broader concepts of a spiritual and emotional, as well as financial, economy. This factor is empire. The commercial marketplace must factor in – and elide while celebrating – the influx of imperial wealth, while the moral economy must come to terms with how best to assimilate the disruptive alien. Norton never quite comes to terms with those who seek for more than the financial or the moral marketplace can give them. The absence of Catherine Dalrymple and the presence of Myra Grey open up difficult spaces in her work. Catherine Dalrymple


is the other protagonist of ‘The Wife’. Ugly, bad-tempered, passionate, and hopelessly in love with her guardian and uncle-in-law Lord John Haslingden, Catherine is a fascinating figure who in the novel’s earlier stages has as almost as much narrative priority as (and a good deal more reader attention than) her imprudent sister. One of the strangest aspects of the narrative, then, is the way in which she disappears from the story after Susan’s marriage, reappearing only towards the end to save her sister from ruin. She speaks of her own struggle with sinful love, assuring Susan that ‘lonely prayer has brought me peace’.89 The process of this struggle, however, remains hidden, and Catherine herself is unsettlingly absent from the scenes of blissful domestic harmony with which the novel closes. Norton’s description of Catherine suggests a definite (if unconscious?) programme of racial positioning. Both sisters have ‘dark eyes’ and ‘dark Moorish skin’, but Catherine lacks ‘the exquisite clearness which made you doubt, when you gazed on her sister, whether she was indeed a brunette’. Instead, Catherine has ‘a sunk and sullen look ... [of] intolerable fierceness’ and a mouth that is ‘harsh, gloomy, and capable of the most unfeminine intenseness of expression’.90 Unfeminine and unEnglish, too dark in mood and in skin, Norton’s creation of Catherine suggests a potential in her acts of self-representation to go far beyond the confines of expected values. At the same time, her narrative abandonment of Catherine suggests that the moral economy in which she places her trust is one that is ultimately unable to encompass those who do not know their place within it – or who have no place to know. Lost and Saved’s half-Hindu murderess, Myra Grey, is a sensation stereotype, embodying the evil that comes from the far reaches of empire (it is no coincidence that David Stuart’s financial disaster comes as a result of ‘the rascality of one of the [Anglo-]Indian partners’).91 The moral economy that saves Beatrice (who refuses to take her seducer Treherne’s money in return for Treherne’s moral debt to her) must nevertheless compromise with the lack of any poetic justice enacted on most of her enemies. Accepting this, the novel can still end consistently with Parkes’s prayer to and belief in an overseeing Providence.92 The inability to deal with the Indian element is disturbing to this ordered worldview: Myra Grey’s burst of rather incompetent poisoning towards the end is more entertaining than menacing, but the narrative refuses to have her exposed and suitably punished. Instead, she ends the novel with her schemes thwarted, but still securely positioned within her family and within English society. Most problematic of all is that the ‘Providence’ to


which Parkes prays would appear to manifest itself on earth through Myra Grey: her backfired poisoning of one character accidentally kills Treherne. This death releases Beatrice from her self-proclaimed wifehood and enables her to marry again and to assist Parkes. The colonial subject, whether expelled or assimilated, remains a disruptive presence in the narrative, whilst the spaces of empire as close as Ireland or as far as India threaten the positioning of the structured community to which Norton appeals.

6 Affairs of State: Aristocratic Women and the Politics of Influence

The legacy of reform This closing chapter returns to my opening image, an aristocratic woman writer sitting at a table with the Prime Minster and a middle-class novelist, to place it in the context of politics in its most specifically institutional sense. I consider the influence of aristocratic women on the political life of Victorian Britain, and the vocabularies and literary tropes that this influence generated. The figure of the ambitious and Machiavellian aristocratic woman allowed men of both upper-and middle-classes to gender and dispel pre-Reform spectres of interested motivation and illegitimate influence. This character type facilitated the defining of a male body politic in a language of disinterested conviction and legitimate authority. Even women of other classes could validate their modes of public involvement in opposition to the negative images of upper-class members of their sex. Upper-class women writers, however, were hardly impervious to the political energies generated by Reform; they could engage with these deleterious representations of influence, drawing from them literary tropes through which to articulate their own distinctive political identities and aspirations. For aristocratic women, politics encompassed a much broader and more socialised process than that marked out by the limitations of the franchise. An ‘aristocracy’, wrote Thomas Arnold in 1837, ‘acts through the relations of private life which are permanent, whereas the political excitement which opposes it must always be short-lived’.1 The ‘relations of private life’ for aristocratic women involved not only their 153

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immediate families, but also the people with whom they came into contact in the course of their sociable activities. With high levels of power still in the hands of a comparatively small proportion of society – by 1865, 44 per cent of MPs were still landed proprietors and/or aristocrats – personal interactions within this group retained their potential value. The very nature of aristocratic women’s influence – informal, interpersonal and essentially socialised – meant that it left few visible marks. Supposedly private channels of correspondence formed a usefully unofficial medium for public transactions: requests for patronage, indirect soundings of male relatives as a preliminary to an official offer of positions, indications of changing alliances.2 Politics did not simply take place at Westminster. It was an amorphous process that also involved ballrooms, dinners and house parties as well as the responsibilities devolving on the women of landed estates. These latter places and events were not just appendages to Parliament, but key sites of political activity in their own right, particularly given how inadequate the social facilities of the Houses of Parliament were for informal contact between members.3 As hostesses, negotiators, communicators, dispensers of patronage, and canvassers, aristocratic women had essential roles to play. If the politics of deference still influenced post-Reform voting, then the wives and daughters of country estates, on whom fell most of the regular contact with the local community, still had an important role to play in consolidating and invoking this deference. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries were the great era of the so-called political hostess. As popular or literary representation traditionally portrayed her, she was a power in her own right, a puppet master (or mistress) whose salons, ballrooms and dinner tables were key sites of politicised exchange. She exerted her influence not solely over male relatives, but over a wide spectrum of men. The conversational rituals of the salon, ‘not exclusively female arenas but ... female-managed spaces’, played constitutive parts in cross-Continental politics, particularly in France, and affected constructions of British elite politics well into the nineteenth-century.4 The social as an interpretative category comes into its own when we seek to understand the position of women acting in this ostensibly private yet potentially politically charged role. Vickery’s analysis of the eighteenth-century development of behavioural codes of ‘politeness’ notes the assumption ‘that dining-rooms and parlours were fitted for social traffic and cultural debate’, which opened ‘a way of conceptualising an unofficial public sphere to which privileged women could lay legitimate claim’.5 The most famous early Victorian political hostess was Elizabeth Fox, Lady Holland, whose house became

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a command centre for party discussions and whom fellow-Whigs described as ‘the only really undisputed monarchy in Europe’.6 The Whigs viewed prestigious political hostesses as their especial provenance, and the Tories considered their own lack of them to be a weakness.7 Several of the most prominent political hostesses were associated with sexual impropriety – Blessington is the most notorious example, Lady Holland had previously been divorced, and the socially accepted Lady Palmerston’s position as Lord Palmerston’s lover was well known in the days when she was Lady Cowper. The idea of women’s personalized influence over men generates concepts of sexual influence – the fear that the affairs of the nation could carry a double meaning. That said, the hostile commentator Justin McCarthy concedes a transition from what he terms ‘personal’ to ‘social’ corruption, acknowledging that the relatively open sexual improprieties of the famous political hostesses of the 1830s were things of the past by the next generation.8 We should, however, see the political hostess as only one manifestation, albeit the most vivid, of the ongoing involvement of Victorian upper-class women in the politics of their families and friends. Elaine Chalus’s research on eighteenth-century politics foregrounds elite women’s roles in ‘social politics’, which were manifested, for example, in assemblies and patronage networks.9 Aristocratic women of the 1830s were heirs to, and often seasoned practitioners of, a participation in the affairs of State that was carefully coded as informal and personalised, yet would exercise significant influence for decades to come. Linda Colley’s discussion of the development of women’s preReform political identities through extra-Parliamentary activity has been highly influential.10 Critics have, however, contested her claim that the Duchess of Devonshire’s notoriety following the Westminster Election of 1784 (due to high-profile canvassing for her friend Charles James Fox) inhibited the later political involvement of aristocratic women.11 The attacks on the Duchess must be set in the context of political satire in general, and of party rather than gendered politics: Tory papers and supporters perceived the Duchess’s support for the Whig candidate as a genuine political threat and responded accordingly.12 Certainly, upper-class women’s political activity in the next century tended to be a good deal lower in profile. It was not, though, necessarily narrower in scope. Previous commentators identify the increasing professionalisation of politics after around 1841 as marking a decline in upper-class women’s power.13 Historians such as K.D. Reynolds and Peter Mandler have insisted on the continuance of this power, with the real decline after the 1880s, once party organisations began to

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come fully into their own. In my view, factual writing, literary representations and popular comment all bear out Reynolds and Mandler’s arguments. The ideal functioning of parliamentary democracy rests on the concept of elected representatives who stand for the interests of the groups who have selected them. In this sense, all women – and a substantial proportion of men with insufficient property to qualify for the franchise – were wholly unrepresented. The theory that claimed to justify this in reference to women was the idea of ‘virtual representation’ through a husband’s or father’s vote. Gleadle and Richardson suggest that this theory was an important part of many women’s political identity, especially since, as Matthew Cragoe argues, families often perceived the vote as a communal property rather than the exclusive possession of the propertied male.14 Scholarly discussions of women’s political influence tend to characterise such influence as ‘indirect’ as opposed to the ‘direct’ power exerted by an enfranchised (male) subject.15 This terminology, however, is somewhat misleading with regard to socially and politically elite women. Without the vote, aristocratic women’s relationship with legislative power was inevitably at a remove from this power, insofar as their influence largely operated through men. They nonetheless had direct access to many of the individuals who exercised power – largely, even in the post-Reform era, still from the higher ranks of society. Their engagement with legislative power took place on a far more directly interpersonal level than that of an enfranchised bourgeois tradesman, and certainly more closely than that of the tradesman’s wife. Aristocratic women could act directly on those in high office through the unofficial mechanisms of social ritual: to return to my example at the start of this study, neither the tradesman nor his wife tended to have the Prime Minister at the dinner table. Historians’ discussions of upper-class women’s political activity have tended to centre upon whether they should characterise it as functional (that is, as motivated by self-interest and/or familial interests), or ideological (that is, motivated by party loyalties and/or political ideologies). Reynolds concludes that allegiances and activities tended to be functional rather than ideological; Gleadle and Richardson emphasise ideological motivations, but ask whether this may have been more the case for middle-class women, whose scope for political activity expanded considerably over the middle and later decades of the century.16 As I see it, these debates impose artificial binaries on a process that most aristocratic women experienced as a sophisticated fusion of all these


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motivations. Such debates risk, moreover, as Mandler points out, returning to an overly limited proto-Namierite concentration on politics as a matter of informal localised and dynastic manoeuvrings, at the expense of ideological motivations and forces.17 Aristocratic women tended not to perceive functional and ideological involvement as incompatible or even separate. Their loyalties might often come from fathers, husbands, brothers or lovers, but in the world of the high ton, family ties were also social and/or political ties, and the dividing lines between these ties were highly fluid. Certainly, aristocratic women’s political involvement tended to take the shape of promoting the interests of their male relatives and connections. Men were their channels to power: women’s influence was not so much over public affairs as over the men who had the official authority to shape the nation’s course. Many women gained their party affiliations by a form of inheritance, or else married into them: political allegiances and political influence were in some senses family properties, part of a daughter’s inheritance or a wife’s settlement. Nor were these identities necessarily incompatible: although Perry has highlighted the shift in dominant kinship structures in the eighteenth century from consanguineal to conjugal, families of origin seem to have retained their supportive functions after marriage.18 This might seem to point towards a largely functional perception of and engagement in party conflicts.19 On this view, the power thus exercised is at best that in Shirley Ardener’s concept of the incorporated wife. 20 Familial channels and personal ideological convictions are, however, not incompatible. Like all inheritances (or marriage settlements), affiliations could serve the individual’s own convictions and aims. 21 It is worth remembering that journalists and upper-class commentators alike tended to consider a disinterested and vehement attachment to ideology rather than to family members and connections unladylike and questionable. As the 1784 Westminster election and the attacks on the Duchess of Devonshire demonstrated, political enthusiasms could become dangerously confused with amatory ones, at least in the public eye, when directed towards men who were not relations. Functional and ideological motivations did not fall into neatly separable categories for aristocratic men either. Recording her attendance at the formal opening of Parliament on 3 February 1842, Charlotte Guest dryly notes the customary ‘petition that the Peers might be influenced by no private interests in their deliberations and the passing of their laws, which on the eve of a Corn Law debate seemed to me


inconsistent enough to say the least of it’.22 Significantly, the enthusiastically Whiggish Guest implicitly positions both party political opinions and (presumably) landowning status as ‘private interests’, but ones which are very unlikely to be kept out of any debate on a contested topic. Easy distinctions between familial and ideological motivations are further complicated when one considers that in the 1830s neither the individual parties themselves, nor their ideologies, were clearly defined entities or concepts. The strained Reform consensus disintegrated swiftly after its success. As Alan Sykes warns, a ‘political mentality is not a political party’.23 Whigs of the 1830s, claims Ian Newbould, had quite clear senses of what they stood for, and ‘few could doubt that Whig and Tory signified something’, but this ‘something’ did not lend itself to precise definitions.24 The relatively clearly defined Liberal and Conservative party identities that had evolved by the end of the century had still to form: the subsuming of the Whigs into the mid-century Liberals had still not produced a hegemonic party identity by the end of the 1860s.25 Aristocratic women were not alone in adherences to individual figures rather than to ideologies. What were for men, however, acceptably quasi-contractual loyalties to party leaders, or even reasonable support for brothers and fathers, laid women open to charges of unthinking familial partisanship, since their strongest mode of political influence was through male family members. Such disapproval came perhaps most heavily from aristocratic men, anxious to shed images of the aristocracy as feminised, foreign and essentially corrupt, images that were a rhetorical staple of the Reform agitation.26 The pre-Reform regime of ‘Old Corruption’ is marked out as elitist, irrational, and especially as feminine.27 The intervention of Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, in the 1847 North Staffordshire election earned her the chastisement of Whig party leaders – ‘these are the set of mistakes made by women, who act from impulse’ – since she had supported her husband’s nephew, a Peelite. 28 Mandler, however, sees this tussle as ‘an opportunity to translate the problem of aristocratic influence into the age-old language of misogyny’ and so as a manifestation of ‘the growing anxiety about aristocratic influence – among aristocrats – in a form that disadvantaged women’.29 Similarly, Lady John Russell might have been criticised for her social inadequacies, but she was also widely perceived as exercising a highly detrimental influence over her husband, particularly during the dissolution of his 1852 administration.30 The evolution of a more distinctively ‘British’ aristocracy around the Napoleonic Wars necessitated detachment from previously strong Continental associations.31 This development facilitated


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the representation of aristocratic women as channels for foreign influences. Not surprisingly, then, the political hostesses that were perceived as such assets to the Whigs could also become liabilities, associating the party ‘with the feminine capriciousness and alien idealism of a detached aristocracy’.32 Aristocratic women’s modes of political involvement became a useful target against which their male contemporaries, and even women of other classes, could define themselves, implicitly or explicitly: McCarthy’s seemingly misogynistic 1870 polemic against ‘petticoat influence’ is in fact a call for women’s suffrage as a contrastingly legitimate intervention.33 The ambitious political hostess continues to resurface unexpectedly at important moments in the literary imagination of Victorian England, and for a good while longer than would seem at all relevant. Even as the influence of aristocratic women remained a significant factor in nineteenth-century political life well into the Victorian period, the type of influence they wielded was characterised as that which the Reform Bill sought to suppress. The depiction of the patrician Barnacles in Little Dorrit (1855–1857), Charles Dickens’s most wide-ranging and explicit attack on the state of the nation, draws on long-standing tropes of anti-aristocratic rhetoric. In this novel, both the offices of Government and the drawing-rooms of fashionable society are sites for the corrupt machinations of the (largely homogeneous) social and political elite. Although they grovel to the forlorn Mr Merdle’s vast wealth, it is upon the chilly bulwark of Mrs Merdle’s unimpeachably well-bred bosom that they can build a channel between him and high society. Only in her dining- and drawing-rooms, with their elaborately informal, ostensibly apolitical conversational rituals, can they conduct negotiations under the bosom’s socially impeccable (if icy) protective covering.34 In Wives and Daughters (1866), Gaskell’s Lady Harriet is a highly likeable character, but her approach to politics is cynically astute. She is well aware of the extent to which the deference she expects from the pre-1832 rural community is contingent upon aristocratic theatricalised display: ‘don’t you see, we’re a show and a spectacle – it’s like having a pantomime with harlequin and columbine in plain clothes ... and then there’s the election in June’ (my emphasis).35 For Anthony Trollope, writing in and for the 1860s and 1870s, ambitious upper-class women are thematically vital to his representation of the contemporary political world, most famously the gentlemanly but wrong-headed Lady Glencora Palliser. Attractive as Glencora’s spirit is, it makes her incapable of the rational objectivity required by a stateman. The Prime Minister (1876) in particular

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demonstrates the consequences of an excess of ‘feminine’ partiality, when Glencora’s ill-judged meddling in electoral politics proves a serious embarrassment to her earnest husband. 36 Towards the end of the century, Mary Augusta Ward’s Marcella (1994) makes the political education of a well-intentioned but – again – wrong-headed upperclass woman the paradigm for her own engagement as a novelist with questions of socio-political action. The sequel Sir George Tressady (1896) explores the way in which Marcella’s use of her personal influence generates a disturbing confusion between political and sexual intent. A conversation across an upper-class dinner table turns from Marcella’s political influence to her beauty, comparing it with Blessington’s. ‘Lady Blessington!’ interposes one guest maliciously, ‘an unfortunate comparison, don’t you think?’. Another elaborates, snidely suggesting that ‘the Count d’Orsay is only a question of time!’37 A discussion of an aristocratic woman’s political involvement becomes a discussion of her sexual availability, even as, forty-seven years after Blessington’s death, Ward takes for granted that her latecentury, predominantly middle-class readership needs no explanation of the scandal-ridden details of the Countess’s life. The lasting nineteenth-century literary model for a politically engaged upperclass woman is a partially ostracised political hostess and writer whose questionable origins and peculiar love life were the talk of early Victorian high society. 38 Yet from all these negative representations in middle-class Victorian fiction, we can nonetheless draw the conclusion that the figure of the politically ambitious upper-class woman possesses a remarkably longlived thematic relevance to national concerns, as indeed does her domain: the high society drawing-room and the interpersonal rituals governing it. The next section will consider how upper-class writers made imaginative use of this figure in representing their ideal Reform-era literary nation.

Shopping, voting and political women Even as the political hostess was insistently characterized as an essentially pre-Reform figure, outmoded and irrelevant to the post-Reform political consensus, she became a crucial symbolic feature for those writers and commentators seeking to define this consensus. Legitimacy versus illegitimacy, principled versus personal motivations, rational objectivity versus irrational partisanship – these oppositions proved


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particularly fruitful for the narrative demands of fashionable novels. In Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham (1828), the protagonist stands for election in the borough of Buyemall (following the satirical silver fork tradition of such naming), and mentions matter-of-factly his mother’s involvement and her detailed knowledge of the constituency.39 Lady Frances is equally well informed about metropolitan and national politics: dinner-party conversation allows her to give her son accurate warnings about a threat to his political future.40 Significantly, though, Lady Frances is a negative figure in the novel, the epitome of heartless, frivolous fashionable society, as distinct from Pelham’s uncle who offers him sober tutelage in the intellectual and moral foundations of politics (tutelage from which his mother removes him). Mulvey-Roberts argues that this contrast in educators also allows Edward Bulwer Lytton to enact a rejection of his mother-in-law Anna Wheeler’s radical writings.41 Pelham’s growth into emotional and intellectual maturity, and what Oakley sees as the novel’s ‘reconstructing of a reformed, liberal, popular, aristocratic order’,42 involves finding a worthy future in male, not female, role models. This need for male exemplars points the way towards Godolphin (1833), Bulwer’s first novel published in the aftermath of Reform. Godolphin takes place in the period leading up to Reform, and features a far more sympathetic politically engaged woman: the liberal-minded, morally upright Constance Vernon. Constance wields her social and her political influence inseparably: in ‘her salons the measures of her party were discussed: in her boudoir (it was whispered that) they were arranged’.43 When her Whig husband wishes to conciliate a political ally, he does so by asking her to win over the ally’s wife, a task Constance accomplishes through astute manipulation of social techniques (94–95). Even her establishment of a quasi-Almack’s ensures that her club was ‘made an organ of political influence’, and ‘day by day it became more the fashion to be liberal’ (102, my emphasis). Yet as this latter phrase would suggest, the narrative renders Constance’s political engagement fundamentally suspect. Her political ambition causes estrangement between her and the eponymous hero, and she chooses instead to marry for influence. Moreover, her motivations for desiring reform are deeply personal rather than ideologically principled: she is pursuing the quest wished upon her by her ruined father for revenge against ‘the Oligarchy’. Lord John Russell’s introduction of the Reform Bill on 1 March 1831 heralds ‘the approaching triumph of her hate’ (269), not the triumph of her political principles. Eventually, her lack of ideological foundation proves intrinsically corrupting to others: when the hero finally becomes

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politically ambitious, he purchases a rotten borough ‘for Constance’s sake’ (289), and with her subsequent approval. The alteration of this scene in the 1840 edition of Godolphin reflects the shifting cultural priorities of early Victorian Britain, as the central Reform focus on parliamentary politics moved to wider societal arenas of change and debate, including the home itself. In the 1840 edition, it is Constance herself who purchases the rotten borough of her own accord, in a gesture of submission to her new husband’s Tory adherences (n.289a, 360–363). The alteration enhances both Godolphin’s domestic authority and his political integrity: the scene becomes one of marital triumph, as the daughter yields to the wife. (It is dangerously tempting also to read this scene as Bulwer Lytton’s attempt to assert some marital control four years after his separation and a year after his wife’s publication of Cheveley.) Constance’s political principles are still subservient to her emotional attachments and personal ambitions, but now she also becomes the repository of the act of political corruption, leaving the passively accepting Godolphin morally and politically pure. This change signals the changing priorities of upper-class men, attempting to build new modes of government – even as they moved further away from silver fork writing, as I discuss in Chapter 2. The classic point of literary reference for the political hostess is Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), the second in his ‘Condition of England’ trilogy. Disraeli’s main silver fork novel, Vivian Grey (1826), also portrays a range of sexually licentious, politically involved aristocratic women from whose entanglements the hero must escape. In the transition between this earlier work and Sybil, we see the effects of the post-Reform conceptualisation of politics hinted at in Pelham and Godolphin. Sybil’s depiction of politically engaged aristocrats makes use of similarly negative vocabulary; what makes it distinctively postReform is the emphasis Disraeli places on the political hostess, not simply as illegitimate, but as anachronistic. ‘I will ask him still for Wednesday,’ said Lady St Julians; ‘... If society is not his object, what is?’ ‘Ay!’ said Egremont, ‘there is a great question for you and Lady Firebrace to ponder over. This is a lesson for you fine ladies, who think you can govern the world by what you call your social influences ... flattering yourselves all this time, that to have the occasional privilege of entering your saloons and the periodical experience of your insolent recognition, is to be a reward for great exertions, or if necessary an inducement to infamous tergiversation’.44


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A new era, Disraeli suggests, is dawning, one in which the upperclass woman’s drawing-room will no longer be the route to political power. His diatribe aims at the exclusion of this particular form of interpersonal feminized influence from his ideal body politic. In the turbulent social climate of the 1840s, it was all the more important to be able to define the controllable arena of Westminster as responsive to a changing social order. The recently formed Young England movement was seeking an identity for itself within the Tory party. Critics have often commented upon the inconsistencies of Disraeli’s social prescriptions and the Young England ideology in general.45 Not the least of these is that the ordered hierarchical and feudal world, with which Disraeli proposes to resolve his famous ‘Two Nations’ binary, utilises vocabulary a good deal more congenial to most upper-class women than to many members of the newly enfranchised classes. Ironically, given the ambiguities of his own social status, Disraeli’s ideal for a new England depends on a model of aristocratic male leadership. As well as Sybil’s Egremont, Disraeli’s eponymous heroes in Vivian Grey (1826), The Young Duke (1831), Coningsby (1844) and Tancred (1845) (from outside Parliament and England), and by extension the Young Englanders themselves, have to take their rightful position at the head of the ordered nation. To do so, however, they need to dissociate themselves from the images of aristocratic corruption promulgated by the Reform agitation, and most especially its extra-parliamentary dimensions. Upper-class men must appear relevant, capable of uniting the divided nation and working towards prosperity for all. The sacrificial victims of this agenda, then, are upper-class women.46 Significantly, Disraeli’s last novel, Endymion (set between 1827 and 1850 but written in 1880 without the need for Sybil’s tactical agenda) represents upperclass women’s political involvement in a far more positive, or at any rate effective, light.47 Disraeli’s depiction of the political hostess thus cannot be taken as direct historical documentation, but rather as a representation serving specific literary, social and political objectives. It also serves as Disraeli’s act of autobiographical self-(re)creation. Disraeli’s own career had its roots in his social skills and the patronage of women like Ladies Londonderry and Jersey (the latter parodied as Lady St Julians).48 Having acquired a seat in the House in 1837, he could afford to reinvent himself. The attack in Sybil is in keeping with the hostility towards politically ambitious women that Mandler claims even the men who benefited from these women’s assistance often felt.49 In ridiculing Lady St Julians and her coterie, Disraeli is staging a rejection of an idea

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of himself as a man whose career rose from women’s drawing-rooms, in favour of one whose masculine literary and political voice articulates the future of the nation as a whole. Yet many aristocratic women writers were also capable of responding to the changing political climate of Reform, and of fusing personal concerns and familial affiliations with political engagement through their fiction. Taken as a whole, Vernon argues, ‘nineteenth-century elections constituted a ritual process through which constituencies talked to themselves, creating narratives which expressed their sources of unity as well as their sources of difference’.50 Through judicious depictions of electoral rituals, upper-class women writers could create narratives of unity incorporating alternative versions of their influence, and narratives of difference distinguishing their visions of politics from those of their attackers. Commencing pre-Reform, the Hon. Emily Eden’s The Semi-Attached Couple (which was published in 1860 but probably mostly written in the early 1830s) includes a witty election account, on a par with Dickens’s Eatanswill in The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837). The SemiAttached Couple appears to bear out Bulwer Lytton’s and Disraeli’s cynicism about women’s incapacity for objective political engagement. The young Helen Beaufort’s emotional inexperience when entering her marriage to Lord Teviot seems at first to be matched by a corresponding political naiveté – in contrast to her sophisticated creator, for Eden was a strong Whig and a noted political hostess. ‘I should be puzzled to say what my party is’, observes Helen, ‘for at this moment I am very ignorant of all political matters’. 51 Only personal relationships generate any true dedication: ‘but if Lord Teviot comes into office, I suppose I shall grow as eager as most people are’ (134). Lady Portmore, the one woman in the novel who claims both ideological involvement and political knowledge, is very similar to Disraeli’s Lady St Julians. Her private gossip and her public advice are alike in their worthlessness, and the denial of a government appointment to her disreputable nephew effects ‘a complete and entire change in Lady Portmore’s opinion on free trade, parliamentary reform, foreign policy, etc. She did not state the precise nature of her new views’ (258). Affection motivates Helen whereas a desire for power motivates Lady Portmore, but both women see politics in terms of familial bonds and neither conceives of their party identities as separable from these bonds. Although Helen may be politically inexperienced in terms of parliamentary politics, however, she is notably au fait with the personalised


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constituency interactions of early nineteenth-century election rituals. She brings to the Beaufort men’s election campaign a tactical pragmatism previously lacking in her dealings with her husband, from whom at this point in the novel she is partly estranged (or to whom she is ‘semi-attached’). ‘Yes, we have each got a polling-book, a list of voters, or whatever you call it’, Helen tells her cousin (one of the two Beaufort candidates), ‘and have been studying them all day to see if there are any of our tradespeople or old friends in the village whom we could persuade to vote for you’ (211). In particular, Eden’s aristocratic women go shopping, for ‘as they justly alleged, shopping was what every woman was born for, and could not, under any circumstances, be considered illegal’ (215). ‘We want you to order a bonnet, which you need not wear, at Mrs Vere’s’, urges Helen’s cousin. ‘Vere pretends to have opinions about Church reform’ (211). Faced with the opposition’s own use of patronage (a large order to the local ironmonger), Lord Beaufort’s mother employs a language of coercion and corruption, but in the next breath, she draws on what she would doubtless consider, in T.J. Nossitur’s terminology, legitimate influence and market forces.52 ‘ “That is actual bribery,” said Lady Eskdale, rising into real election energy; “but if it comes to that, your father is going to have iron hurdles all around the pleasure-ground” ’ (211–212). The selective shopping which became a cross-class tool in anti-slavery protests, and which lower-class women were able to use as their own tool of political involvement,53 takes on greater individual potential in the hands of aristocratic women. In a rural area, where tradesmen with votes tended to be highly dependent on the nearby country houses, we cannot consider shopping to be a non-political act. It is, instead, a classic exertion of aristocratic women’s influence: interpersonal, informal, seemingly innocuous, and potentially highly significant. Despite their disingenuous denials, the Beaufort women are most certainly ‘sullying the purity of the election’ (215) with their targeted purchasing, but their methods cannot be officially deemed illegitimate. Moreover, in contrast to, for example, anti-slavery sugar boycotts, this aristocratic shopping seems based not on the withholding of custom, but the granting of it: the response to a wavering voter is to bestow custom immediately, not to threaten its future withdrawal. Admittedly, one action can implicitly suggest the other. It is, however, in keeping with many historians’ theories about generally acceptable and unacceptable degrees of aristocratic influence that none of the women refers to negative pressure such as this – even if it was a part of real-life electoral scenes, Eden clearly feels it incompatible with the

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depiction of sympathetic aristocratic characters.54 The only direct coercion in the novel comes from lower-class characters responding to aristocratic influence: in keeping with theories of virtual representation, the deferential Mrs Harris is actively proud ‘that she had made Harris vote against his conscience and inclination for [the Beauforts]’ (216). The Beauforts’ agent cheerfully invokes individual conviction in what is clearly a case of a dependant (with two votes) trapped between competing aristocratic influences: ‘I allow the little wretch one vote ... because he is his Grace’s [their opponent] private tinker ... but in a general way, I don’t like to see such little hatomeys [sic] go for to think for themselves.’ (226).55 The ideological cause to which Eden’s women adhere is that of getting their male relatives into Parliament; the party they support is the one to which their male relatives belong; the narrative makes no explicit attempt to claim for them a wider perspective. Yet all ritual serves a function, and we cannot view either the fictional celebration of electoral dynamics or the maintenance of the manners of high society as a politically neutral project. The election scenes have ideological import that makes them wholly consistent with the values of the main storyline’s post-courtship comedy of manners. These scenes open up a narrative site on which Helen Teviot, even as she exercises such unexpected political acumen, is also re-building her relationship with her husband through her letter-writing – a détente that is represented as natural ‘when the heart is tender and the mind well-regulated’ (202, my emphasis). Manners are, in fact, the key to Eden’s novels. ‘Behavioural literature and codes’, argues Marjorie Morgan, ‘suggest that literate English men and women viewed manners and morals as crucially important agents of social stability’.56 Specifically, she claims that aristocrats hoped the inculcation of correct conduct ‘would perpetuate aristocratic control, values and manners’.57 Party allegiances and ideologies are of great significance to Emily Eden, daughter and sister of prominent statesmen. They are so integral to her world that she feels no need to foreground them through literature (unlike the outsider Disraeli for whom such allegiances and ideologies are his way to power). In her view, they remain a crucial part of a secure aristocratic world, in which public and private spheres are neither opposed nor rigidly complementary, but rather cannot be conceptualised as separate entities in the first place. While Eden clearly represents the socialised manoeuvrings of aristocratic women as a different part of the electoral process from the canvassing in which their male relatives engage, her narrative positions the social as inextricably political in nature.


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In the post-Reform period, upper-class women writers show themselves to be just as capable of constructing ideological responses to the changing political climate, by seeking new ways of thinking about politics. Caroline Norton’s ‘Woman’s Reward’ again foregrounds women’s electoral involvement. Norton wrote it in 1835 – that is, for a post-Reform world, but the failed bill for Catholic Emancipation defines its political scene as pre-1829. Like Semi-Attached’s Helen, Norton’s protagonist Mary Dupré campaigns unquestioningly for her family. Norton seems to find nothing problematic about this pure and high-minded character ordering household supplies en masse in an effort to win over her unpleasant brother Lionel’s most implacable opponents (I. 291–293). Norton’s own passion for political involvement and her fragile social roots make her even more anxious to assert upper-class women’s political significance. She achieves this sense of significance by making the election results in ‘Woman’s Reward’ almost entirely dependent on the actions and interactions of women. When the time comes for Lionel’s next election, his thoughtless wife Lady Clarice Lyle (possibly modelled on Melbourne’s wife Lady Caroline Lamb) has taken Mary’s role in the constituency. Lady Clarice’s failure to conciliate the voters is, Norton tells us, the decisive factor in losing him his seat (II. 300). Unfortunately, the success of saintly Mary’s canvassing raises awkward issues for Norton. In desiring a protagonist (and partial alter ego) who is both politically effective and unchallengeably pure, she wants to have her electoral cake and eat it. Norton’s novel places far more explicit emphasis than does Eden’s Semi-Attached upon the societal importance of politics and upon the language of individual conviction, yet this sits uneasily with the languages of influence and of the market through which Mary demonstrates her sisterly loyalty. Mary’s use of her personal connections and her economic power might be justifiable as a means to a desirable political end. Should we value her political effectiveness, however, when she puts it to such a self-evidently bad cause as the election of the intolerant Tory Lionel? ‘Woman’s Reward’ clearly intends to critique Lionel’s flippant dismissal of ‘woman’s ambition’ as directed wholly towards the success of the men in their lives since ‘they have no abstract love for their country’ (I. 99). Yet all the available narrative evidence would seem to bear him out. Certainly, Mary is notably lacking in the sense of individual conviction and involvement that Norton derived from her own Whig family heritage.58 The novel’s ultimate message, however, depicts Whig values as the solution to both public and private dissensions. ‘Woman’s Reward’ is

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distinctly ambiguous about the merit of party identities: the particular virtue of the Whig hero William Clavering is that he acts, not from party allegiances, but rather from personal conviction, and seeks to convince others according to these lights (‘Woman’s Reward’ II. 4). Norton, however, is reworking the way in which, as Mandler has argued, many Whigs saw themselves after 1832: vibrant reformers, eager ‘to demonstrate the practical usefulness and responsiveness of an aristocratic State to popular pressure’.59 The novel brings its private and public conflicts to a head in the question of Catholic Emancipation, the reforming measure that Clavering is struggling to bring through Parliament. Driven by spite against him, the Tory Lionel makes a speech denouncing it, and the Bill fails (II. 121–125). Lionel has allowed personal motives instead of disinterested consideration of the people’s good to influence his political conduct, and this would seem a simple demonstration of the importance of character over party: Lionel is a bad brother and a bad husband, and as such is a bad politician. For Norton, however, this is more of a twoway process. Lionel’s political flaws are also his personal flaws. That is, the intolerance, obsession with class status, and lack of respect for the liberties and feelings of others that characterize him as an individual are also, in her representation, characteristics of a political identity. Norton is not saying that Lionel is a bad statesman because he is a bad brother and husband. She is saying that he is a bad brother, husband, and statesman because he is a Tory. Significantly, Catholic Emancipation, which was actually passed, if rather reluctantly, by a Tory government, becomes in her fiction (as implicitly in much Reform rhetoric) an intrinsically Whig measure and therefore a moral index of an individual’s tolerance and integrity. The same logic that makes Lionel a bad private and public man makes Clavering a good husband and statesman. Just as commentators generally took Clavering as Caroline Norton’s idealised portrayal of Melbourne, so too she apparently modelled Lionel’s more petty aspects on her boorish husband.60 We may then interpret her own passionate belief in the Whig cause, as with her enthusiastic canvassing for Reform in the face of hostility from the Nortons, who were Tories,61 as a matter of internal conviction, a Sheridan family legacy, a gesture of opposition to her brutal husband – or all of the above. The logic of Norton’s representations is that none of these motives is inconsistent with each other. Ultimately, personal convictions and party allegiances are easily reconcilable, because, if only politicians (and husbands) would allow themselves to listen to Clavering/Melbourne’s personal convictions, they would all be Whigs.


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Other upper-class women found literary modes of political engagement through representing ideal leaders – and their polar opposites, corrupt men who are the wrong leaders for the country. Copeland identifies Charlotte Bury’s 1836 novel The Devoted as staging an essential spectacle of reform.62 Yet Bury is by no means wholly celebratory of electoral progress. Election rituals in her novel use ideas of representation to construct the franchise in terms of a language of rightful deference menaced by some (not all) forms of inclusion. She angrily portrays certain voters, particularly the newly enfranchised ones, as taking seemingly malicious pleasure in withholding their votes, but also paints an image of properly deferential franchise-holders who can take ‘honest pride’ in benefiting their masters.63 The Devoted takes for granted the canvassing activities of upper-class women (good and bad), but uses the disastrous consequences of the election itself as a means to criticise the rank-obsessed and heartless Lord Altamont, with his contempt for ‘the multitude’.64 Toward the end of the Reform decade, Catherine Stepney had already seen her own share of marital disasters. She married Sir Thomas Stepney only after divorcing her first husband Russell Manners for desertion and infidelity under the more flexible Scots marriage laws. (Hers is one of the cases referenced by Norton in Letter to the Queen (LQ 32).) Sir Thomas became equerry to the Duke of York, and by the early 1840s Lady Stepney seems to have been in a secure enough position for Charlotte Guest to consult her about storming the higher circles of fashionable society. (She particularly recommended the giving of concerts and balls.)65 Stepney also apparently had an affair with Edward Bulwer Lytton, presumably prompting his wife’s references to her as ‘Lady Stepastray’ in Cheveley. Stepney’s novel The Courtier’s Daughter (1838) (or, in Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s rendering, ‘The Chamberlain’s Daughter’) is set pre-Reform, in the early nineteenth-century but, like Norton, Stepney is concerned with the building of a post-Reform world. This popular device of an earlier setting allows authors, particularly proReform ones, to lay claim to a historical perspective that implicitly vindicates the novel’s politics. More pragmatically, or more aesthetically, the extended nature of pre-Reform elections over more than one day allows for greater narrative drama and suspense. The Courtier’s Daughter ostensibly promulgates the familiar rhetoric about political hostesses later used by Disraeli in Sybil. A shallow aristocratic woman, Lady Jane De Winton, is concerned only with her son’s advantage, not with his political integrity, and tries unsuccessfully to persuade him to abandon his father’s radical republican


principles. Yet Stepney is actually using this rhetoric to work in a subtle critique of male politicians, epitomised by the eponymous ‘courtier’, the Earl of Dungarvon. The old-fashioned word ‘courtier’ is significant, pointing as it does to outmoded, court-centred models of government, as well as conveying associations of insincerity and place-seeking. Sure enough, ‘so insinuating was the Earl’s manner, and so powerful his arguments’ that his conversation persuades De Winton to abandon his principles.66 The ‘infamous tergiversation’ that Disraeli’s Egremont decried here proceeds from insinuating conversation, but Stepney shows that reformers should direct these critiques, not at women, but at the older aristocrats of both sexes. She portrays ‘the courtier’s daughter’, Horatia, as a worthy representative of the new political generation. Indeed, the hero’s father admiringly views Horatia as the more firm-minded member of the couple: ‘Horatia possessed a quality which he [the hero] often wanted, firmness and decision of mind (though veiled under the most feminine gentleness of manners) which ... would influence him to exert the commanding talents which he possessed’ (III. 236). In contrast, the scheming Henrietta De Winton (daughter of Lady Jane) ‘would never have sufficient influence over him, to induce him to rouse himself from inglorious tergiversation’ (III. 237, my emphasis). In Stepney’s literary nation, the bad aristocratic woman is the one who is not sufficiently interested in politics. Horatia’s role in the new order, then, combines the personalised influence and ambition traditionally linked to negative constructions of aristocratic women’s politics, with the more benign models of inspiring symbolic influence usually associated with post-Reform middle-class ideals of domestic womanhood. The Reform decade closes with the election in Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s Cheveley (1839), a campaign involving two women’s absences. Neither De Clifford’s mother nor his wife support his canvassing, but for very different reasons. The Dowager Lady De Clifford (a parody of her mother-in-law Elizabeth Bulwer), ‘thought it incumbent on her to be a Tory, and therefore regarded her [Radical] son’s political principles as waifs upon her manor’ (65), as with Elizabeth and Edward Bulwer. However, although the Dowager prioritises her political convictions over the pleasure of having a son in Parliament, withholding her considerable support as a landowner, Rosina Bulwer Lytton represents these convictions as a matter of ingrained class prejudice rather than ideological belief. They are no source of moral or intellectual credit. Neither are De Clifford’s ‘ultra-Liberal’ politics any credit to him, since ‘in private life (as in the general pendant to public liberality) he was a


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tyrannical autocrat’ (24). His mistreatment of his long-suffering wife, Julia, reflects this domestic tyranny. Her absence from her husband’s election campaign is not due to political allegiances or ambitions. Instead, it functions as a vital symptom of De Clifford’s lack of domestic morals, since he has banished his wife from her place by his side to an isolated life in the country. Given these two notable absences, the women actually involved in the Blichingly election are not aristocratic but bourgeois, and they are more shopped against than shopping: De Clifford’s electioneering seems to aim as much at courting the women as the men of the district. Although Rosina Bulwer Lytton represents the political involvement of women of all classes as essentially shallow and ideologically hollow, she codes this not so much as quintessentially female, as quintessentially electoral. The narrative keeps the martyred protagonist firmly apart from party identities and participation in electioneering. Her angelic status is implicitly irreconcilable with the intrinsic sordidness of the political process as represented by Cheveley. For Rosina Bulwer Lytton to emerge from her fictional battle triumphant, she must preserve Julia De Clifford from the polluting contact of the canvass. As we saw in Chapter 4, Rosina Bulwer Lytton did make an appearance on a political platform in the Hertfordshire elections of June 1858, unlike Julia, or Eden’s women who oversee the hustings from the window of a nearby inn. Such an appearance, however, was sufficient for her husband to declare her legally insane and for initial official reports to obscure her words as an illegitimate mode of public discourse. Throughout Cheveley, Rosina Bulwer Lytton deploys standard antiWhig rhetoric, especially the accusations of caring solely for place over principle and supporting only their own connections. She contrasts this with the Toryism of Lord Cheveley himself, the ‘Man of Honour’ in all aspects of life, both public and private, whose aristocratic virtue counteracts De Clifford’s aristocratic vice. This seeming party partisanship in fact arises from personal factors: the particular virtue of the Tories is that they are not the Whigs, and the particular vice of the Whigs is that her husband supported them (as a Radical). When Edward Bulwer Lytton transferred his political allegiances to the Tories later in the century, her later attacks lost even her earlier factional underpinnings: ‘the two parties are in reality “one concern” ’ (Blighted 43). In one of her later novels, The World and His Wife (1858), written at the height of her disillusionment, she went on to dismiss even the recent legal developments in favour of women’s rights – many urged on by Caroline Norton – as a matter of party rather than personal conviction.67 She

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thus implies that these two modes of conviction are incompatible. Tories in the post-Reform years often expressed similar anti-party sentiments, aiming to depict themselves as the ‘true’ representatives of an organic, non-factional political community.68 However, Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s widening hostility to all facets of political life deprives her of the ability or desire to make universalising claims. This means that her opposition to party politics, instead of aligning her with like-minded groups, effectively sets her in opposition to the evolving trends of parliamentary democracy, directed by the 1860s towards increasingly coherent party identities. The Dowager’s Toryism and De Clifford’s Radicalism are ideologically indistinguishable, not because Rosina Bulwer Lytton is unable to conceive of different party political identities, but because the real testing-ground of these identities comes upon the domestic hearth. Rosina Bulwer Lytton sees the public and private spheres as integrally connected on a moral level, but unlike with Norton, the private sphere predominates. For her, there is no such thing as the bad husband who makes an honourable MP. The man who abuses his wife will inevitably abuse his country. De Clifford’s breathtakingly hypocritical victory speech neatly encapsulates this fusion, drawing upon the language of separate spheres to praise the wholly domestic influence of home and hearth as ‘the nurseries of our virtues or our vices’ (396). While private wrongdoing is unchecked, public measures such as Reform Bills will make no real difference. Thirty years later, Josephine Butler and her supporters based their campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts on such an alignment between private and public (male) morality.69 The point of these examples is not to suggest that all aristocratic women wrote positively (or neutrally) about women’s political involvement and all men wrote negatively. My aim, rather, is to show how different writers can rework the same fundamental vocabularies of influence and ambition to take on different meanings – and to give these vocabularies new relevance for a post-Reform world.

Later decades It makes sense to return to Eden’s The Semi-Attached Couple, this time to consider the context in which Eden rewrote and published the novel: the world of 1860. During decades of industrialisation and franchise reform, politics inevitably expanded well beyond the range of aristocratic drawing-rooms.70 Pat Jalland’s case studies of late-century political wives suggest that, while their experiences could differ dramatically,


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those who had unambitious or resistant husbands had limited influence.71 The post-Reform power base was simply too large to be accommodated by the limited structures of social inclusion evolved by an elite whose identity was rooted in processes of exclusion.72 Combermere and Knollys, writing in 1866, observe of the early nineteenth-century that in ‘these days we can scarcely realize the requirements of electioneering partisans ambitious of the social attentions which formerly condemned the resident county member to an incessant reception of guests’.73 At the initial time of composition, Eden could afford to be blasé about elections and politics, since they were a fundamental part of the fabric of social life. Party allegiances could and did produce bitter dissension, but ultimately the intangible bonds of rank linked the upper-classes. By the time Semi-Attached was actually published in 1860, even the idea of such a world was under much greater threat. Tamara Wagner, reading the novel as predominantly a product of the 1860s, sees it as an attempt to translate Jane Austen’s stylistic and moral concerns into a mode of ‘aristocratic writing’, with a retrospective reshaping of Regency values into domestic concerns.74 Yet the election scenes have an inevitable anachronism which presents its own creative possibilities on publication. Semi-Attached’s depiction of pre-Reform election rituals is key to the Preface’s nostalgia-invoking ‘apology’, these being represented as the scenes which could not lend themselves to rewriting – and which might have the most interest to the younger generation of readers. Frank O’Gorman’s analysis of such rituals from 1780 to 1860 highlights their ongoing function as hierarchical expressions of social structure, inclusive of all sectors of the community. This inclusiveness also facilitates the use of election ritual as a form of social safety valve.75 Davidoff has observed that as the century progressed, high ‘Society’ increasingly justified itself by the need to set a good example to society – specifically, to the lower orders.76 For the upper classes, she claims, the lower orders largely meant servants, but the designation of ‘lower order’ could extend to the native peoples of the empire whose range was spreading over the globe. In looking at the role played by aristocratic women in Victorian politics, we should not forget that the socialised nature of this role extended also to empire. Eden discovered this extension of her traditional duties in 1836 when she left for six years in India as hostess to her brother Lord Auckland, the newly appointed Governor-General – a geographical disruption that became a far more profound disruption to her ordered worldview.77 By the 1860s, Semi-Attached’s vision of a world whose domestic and political relationships harmonise within a

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deferential social order is both an object of desire and one of irrecoverable antiquity to the novel’s actual readership. The reason that Eden revisited and published Semi-Attached in the first place was to capitalize on the success of her 1859 novel The SemiDetached House (published anonymously, but with Lady Theresa Lewis’s name as editor). The decade leading up to The Semi-Detached House had seen millions gained and lost in railways, the Great Exhibition (1851), the Crimean War (1853–1856), and the Sepoy Rebellion (1857–1858). In the next decade, as Catherine Hall emphasises, commentators debated the 1865 Governor Eyre controversy about the violent suppression of a rebellion in Jamaica and the Second Reform Act almost in tandem, with all the issues these events raised about inclusion and exclusion, social and racial hierarchies, just and unjust authority.78 The protagonists of The Semi-Detached House are not squabbling aristocrats but an aristocratic family and a middleclass family living under the same suburban (semi-detached) roof, awaiting the return of one husband from diplomatic affairs in Berlin and another from his sea travels for the East India trade, fending off the social and financial predations of a Jewish financier and his family. The change in cast (and in caste) signals the change in period and in authorial concerns. The domestic space of the semi-detached house becomes a politically charged site on which to represent Eden’s ideal Britain of 1859.79 In Eden’s literary nation, upper- and middle-classes can combine as part of the Liberal consensus, the eventual realization of Reform ambitions in a world where Whigs and aristocratic Whig leadership are things of the past. ‘I don’t mind her [the Jewish Baroness Sampson] not being ladylike in manner, nor, indeed, in look’, the comical Mrs Hopkinson tells her son-in-law, ‘but I hate her pretences’. ‘Pretensions, ma’am, you mean’, he – and probably the reader – intones condescendingly. Disconcertingly, however, Mrs Hopkinson knows very well what she means: ‘No, I don’t, Charles, I know what pretensions are, we all have them; I mean pretences’ (my emphasis).80 The exclusive social spaces of the English country house and the permeable outdoor spaces of election performance no longer suffice for Eden’s realization of an emotional harmony that echoes an organic social order. Instead, the key site for this order must be the enclosed world of the bourgeois home, a world whose judgments depend, not upon upper-class vocabularies of critical social discrimination – ‘pretensions’ – but upon vocabularies of moral earnestness that reject forms of acting as ‘pretences’.


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The joking image towards the end of the novel of the potential pleasures of ‘a semi-detached castle’ (223), can be seen as representative of the shifting sites of aristocratic value schemes: even as country houses and metropolitan salons retained important levels of direct political influence, in the world of the 1850s and 1860s they are no longer the crucial literary arenas for representing states of the nation. Yet Eden, whose own home continued to be a gathering-point for Whig and Liberal politicians, betrays a notable ambivalence towards the power relations and the performativity inherent in such fictionalised bourgeois domesticity. The Semi-Detached House never quite manages to absorb its unhappiest and most ambivalent character, the (presumably Jewish) Rachel, who describes her past home life as ‘all actors and actresses and none of us quite up to our parts, though we act all day long’ (109–110), and who is urged towards a happier future life by Mrs Hopkinson’s desire that ‘we should all be settled like the people at the end of a play’ (255). This theatrical domestic future is one in which Rachel’s expressly stated incapacity for normal wifely love will prove, if anything, an advantage to her. ‘I almost think it is better that the love should be most on the husband’s side; and then he is afraid of you’, cosy Mrs Hopkinson tells her bluntly, ‘and that is not amiss when the wife is cleverer than the husband’ (325). In a society that almost obsessively inscribed the ideal woman’s influence as domestic and spiritual, Eden does not quench a certain cynicism about the implications of an influence so inseparable from the power dynamics of marital relationships.

Representing Victoria A discussion of aristocratic women’s political influence would not be complete without a brief consideration of the nation’s (theoretically) most powerful woman, Queen Victoria. Several critics have discussed the cultural implications of Victoria’s representation (by herself and by others) as the quintessential bourgeois wife and mother.81 I want to focus upon the conflict between this representation and the Queen’s position as the theoretical pinnacle of the aristocratic social pyramid. Young women’s presentation at Court was a central introductory ritual to fashionable society, yet Reynolds notes that Victoria’s reign saw a widening and unprecedented division between the Court and aristocratic ‘Society’.82 Upper-class women grappled with the crucial nineteenth-century transition from a construction of sovereignty that still drew upon older models of direct intervention to one which

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exerted great symbolic – and symbolically gendered – influence. They respond to Victoria, and to the idea of Victoria, both in terms of personalised social interaction and of her universalised emblematic status. Appealing to ‘the English Public’, Rosina Bulwer Lytton explicitly rejects the polemical device of a Letter to the Queen.83 For her, the Queen is merely a woman who has sided with the men. Victoria is ‘a little selfish, sensuous Inanity’ (Blighted 42), and Rosina Bulwer Lytton makes no bones about her opinion that Albert’s early death was a lucky escape for him. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s response to Victoria epitomises the central tension in her work: on the one hand, she demands the right to a public voice, and on the other hand, she insistently personalises all aspects of public life, turning them into part of a universal conspiracy against her. Her image of the actual Victoria as an epitome of failed solidarity offers a reversed, negative version of one of the Queen’s most powerful representations as the paradigmatic figure of nineteenth century womanhood.84 By contrast, in A Letter to the Queen Caroline Norton explicitly accepts and even welcomes the nominal nature of the throne’s power. She makes clear that the true addressee of her traditional appeal for protection is the Law. It is, she writes, a glorious thing that the Law should be stronger than the Throne ... But it is not a glorious thing that, being stronger than the throne, it should be weaker than the subject: and that that which even a king can only do within a certain limit, – (oppress or uphold), – may be done with boundless irresponsible power, in the one single relation of husband and wife. (LQ 103–104) In other words, the replacement of the older patterns of monarchical government by legal mechanisms is a welcome one, but not when those mechanisms only reproduce the patterns of absolutist monarchy within the home. Norton identifies herself with queenliness through her sufferings: ‘INSULT is not DEGRADATION: Queens have been insulted, as I was’ (LQ 82). Among the royal precedents she mentions is another Caroline who found her reputation and her future at stake in a state trial conducted by men, even as her guilt or innocence became a matter for popular speculation. The Queen Caroline Affair of 1820–1821 roused anti-monarchical public opinion to near-frenzy, and it was possibly the first nineteenth-century cause to line up women as ‘defenders of familial values and communal morality’.85 Davidoff and Hall represent it as a


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defining moment in the evolution of a middle-class identity, but Dror Wahrman points out that support for Queen Caroline cut across class barriers, generating a discourse of ‘the people’ versus ‘the higher orders’ rather than an explicit confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.86 The success of Bury’s journals shows the ongoing popular interest in the matter. In assuming the role of Queen, Norton is anticipating Ruskin’s exhortations to the wives of Britain in ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (1865), which, Sharon Weltman argues, waives private and public distinctions and so ‘elevates politically powerless housewives to rhetorically empowered queens’.87 Such concepts of symbolic gendered power are, however, insufficient for what Norton is trying to achieve; her rhetorical queenliness becomes a claim to a public voice that directly addresses the structures of the state. Nevertheless, as is clear from the poignant bitterness with which Rosina Bulwer Lytton rejects it, the idea of a direct personal appeal to the reigning monarch as the dispenser of justice and righter of the wrongs done by evil subjects retained its imaginative power in the period.88 In contrast to her public rhetoric, Norton herself still cherished some resentment towards the actual Victoria for Norton’s banishment from Court after the 1836 trial (Melbourne himself thought it better for her not to appear until the new queen was safely married).89 The Bedchamber Affair of May 1839 regarding the party identities of the Queen’s Whig ladies-in-waiting highlighted male politicians’ fear of influence, and disruptive, personalised, Whig female influence at that, over a pure young girl.90 Similar anxieties produced the banishment of Norton just at the point when she most needed the Queen’s personal countenance, in Victoria’s most ‘aristocratic’ role as the theoretical head of Society. Decades later, Norton’s sense of abandonment surfaces in Lost and Saved (1863). The naïve young sailor Owen Brooke writes a letter to the queen on behalf of his seduced and betrayed sister, but he lacks the literary standing and socio-political contacts that get Norton’s letters both published and read. More significantly, he lacks Norton’s perception that an appeal to the Queen by virtue of its historical moment must be a rhetorical device. Instead, Owen attempts to throw his letter into Victoria’s carriage as she passes, and finds himself under arrest for having attacked the queen.91 This scene does not come across as hostile towards Victoria herself: as the central presence, she is wholly absent from it. Norton accepts that the old logic of patronage and direct appeal has gone, and is not advocating a return to outmoded constructions of monarchy. Lost and Saved accepts the passing of the old order – but registers an implicit accusation. The queen, as the


paradigm of Victorian womanhood, is ‘the one woman in England who cannot suffer wrong’, as Norton reminds her readers (LQ 154). Married women are legally non-existent in a country ruled by a married woman. This is the paradox on which both Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Caroline Norton brood: many venerate the Queen as wife and mother, yet the Parliament of which she is Head continues to oppress other wives and mothers. The ideal of female symbolic influence depends on its operation in an etherealised, privatised sphere supposedly above the sordidness of the public world. Yet such an ideal is doomed from the start, in that the most successful embodiment of the spiritual power of womanhood is the body of the ruling Head of State. The ideal may be women’s physical absence and spiritual presence – but this provokes the spectre of the reverse, the fear that lies behind Norton’s representation in Lost and Saved, the fear that even a central physical presence can become a spiritual absence. Margaret Homans observes that the fact ‘that Victoria was monarch only because of a “failure of issue male” means that, whatever else she may represent, she always represents lack’.92 In Eden’s The Semi-Detached House, middle-class Mrs Hopkinson, for all her initial fears about neighbourly exposure to ‘the vices of the nobility’ (22), feels no such anxiety about ‘our good Queen’ (46). She instead lives ‘in a state of enthusiastic and loyal curiosity about the Court’. (45). Baroness Sampson, intent on social climbing, sees the Queen in terms of her aristocratic role in the fashionable world. She tries to imply, not her knowledge of the Queen, but the Queen’s personal knowledge of her: ‘ “I suspect we are out of favour at Court, but a Drawing-Room is my aversion” ... she hinted an intention of bringing the Queen to her senses by staying away from the next Drawing-Room too’ (46).93 Yet for Mrs Hopkinson, the social and the political, direct and symbolic power, the Queen as mother and as monarch, are all jumbled up together: ‘what with all her children, and what with making war and making peace, and giving balls and proroguing Parliaments’ (156). Eden can look down with amusement from her aristocratic security upon the attempts of the two women, in their very different ways, to lay claim to the Queen. Together with this amusement, however, is an awareness of the extent to which Victoria has become a public possession, a symbolic presence in society rather than a personal presence in Society. As in Lost and Saved, the actual Victoria makes no appearance in the text. Instead, she functions as a vacancy, a space upon which women (and men) of all classes can project desires and fantasies, both social and domestic, of identity and belonging. Aristocratic women seeking to make political


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interventions into national politics and society’s attitudes were poised between their traditional modes of personalised interaction and developing bourgeois ideals of symbolic power. The figure of the queen both embodies their particular dilemmas and transcends them, through a cross-class model of appeal that they could not readily emulate. In conclusion, aristocratic women’s capacity for political action is characterised by the equivalent strengths and limitations of aristocratic women’s authorship. Interpersonal and highly socialised modes of contact and influence opened up spheres of access and influence not available to women of other classes, but such modes were by their nature vulnerable to attack and dismissal as lacking in ideological foundations and legitimacy. Aristocratic women’s writing about politics, or with politically polemical intent, however, could offer alternative models of influence that gave them a part in the post-Reform state. Such writing was also, as the century wore on, expressive of shifting priorities in a world in which social and political elites still overlapped, but in which the traditional sites of socialised action were growing less immediately influential. Aristocratic women writers thus needed either to adapt personalised modes of intervention, place greater literary emphasis on middle-class ideals of symbolic influence, or combine the two approaches, even as their writing also foregrounds some of the problems with theories of influence that disregard or deny the possibilities of the social.


The 1867 Reform Act provides a convenient historical moment on which to conclude. This legislation admittedly lacked the iconic status and energising socio-political discourses of the First Reform Act, but it provided a vital and highly charged point of national self-definition.1 Through its enactment, a little under a million men gained the vote, doubling the electorate. Whereas the dominant rhetoric of the 1832 Act challenged the extent of aristocratic power, the debates leading up to 1867 focused more specifically on who would be included in the franchise, and thus on what defined a political subject. Key questions involved the judicious extension of power to further bases, rather than the destabilising of traditional power bases. The definitions sought by parliamentarians and campaigners were of noble versus unsuitable working-class men,2 not of dissolute aristocrats versus gifted elite leaders. This emphasis on franchise-centred models of expansion and legitimation confirmed the gradually lessening relevance – even to aristocrats themselves – of vocabularies, images and ideas traditionally associated with the aristocracy. The Act itself came in between the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865 and the retirement of Lord John Russell in 1868, two politicians emblematic of the Whig-Radical coalition that had furthered reform in 1832 and onwards, and whose departures opened the way for Gladstonian Liberalism. The battles fought and lost in the 1860s were as important as those fought and won. The Second Reform Act is also significant for what it omitted, particularly its failure to grant the franchise to women. The very fact that women’s suffrage was a topic for debate nevertheless highlighted the way in which the First Reform Act’s gendering of the political subject had become by the Second Reform Act an active and uneasy omission that pointedly highlighted gender identity over class. Many 180


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middle- and upper-class women indignantly decried the granting of the vote to men of lower-class status instead of themselves. Arguments for suffrage, notes Jane Rendall, ‘varied not only with reference to marital status, but also in relation to boundaries of class, religion, nationality and race. Those arguments could exclude as well as include’.3 Demands for women’s suffrage failed for 1867, and would continue to fail when the 1884 Reform Act and 1885 Redistribution Act tripled the electorate and made the vote in effect an accepted right rather than a sought-for privilege – for men. The existence and organisation of these demands nevertheless signalled the directions in which women’s movements would proceed in the closing decades of the century – that is, coordinated campaigns for goals associated with clearly identifiable and legitimate structures of the State, especially but not limited to the franchise. Greater social relevance, then, came at the cost of diluted control and depersonalised engagement. Aristocratic women still played important political roles, but roles more easily assimilated into parliamentary structures. This was particularly applicable towards the final third of the century, when the increasing professionalisation of politics meant that party organisations conducted much of the local constituency work that had previously fallen on wives and daughters.4 Other, more organised but also more contained modes of political involvement were opening up for women, with such organisations as the Conservative Party’s Primrose League (1883). By 1887, the then Countess of Jersey, Margaret Elizabeth, was addressing the Middleton Conservative Association, a public mode of action which would have been unthinkable to her early Victorian predecessor, her husband’s grandmother and Disraeli’s ‘Lady St Julians’.5 Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s granddaughter, Lady Constance Lytton, carried on many of her grandmother’s traditions, defying convention in favour of scandalously public actions and writings. Yet her career suggests the different outlets available to women of her generation, since both her activities and her writing were in the service of the cause of women’s suffrage, a more communal and specifically parliamentary political objective than those of her grandmother. Constance Lytton also engaged in acting out social roles, but whereas Rosina Bulwer Lytton pointedly enacted for her audience the upperclass identity that she also blamed for her sufferings, her granddaughter disguised herself as a seamstress (in January 1910) to ensure that her social rank did not shut her out from the treatment meted out to women of lower classes. Like her forebear in later life, she too had to resort to a pseudonym – Jane Warton. Lytton also inscribes her experiences in

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autobiographical writing – Prisons & Prisoners, Some Personal Experiences (1914) – an account featuring an extraordinary moment in which Lytton seeks literally to inscribe her cause upon her own body, abortively attempting to carve ‘Votes for Women’ with a hairpin over her heart.6 Rosina Bulwer Lytton would have been more likely to try to carve ‘Give Me My Allowance’ on her husband’s face. Where do we position upper-class women’s writing in these changing socio-historical contexts? Philip Waller’s examination of aristocratic salons of the later part of the century suggests that if anything, aristocrats and authors became even more socially intermingled as the century moved on.7 Upper-class women’s salons continued, therefore, to offer important sites of socialised exchange. Aristocratic women’s authorship, however, declined in prominence. Autobiography and memoirs retained their role as a productive genre. The commercial appeal of an elite world was still very much in force – as indeed it still was by the time of Nancy Mitford’s successful novels of upper-class life in the mid-twentieth century. (Mitford’s sister Deborah married the great-great-great-great grandson of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire). However, the late nineteenth century witnessed less scope for aristocratic fiction, especially given the professionalisation of authors and their enshrinement as (conspicuously gendered) ‘men of letters’, as Hadley discusses in relation to George Meredith and his rendering of Caroline Norton in Diana of the Crossways (1885).8 The silver fork novel and the dandy found late-century re-tooling in fin de siècle fetishising of personality and spectacle, but such spectacle was well under the artistic control of male intellectuals, whose staged lack of earnestness was the essence of their elite and non-commercial status. The timelessness of the promise of scandal in high society can be seen in the fin-de-siècle success of another questionably aristocratic Irishwoman, Lady Colin Campbell, whose 1889 novel Darell Blake: A Study sold 5,000 copies in a year on the strength of her highly publicised legal separation from her husband on grounds of his cruelty.9 Yet the fact that Campbell wrote only the one revelatory novel in her lengthy literary career suggests the lack of long-term potential for the controversial author of a revealing roman à clef. Moreover, although the Campbell divorce case obviously continued to play on public fascination with aristocratic vice, its appeal suggests a transition to a culture of celebrity – rather than elite – scandal, whereby class is merely one potentially enticing factor among other forms of public prominence. Although the News of the World was launched in 1843, it made its real impact in the 1880s with its coverage of the Campbell case, significantly


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headlined ‘All Human Life is There’ – the paper explicitly invited its readers to feel pleasurably complicit in, rather than morally and socially quasi-detached from, the spectacle of failure. Through their gender, aristocratic women could bear the brunt of ‘Old Corruption’ for aristocratic men anxious to assert continued authority over a post-Reform world while, through their class and traditional associations with dilettantism and leisure, they were repositories for the standard critiques of women’s writing. Yet aristocratic women writers themselves formed authorial identities and commented upon their social and political worlds, formulating their own versions of imagined communities through which they could include themselves within their literary nations. This book has considered the nineteenthcentury aristocratic social as a site of privileged inclusion, which gains political significance through a discourse of exclusion. New understandings of specific experiences with the social allow us to engage with wider national dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, as elite identity offers a gateway to more universal understandings of Victorian literary and political experiences.

Notes Introduction 1. These definitions are drawn from Neal Riemer and Douglas Simon, The New World of Politics: An Introduction to Political Science, 4th edn (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) 3. Chantal Mouffe sees the political as an essentially antagonistic process involving contending collective identifications. See esp. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 2. Michael Sadleir, Blessington D’Orsay: A Masquerade (London: Constable, 1947) 189. I have drawn the biographical details in this discussion primarily from Sadleir’s study. 3. He inherited his mother’s estate, Knebworth, and her maiden name, Lytton, upon her death in 1844. I will use ‘Bulwer’ when I am referring solely to his pre-1844 activities. 4. Sadleir, Blessington 220. 5. Sadleir, Blessington 190. 6. Sadleir, Blessington 191–193. 7. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; London: Penguin, 1967) 66. 8. Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993) 17, xvii, and see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1987). 9. ‘[If] by aristocracy, those persons are meant ... who seek honours without merit, places without duty, and pensions without service ... the sooner it is carried away with the corruption on which it has thriven, the better.’ Lord John Russell, quoted Edward Pearce, Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003) 76. 10. See Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles (London: Cresset Library, 1973). 11. See Isobel Armstrong, ‘Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry’, in Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (eds) Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian (New York: Macmillan, 1999) 3–32; Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (eds) Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Anne Mellor, ‘The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women’s Poetry, 1780–1830’, Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 261–276. 12. J.V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 16–22. 13. See N.P. Willis, Evening Mirror (11 November 1844): 2/1 and Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864–1865; Oxford: OUP, 1973) 1. 14. Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880, abr. edn (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1986) 3.

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Notes 185 15. This is a central tenet of David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin, 2000). 16. See Francis O’Gorman and Katherine Turner (eds) The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 17. See Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (eds) Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 18. Peter Mandler, ‘Namier in Petticoats?’, review of Aristocratic Women and Political Society, by K.D. Reynolds, Reviews in History (February 1999) 3, Institute of Historical Research http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/ mandler.html, accessed 30 June 2008. 19. See Beckett, The Aristocracy in England; Norman Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); D.C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System (New York: Harvester, 1976). See also Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1831 (London: Arnold, 1997) 368–371. 20. Hall, McClelland and Rendall, ‘Introduction’, in Hall et al. (eds) Defining the Victorian Nation 10. 21. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994) 10. 22. Davidoff, Best Circles 33–34. 23. See Anne Summers, ‘A Home from Home – Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century’, in Sandra Burman (ed.) Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979) 33–63; F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in 19th Century England (Oxford: OUP, 1980); Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774–1858 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994) 40–42. 24. K.D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) 118–119. 25. Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 35. Mandler uses ‘whigs’ and ‘Whigs’ to distinguish between the individuals and ideals concerned and the party identity. 26. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 2–3. 27. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 42. 28. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 153. 29. Catherine Hall, ‘Private Persons versus Public Someones: Class, Gender and Politics in England 1780–1850’, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992) 151–171. See also Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Gleadle and Richardson (eds) Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000) 20 and Amanda Vickery, ‘Introduction’ in Vickery (ed.) Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) 14–15. 30. Peter Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s: Aristocratic Women and Politics, 1815–1867’, Vickery (ed.) Women, Privilege and Power 157.

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31. Catherine Hall, ‘The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds) Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000) 125, 127. 32. Davidoff, Best Circles 15, and see 15–17 for a general discussion of the threats posed by new social mobility. 33. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 136–143. 34. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 48–104. 35. See esp. Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: CUP, 1983); Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: OUP, 1991). 36. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English WorkingClass History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983); Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Vernon, Politics and the People. 37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 38. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, intro by Margaret Canovan (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 52. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition 35. 40. Arendt, The Human Condition 28. 41. Patrick Joyce (ed.) Class, Oxford Readers (Oxford: OUP, 1995) 183–184. 42. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1962; London: Polity Press, 1989). 43. Joyce, Class 183. 44. Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration’, in Landes (ed.) Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1998) 141, and see Geoff Eley, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) 289–339. See also Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 45. Calhoun, ‘Introduction’, in Habermas 3. 46. Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan, 1988), rpr. Joyce, Class 226. 47. Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ 227. 48. Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ 228. 49. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas’, in Landes, Feminism 87. 50. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 7. 51. Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Personal is not the Political’, Boston Review (October– November 1999) v. 52. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002) 8. 53. Benhabib, Claims of Culture 15.

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1

Aristocratic Lives: Life-Writing, Class and Authority

1. Laura Marcus, ‘The Face of Autobiography’, in Julia Swindells (ed.) The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995) 15. 2. Marcus, ‘The Face of Autobiography’ 15. 3. Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 223. 4. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject xii; Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 4. 5. Linda Peterson, Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Politics and Poetics of Life Writing (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), and see Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of SelfRepresentation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1991). 6. Peterson, Traditions 1–42. 7. For women’s uneasy relationship with the spiritual autobiography’s interpretative structures, see Linda Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986) 120–155. 8. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject 155. 9. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), esp. 76–106. 10. Dror Wahrman, ‘ “Middle-Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies 32 (October 1992): 402. See also Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: OUP, 1991), chapter 8. For a reading of religion as a political organising force, see Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 11. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 161. 12. Alison Adburgham, A Punch History of Manners and Modes 1841–1890 (London: Hutchinson, 1961) 31, 33. Puseyism was a popular term for the earlier stages of the ritualist Oxford Movement, in which Edward Bouverie Pusey became an influential figure. 13. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 165–166. 14. Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford: OUP, 1994) 105. 15. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 125–127. See also Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy 137. 16. Stone, An Open Elite? 146. See also Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 5 and Cannadine, Aspects 25. 17. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 166. 18. The importance of personal religion to philanthropy is emphasized in Prochaska’s Women and Philanthropy. 19. Julia Swindells, ‘Introduction’, in The Uses of Autobiography 9. 20. For a (partisan) discussion of nineteenth-century upper-class converts to Catholicism, see Madeleine Beard, Faith and Fortune (Leominster: Gracewing, 1997).

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21. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 30–31, 71; Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (London: Hutchinson 1973) 62–65. 22. Morgan, Sydney [Owenson], Letter to Cardinal Wiseman (London, 1851) 5. Subsequently cited in text. 23. For a discussion of the role of salons, see Sarah Richardson, ‘ “Wellneighboured Houses”: the Political Networks of Elite Women, 1780–1860’, in Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics 56–73. 24. Davidoff, Best Circles. 25. John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, eds Charles Stephen Dessain et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–1977), see esp. Vol. XX. 464–465 and XXII. 65–67. 26. Mary Elizabeth Herbert (Baroness Herbert of Lea), How I Came Home (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1894). 27. Herbert, How I Came Home 6. 28. Andrew W. Robertson, The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Britain, 1790–1900 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995) 97. 29. Herbert, How I Came Home 12. 30. Froude’s biography, together with his 1881 edition of some of Carlyle’s papers, was comparatively frank about his subject’s flaws and domestic life, generating anger from Carlyle’s relatives. 31. Elizabeth Missing Sewell, The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell, ed. Eleanor Sewell (London: Longman, 1907) 1. 32. Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830 to 1960 (London and New York: Longman, 1999) 79. 33. Peterson, Traditions 19. 34. Helen Rogers, ‘In the Name of the Father: Political Biographies by Radical Daughters’, in David Amigoni (ed.) Life Writing and Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 145–164. 35. Stone, An Open Elite? 80. 36. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) 40. 37. Perry, Novel Relations 41. 38. Perry, Novel Relations 36. 39. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 103–104. 40. Lady Georgina Bertie, ‘Preface’, in Five Generations of a Loyal House, Part I (London: Rivingtons, 1845) v. 41. Bertie, ‘Introduction’, vi, vii. 42. Georgiana, Lady Chatterton (ed.) Memoirs, Personal and Historical of Admiral Lord Gambier, 2 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1861) I. 1. 43. Chatterton, Memoirs I. 3–4. 44. Mary Cotton, Viscountess Combermere and W.W. Knollys, ‘Preface’, Memoirs & Correspondence of Field-Marshall Viscount Combermere, 2 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1866) I. v. 45. Combermere and Knollys, Memoirs I. 321. 46. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining A Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 57–91. 47. Sadleir, Blessington 185.

Notes 189 48. Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (London: Palgrave, 2002) 23. 49. Lady Blessington, ‘Preface’, in Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (London: Colburn, 1834) 1. 50. Blessington, Conversations 95, and see 78, 93–96. 51. Sadleir, Blessington 75–76. 52. Cronin, Romantic Victorians 32. 53. Blessington, Conversations 46. 54. Mellor, ‘The Female Poet and the Poetess’. 55. Cronin, Romantic Victorians 24–25. 56. Lady Charlotte Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, 2 vols (London, 1838) I. 1–2. 57. Bury, Diary I. 27, 16. 58. Bury, Diary I. 23–4; I. 363–400. 59. Edward M. White, ‘Thackeray, “Dolly Duster”, and Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury’, Review of English Studies XVI (1965): 36. 60. Charles Greville, The Diaries of Charles Greville, ed. Edward Pearce (London: Pimlico, 2006) (12 January 1838): 166. 61. Greville, Diaries (20 February 1838): 168. 62. White, ‘Thackeray, “Dolly Duster”, and Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury’ 36. 63. Greville, Diaries (20 February 1838): 168. 64. Henry Brougham, review of Diary of a Lady in Waiting, [by Lady Charlotte Bury], Edinburgh Review 67 (1838): 1–80; Review of Diary of a Lady in Waiting, [by Lady Charlotte Bury], Athenæum (6 January 1838): 4–5. 65. W.M. Thackeray, review of Diary of a Lady in Waiting, by Lady Charlotte Bury, The Times (11 January 1838): 3; review, Fraser’s Magazine 7 (March 1838): 353–359. 66. J.W. Croker, Quarterly Review 61 (January 1838): 150–164. 67. White, ‘Thackeray, “Dolly Duster”, and Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury’ 42. 68. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 162. 69. Burton Pike, ‘Time in Autobiography’, Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 327. 70. See Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 29, and see 29–53 for a summary of the general debate on this matter. 71. Peterson, Traditions 4–6. See also Clinton Machann, The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 6. 72. Mermin, Godiva’s Ride xiv and passim. See also Barbara Leah Harmon, ‘In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South’, Victorian Studies 31 (1988): 351–374. 73. Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper Collins, 1998) 61. The next chapter will discuss the implications of ton, a term associated with fashionable upper-class life. 74. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, The Sylph, 2 vols (London, 1779) I. 72. 75. Devonshire, Sylph I. 65–71. 76. Foreman, Georgiana 60. 77. Cronin, Romantic Victorians 36. 78. Solveig C. Robinson, ‘Fullerton, Lady Georgiana Charlotte (1812–1885)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004) http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/10242, accessed 1 July 2008.

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79. Newman, Letters (17 November 1885) XXXI. 96. 80. W.E. Gladstone, review of Ellen Middleton, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, English Review I (July 1844): 361. 81. Robinson, ‘Fullerton’. 82. Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Ellen Middleton, 3 vols (London, 1844) I. 24. Subsequently cited in text. 83. Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) esp. chapter five 153–178. 84. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 8–9.

2 Dilettantes and Dandies: Authorship and the Silver Fork Novel 1. Winifred Hughes, ‘Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller’, Novel 25.3 (Spring 1992): 189–209 and ‘Elegies for the Regency: Catherine Gore’s Dandy Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 50.2 (September 1995): 328–347. For important earlier surveys of the genre see Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature 1814–1840 (London: Constable, 1983) and Matthew Rosa, The Silver-Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). 2. William Hazlitt, ‘The Dandy School’, Examiner, 8 November 1827, repr. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London: Dent, 1934) XX. 145–146. 3. April Kendra, ‘Gendering the Silver Fork: Catherine Gore and the Society Novel’, Women’s Writing 11.1 (2004): 36. 4. Kendra, ‘Gendering the Silver Fork’ 36. 5. Hughes, ‘Silver Fork Writers’ 329. 6. Lady Charlotte Bury, The Devoted, 3 vols (London: Bentley, 1836) II. 176. 7. Cronin, Romantic Victorians 118. 8. See Cronin, Romantic Victorians, chapter four, and Hughes, ‘Silver Fork Writers’ 328–347. 9. Edward Copeland, ‘Opera and the Great Reform Act: Silver Fork Fiction, 1822–1842’, Romanticism on the Net 34–5 (May–August 2005) 2, http:// www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n34–35/009440ar.html, accessed 1 July 2008. 10. Kendra, ‘Gendering the Silver Fork’ 34–5. ‘Rotten boroughs’, important targets of the 1832 Reform Act, were voting districts of limited population, for which the choice of parliamentary representatives was effectively under the control of the district’s ruling (usually landed) interest. 11. See Pearce, Reform! 84, 93. 12. See Laura Hanft Korobkin, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 13. Edward Bulwer [Lytton], Pelham, 3 vols (London: Colburn, 1828) I. 4. 14. See Robert Baldick, The Duel: A History of Duelling (London: Chapman & Hall, 1965).

Notes 191 15. Baldick, The Duel passim. 16. Michael Flavin, Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2003) esp. 65–82, 218. 17. Edward Bulwer [Lytton], England and the English (London, 1833) book 4, chapter 2. 18. Copeland, ‘Opera’ 4. For another view of opera and the stage as a space of reform, see Hennifer L. Hall-Witt, ‘Reforming the Aristocracy: Opera and Elite Culture, 1780–1860’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds) Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge: CUP, 2003) 220–237. 19. Morgan, Manners 96. For the narrative importance of dinner parties in the silver fork novels of Theodore Hook, see Adburgham, Silver Fork 49–50. 20. Cronin, Romantic Victorians 109–142. 21. Hughes, ‘Silver Fork Writers’ 333. 22. Hughes, ‘Silver Fork Writers’ 329. 23. Adburgham, Silver Fork 1; Rosa, Silver-Fork School 8. 24. Review of The Budget of the Bubble Family, by Lady Bulwer, The Times (12 October 1840): 3. 25. Alice Acland, Caroline Norton (London: Constable, 1948) 46. 26. James Raven, ‘The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830’, in Robert J. Griffin (ed.) The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003) 159. 27. Lady Charlotte Bury, Diary 1818, quoted Adburgham, Silver Fork 26–27. 28. Morgan, Manners 21. 29. See Elizabeth K Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder (eds) The Woman Question: Volume III – Literary Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (London: Virago, 1978). 30. See ‘On Female Authorship’, Athenæum 42 (13 August 1828): 655–656. 31. Rosa, Silver-Fork School 41. 32. Morgan, Manners 90. However, Kathleen Tillotson notes the surprising resilience of the declining form, which lasted well into the 1850s. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) 86–87. 33. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834; Oxford: OUP, 1999) 210–212. For countering arguments see J.W. Oakley, ‘The Reform of Honor in Bulwer’s Pelham’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.1 (June 1992): 49–71. 34. Robert Blake, Disraeli (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966) 191. 35. Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties 88. For the earlier roots of fictional representations of characters further down the class scale, see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 36. For a discussion of domestic fiction as the expression (and repression) of suppressed revolutionary feeling, see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. 37. See W.M. Thackeray, ‘Lords and Liveries’, Novels by Eminent Hands (London, 1847); Claire Nicolay, ‘Delightful Coxcombs to Industrious Men: Fashionable Politics in Cecil and Pendennis’, Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2002): 289–304; and Sarah Rose Cole, ‘The Aristocrat in the Mirror: Male Vanity

192

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

Notes and Bourgeois Desire in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.2 (2006): 137–170. W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, intro. John Sutherland (ed.) (1847–1848; Oxford: OUP, 1998) 636. Subsequently cited in text. Lady Blessington, The Victims of Society, Ann Hawkins and Jeraldine Kraver (eds) Silver Fork Novels 1826–41 (1837; London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005) I. 75. Subsequently cited in text. See Ann Hawkins and Jeraldine Kraver, introduction, The Victims of Society, by Lady Blessington vii-xxvi. Hughes, ‘Elegies for the Regency’ 190–191. See Ellen Moers, The Dandy, Brummell to Beerbohm (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960); Laura George, ‘The Emergence of the Dandy’, Literature Compass 1 (November 2004): Romanticism section, Blackwell Publishing, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00125.x, accessed 3 July 2008; James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Cole, ‘The Aristocrat in the Mirror’. Catherine Gore, Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb, Andrea Hibbard and Edward Copeland (eds) Silver Fork Novels 1826–41 (1841; London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005) I. 7. Subsequently cited in text. Hughes, ‘Elegies for the Regency’ 203. Andrea Hibbard and Edward Copeland, ‘Introduction’, in Catherine Gore Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb xxii. Andrew Elfenbein, ‘Silver-Fork Byron and the Image of Regency England’, Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, intro. Frances Wilson (ed.) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) 77–92. See Hibbard and Copeland, Cecil, notes, 402 (I. 308n), 414 (III. 40n), 431 (II. 250n).

3 Silly Novels and Lady Novelists: Inside the Literary Marketplace 1. See esp. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out – Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989); Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1957); Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds) Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (London: Palgrave, 2000), and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989), chapter four, ‘David Copperfield and the Professional Writer’, in Uneven Developments 89–125. 2. The central argument of Tuchman, Edging Women Out, is that the post-1840 literary scene saw the development of a hierarchy of genres through definitions of high culture, formulated by an ‘invading’ male elite (and internalized by female reviewers), that devalued much women’s fiction as ‘low’ culture. See also Poovey, Uneven Developments and Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). 3. Tuchman, Edging Women Out 108.

Notes 193 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Mermin, Godiva’s Ride 95. Tuchman, Edging Women Out 118. Adburgham, Silver Fork 1. Leonore Davidoff, Best Circles 31. Caroline Norton, Stuart of Dunleath: A Story of Modern Life, 3 vols (London: Colburn & Co., 1851) II. 243–244. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 82. Helen Small, ‘The Debt to Society: Dickens, Fielding and the Genealogy of Independence’, O’Gorman and Turner, The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century 35 and Nigel Cross, The Common Writer (Cambridge: CUP, 1985) 35. The Guild of Literature and Art sought to persuade authors and painters to combine in a mutual benefit society for care of indigent members. Jane Margaret Strickland, The Life of Agnes Strickland (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1887) 17. Adburgham, Silver Fork 25. Sadleir, Blessington 198. Sadleir, Blessington 216. Margaret Linley, ‘A Centre That Would Not Hold: Annuals and Cultural Democracy’, in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell and David Finkelstein (eds) NineteenthCentury Media and the Construction of Identities, (London: Palgrave, 2000) 54. Tuchman, Edging Women Out 111. Sadleir, Blessington 198. Adburgham, Silver Fork 255. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 27. Linley, ‘A Centre That Would Not Hold’ 55. Review of the Keepsake, ed. F.M. Reynolds, Athenæum (16 November 1833): 762. William Maginn, ‘Fraserian Festival’, Fraser’s Magazine 13 (January 1836): 6–7. ‘The Annuals of Former Days’, Bookseller (29 November 1858): 498. Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 43. Sadleir, Blessington 199; Adburgham, Silver Fork 255. ‘The Annuals of Former Days’ 498. Charles Heath was a noted engraver who was the main promoter of many of the Annuals. Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? 38. See especially Maginn’s ‘Fraserian Festival’ 1–79, followed by the drooling over ‘Regina’s Maids of Honour’ 80–81. It is difficult to imagine the prestigious Macmillan’s Magazine running a celebration of its bevy of ‘Macmillerians’. Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? 43. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 162. Poovey, Uneven Developments 103. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 162. Abraham Hayward, ‘Codes of Manners and Etiquette’, Quarterly Review 59 (October 1837): 395–439. Kate Flint, ‘The Victorian Novel and Its Readers’, in Deirdre David (ed.) Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, (Cambridge: CUP, 2001) 20. George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review (October 1856): 442–461, reprinted A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (ed.) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1990) 142.

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36. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels’ 142. 37. Deirdre David does note this, but in her reading, the essay’s focus on ‘aristocratic women who wrote long ago, very little, and very airily at that’ signals lack of relevance to the mid-century literary marketplace. Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (London: Macmillan, 1987) 187. 38. Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (London: Routledge, 1983) esp. 57–59. (These comments relate to early Victorian England.) 39. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels’ 162. 40. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels’ 162. 41. Morgan, Manners 64. 42. Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational recreation and the contest for control, 1830–1885 (London and New York: Methuen, 1978), passim, see esp. 75–78. 43. Stefan Collini, ‘The Idea of “Character” in Victorian Political Thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985): 39–40. 44. Small, ‘The Debt to Society’ 15. 45. Helsinger et al., The Woman Question II. 112. 46. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own 54–57. 47. Tuchman, Edging Women Out 28. 48. W.R. Greg, ‘False Morality of Lady Novelists’, National Review 8 (January 1859), repr. Andrew King and John Plunkett (eds) Victorian Print Media: A Reader (Oxford: OUP, 2005) 53. Greg grappled with the issue of ‘surplus’ women in his well-known article ‘Why are Women Redundant?’, National Review 14 (April 1862): 434–460. 49. Greg, ‘False Morality’ 50. 50. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader (Oxford: OUP, 1993). 51. William Cooke Taylor, review of Trevelyan, by Lady Scott, Athenæum (2 November 1833): 735. 52. Review of The Two Friends: A Novel, by the Countess of Blessington, New Monthly Magazine 43 (1835): 377. 53. ‘Mr Bulwer and the Lady Novelists’, British and Foreign Review V (1836) 502. 54. Review of The Wife; and Woman’s Reward, by the Hon. Mrs Norton, New Monthly Magazine 44 (1835): 233. 55. Review of Lost and Saved, by the Hon. Mrs Norton, Illustrated London News (30 May 1863): 590. 56. Quoted Dessain et al. Letters XXI. 381. 57. Georgiana Chatterton, Compensation: A Story of Real Life Thirty Years Ago, 2 vols (London: Parker, 1856) I. 262, 267. 58. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels’ 145. 59. Georgiana Chatterton, Grey’s Court, 2 vols (London: Smith & Elder, 1865) I. 218. 60. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels’ 157. 61. Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (London: John Murray, 1977) 213. 62. Lady Catharine Long, Sir Roland Ashton: A Tale of the Times, 2 vols (London: J. Nisbet, 1844).

Notes 195 63. Review of Sir Roland Ashton, by Lady Catharine Long, Athenæum (24 August 1844): 771. 64. Flint, The Woman Reader 263–264. 65. The classic work on Mudie’s literary standards and control over publishers is Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (London: Bloomington, 1970). See also John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) 24–30. 66. Simon Eliot, ‘The Business of Victorian Publishing’, in David, Cambridge Companion 40. 67. Adburgham, Silver Fork 271. 68. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, esp. 40–44, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) esp. 546–547. 69. Mermin, Godiva’s Ride 53. See also Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic 546. 70. Davidoff, Best Circles 97. 71. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels’ 161. 72. Review of Ellen Middleton, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, The Times (29 May 1844): 3. 73. Review of Ellen Middleton, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Athenæum 80 (July 1844): 199. 74. Review of Ellen Middleton, Athenæum 203. 75. Review of Ellen Middleton, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Christian Remembrancer 8 (July 1844) 86. 76. Mermin, Godiva’s Ride 95. 77. Lady Theresa Lewis, ‘Preface to the First Edition’, Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866) ix–x. 78. Jane Strickland, Life 26–8. 79. Lady Charlotte Guest, Extracts from her Journal 1833–1852, ed. Earl of Bessborough (London: John Murray, 1950). See, for example, 133 (20 May 1842). 80. Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 3. 81. William Hepworth Dixon, review of The Works of Lord Macaulay, Complete, ed. Lady Trevelyan, Athenæum 43 (24 February 1866): 261. 82. Jane Strickland, Life 150. 83. Antonella Braida, ‘Wallace, Grace Jane, Lady Wallace (1804–1878)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/28532, accessed 1 July 2008. 84. Henry Fothergill Chorley, review of Beethoven’s Letters, trans. Lady Wallace, Athenæum 43 (12 May 1866): 630. 85. H.H. Statham, review of The Life of Mozart, by Karl Nohl, trans. Lady Wallace, Edinburgh Review 150 (October 1879): 358. 86. Anthony Trollope, The Way of the World, ed. Frank Kermode (1875; London: Penguin, 1994) 7–15, 753–760. 87. George Eliot, ‘Lord Brougham’s Literature’, Leader (7 July 1855), reprinted Byatt and Warren 302–303.

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88. Mermin, Godiva’s Ride 50. 89. Adburgham, Silver Fork 70. 90. John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) 212 (and see 452 for Murray). 91. Tuchman, Edging Women Out 126. 92. Valerie Sanders, ‘Women, Fiction and the Marketplace’, in Joanne Shattock (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1800–1900, (Cambridge: CUP, 2001) 158–159. 93. Bailey, Leisure and Class 87. 94. Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c1780–c1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980) 137. 95. Bailey, Leisure and Class 78. 96. Poovey, Uneven Developments 101. See also Nicola Diane Thompson, Reviewing Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels (London: Macmillan, 1996) and Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835– 1880 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981) 7–18. 97. Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics – Theatricalised Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). ‘ “Real” property is by definition the land of the family that cannot be circulated for profit, while “commercial” property is that which can be alienated for profit’ (259n). 98. Arendt, The Human Condition 69. 99. Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989) 50. 100. For discussions of equity and married women, see Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in NineteenthCentury England (Oxford: Martin Robertson & Co., 1983) 37–47 and Poovey, Uneven Developments 71–72. 101. Poovey, Uneven Developments 105 and chapter four passim. 102. Catherine Seville, Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England (Cambridge: CUP, 1999). See also Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1994). 103. Stone, An Open Elite? 89.

Part II Writing the Nation State 1. Benhabib, ‘The Personal is not the Political’ V, and see Riley, Words of Selves, esp. 5–7. 2. Helen Rogers, ‘ “What right have women to interfere with politics?”: The Address of the Female Political Union of Birmingham to the Women of England (1838)’, in T.G. Ashplant and Gerry Smyth (eds) Explorations in Cultural History (London: Pluto, 2001) 72. 3. Mouffe, On the Political 9, and see Chantal Mouffe (ed.) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London and New York: Verso, 1999). 4. I will use ‘Bulwer Lytton’ for both husband and wife throughout the next two chapters since I am discussing their long-term relations, even though Edward Bulwer inherited the surname only in 1844 (upon which his estranged wife also adopted it, to his great annoyance).

Notes 197 5. Quoted in Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Lady Palmerston and Her Times (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922) 138.

4

Wrongs Make Rebels: Polemical Voices

1. Virginia Blain, ‘Rosina Bulwer Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard’, Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990): 213. The ‘major myth’ rests on Robert Lytton, The Life, Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1883) and Victor Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1913), being in effect endorsed by Michael Sadleir, Bulwer: A Panorama – Edward and Rosina 1803–1836 (London: Constable & Co Ltd, 1931). For the ‘minor myth’ see Louisa Devey, Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton (London: Sonnenschein, 1887) and S.M. Ellis, ‘Introduction’, in Unpublished Letters of Lady Bulwer Lytton to A.E. Chalon (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1914) 9–26. 2. Blain, ‘Rosina Bulwer Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard’ 213. 3. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Rosina Bulwer Lytton Shells from the Sands of Time (1876; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995) viii, xx. 4. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal to the Justice and Charity of the English Public (London, 1857) 34–35. 5. Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (London and New York: Hambleton & London, 2003) 38. 6. Devey, Life 80. 7. Devey, Life 372. 8. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Rosina Bulwer Lytton A Blighted Life: A True Story (1880; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994) xxxi–xxxii. 9. Devey, Life 372. 10. Quoted Devey, Life 378. 11. Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York and London: Norton, 1988) 25. 12. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, A Blighted Life 4. Subsequently cited in text. 13. Devey, Life 423–428. 14. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject 137. 15. Peterson, Traditions 29. For a discussion of the unease that theatricality and role-playing have traditionally generated in Western thought, see Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1981). 16. Quoted in Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (eds) The Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) VI: 380 2n. 17. See Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Barish, The AntiTheatrical Prejudice. 18. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber & Faber, 1986) 146. 19. For an influential assessment of the cultural conditioning of feminine behaviour, sexuality and madness, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987). 20. Showalter, Female Malady 29. See also Mulvey-Roberts, Blighted xxviii. 21. Blain, ‘Rosina Bulwer Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard’ 218.

198

Notes

22. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 139. 23. RBL to Dr Price (15 October 1860), quoted Devey, Life 366. 24. The classic discussion of this literary issue is Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic. 25. Showalter, Female Malady 5. 26. Poovey, Uneven Developments. See esp. chapter two, ‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character: The Medical Treatment of Victorian Women’ 24–50. 27. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Very Successful! (1856; London: Charles H. Clarke, 1859) 250. 28. Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 29. Bowers, Politics of Motherhood 226. 30. Bowers, Politics of Motherhood 227–228. 31. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class 167. 32. See Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy 1760–1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 33. Gerard, Country House Life 65–89, esp. 67 on expectations of motherhood. 34. This inherited version of events is implicit in Victor Lytton, Life II. 102. 35. For Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s account of her daughter’s death, see Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal 37–39. See also Devey, Life, chapter XVII ‘Illness and Death of Emily Bulwer Lytton’ 238–253. 36. RBL, Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal 21. 37. RBL, Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal 38. 38. Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton 76. 39. Victor Lytton offers an equitable critique of his grandfather in this respect. Victor Lytton, Life II. 99–101. 40. RBL, Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal 38. 41. Devey, Life 247 and see Blain, ‘Rosina Bulwer Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard’ 217. 42. Sadleir, Bulwer 151, 139. 43. Mulvey-Roberts, Blighted ix–xiii. 44. The Doyle name in Tipperary was ‘synonymous with a tradition of military achievements where women were mentioned only as wives or mothers’. Dolores Dooley, ‘Anna Doyle Wheeler’, in Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (ed.) Women, Power and Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Dublin: Attic Press, 1995) 19. 45. For various accounts of the committal (for once varying more in perspective than in factual detail), see Blighted 29–50; Devey, Life, chapters XX–XXII; and Victor Lytton, Life 266–275. 46. See R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landon: A Biography. New York: New York University, 1954. 47. Daily Telegraph (15 July 1858), reprinted in ‘Supplemental Notes’, Blighted 91–92. 48. ’Our readers only have to bear in mind that at this time Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was a Cabinet Minister, with all the immense resources of that post; that he was backed up by the Queen, by Lord Derby, and Mr Disraeli’ Daily Telegraph (15 July 1858) repr. Blighted 97.

Notes 199 49. Marilyn J. Kurata, ‘Wrongful Confinement: The Betrayal of Women by Men, Medicine and the Law’, in Kristine Ottesen Garrigan (ed.) Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992) 45–46. 50. Kurata, ‘Wrongful Confinement’ 46. 51. Kurata, ‘Wrongful Confinement’ 52–59. 52. Quoted Devey, Life 362. 53. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 1–64. 54. See Lynn Stiefel Hill, Heroes, Heroines and Villains in English and American Melodrama, 1850–1990 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997) 77–164 and 165–244 on heroines and villains respectively. 55. Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herman Jenkins, 1965) 30. 56. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 12. 57. See Devey, Life 296–308. 58. Joyce, Democratic Subjects 192–204; Vernon, Politics and the People esp. 80–92, 331. 59. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics passim. 60. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (London: Virago, 1992) 87, and see Anna Clark, ‘The Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848’, in Jean Radford (ed.) The Progress of Romance, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) 46–70. 61. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments 88. 62. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight 93. 63. For Norton, see Poovey, ‘Covered But Not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act’, in Uneven Developments 51–88; for Butler’s self-representation as mother-protector, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight 92. 64. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan, 1995) 80. 65. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’, Cheveley, in Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Silver Fork Novels 1826–41 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005) xxiii. 66. Small, Love’s Madness 139. 67. Sir Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819; London: J.M. Dent, 1964) 323. 68. Blessington, letter to Edward Bulwer [Lytton], April/ May 1836, quoted Victor Lytton, Life II. 3. Blessington may mean ‘virtues’, not ‘victims’. 69. Blessington, Conversations 86. 70. Lady Blessington, Grace Cassidy; or, The Repealers, 3 vols (London, Bentley, 1833) I. 230. 71. Blessington, letter to EBL. 72. Sadleir, Bulwer 149–150. 73. RBL, Miriam Sedley II. 269. 74. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) 136. 75. The Times (6 July 1858): 9. 76. The Times (9 June 1858): 10.

200 Notes 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

The Times (9 June 1858): 10. The Times (9 June 1858): 10. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 198. For an anecdotal but vivid depiction of this interconnectedness, see Alethea Hayter, A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965; London: Robin Clark Ltd, 1992). Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983) 20. Poovey, Uneven Developments 62. This is a description of the young Caroline Sheridan, who marries ‘a Tory aristocratic younger son’. Nevertheless, in effect she discusses Norton as a middle-class woman. Poovey, Uneven Developments 67–68, 88. Jane Perkins, The Life of the Honourable Mrs Norton (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1909) 116. For an astute consideration of the motivating forces behind the criminal conversation action, see Acland, Caroline Norton 78–96. Hartley Coleridge, ‘Modern English Poetesses’, Quarterly Review 66 (September 1840): 376. Helsinger et al., The Woman Question III. 27–28. See [William Maginn], ‘Gallery of Industrious Literary Characters. No.X. Mrs Norton’, Fraser’s Magazine 3 (1831): 222. Caroline Norton, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cransworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (London: Longman, 1855) 61. Subsequently cited in text as LQ. Poovey, Uneven Developments 227 (52n). For a critique of Habermas’s model, see Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Calhoun, Habermas 131. Helsinger et al., The Woman Question III. 26–47. Margaret Forster, Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism (London: Sisterwrite, 1986) 35. Poovey, Uneven Developments 83. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics 133. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 38. Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) 127. Leckie’s focus is post-1857, but her analysis of dynamics of investigation, proof and uncertainty is also relevant to the earlier criminal conversation actions. Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) 223–224. See Hayter, A Sultry Month 176–178. Poovey, Uneven Developments 221 (14n). See Acland, Caroline Norton 59–60. Norton, letter to Mary Shelley, quoted Perkins, Life 142. Caroline Norton, Letters to Edward Bulwer, 2 March 1838 and n.d., D/EK C24/99/3–9, [Knebworth Estate Archive], Hertfordshire Archives. Perkins, Life 145. Charles Pelham Villiers was the brother of Lady Theresa Lewis and of the Earl of Clarendon. Perkins, Life 146–147; Alan Chedzoy, A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton (London: Allison & Busby, 1992) 177.

Notes 201 103. British and Foreign Review; or, European Quarterly Journal 7 (July–October 1838): 376. The authorship of this article is uncertain, but the editor, John Mitchell Kemble, probably wrote it, and he would anyway have had ultimate responsibility for the tone. See John Kilham, ‘John Mitchell Kemble, Caroline Norton and the Idea of a University’, Tennyson and the Princess: Reflections of an Age (London: Athlone Press, 1958) 142–169. This would have stung even more given Norton’s friendship with Kemble’s sister Fanny. 104. Caroline Norton, A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill, by Pearce Stevenson, Esq. (London: Ridgeway, 1839), printed for distribution among the members of Parliament, 121. Subsequently cited in text as PL. 105. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 34–35. 106. J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 23. 107. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931). 108. Ian Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–1841: The Politics of Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) 3. 109. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 35. 110. Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Writing and Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995) 17. 111. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861–1862; New York: Dover, 1968) 4 vols; Alfred Tennyson, ‘Geraint and Enid’, in J.M. Gray (ed.) Idylls of the King (1859–1885; London: Penguin, 1996) II. 940–942. 112. British and Foreign Review 276–277. 113. Caroline Norton, The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of ‘Custody of Infants’ Considered (London: Roake and Varty, 1838) 12. 114. Norton, Separation 13. 115. Elizabeth Rose Gruner, ‘Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, and Isabel Vane’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16.2 (Fall 1997): 304, 307. 116. Gruner, ‘Plotting the Mother’ 307. 117. See David, Rule Britannia 28. 118. See Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 9–65. 119. William Thompson [and Anna Wheeler], The Appeal of One Half the Human Race, intro. Michael Foot and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (1825; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994) 56. 120. This image of the desolate upper-class mother is a good example of Norton’s skill in universalizing her own maternal sufferings: she herself was certainly not exempt from (literary) toil and had a definite occupation other than her children’s education. 121. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 45. 122. Caroline Norton, A Child of the Islands (London: Chapman & Hall, 1845) LXVI 2–4. 123. Caroline Norton, Letters to the Mob, by Libertas (London: Thomas Bosworth, 1848), reprinted from the Morning Chronicle, 1848. 124. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 36. For a discussion of the constructions of ‘proof’ in such trials along levels of class reliability, see Leckie, Culture and Adultery 89. 125. Norton, Letters to the Mob 5, 15.

202 Notes 126. Norton, Letters to the Mob 7. 127. Norton, Letters to the Mob 7–8. 128. Kieran Dolin, ‘The Transfigurations of Caroline Norton’, Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2002): 521. 129. Chedzoy, A Scandalous Woman 211–219. 130. Chedzoy, A Scandalous Woman 238–239. See, for example, The Times 19–24 August 1853; 8–10 September 1853. 131. See esp. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London, 1839). 132. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem 276. 133. See Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy, chapter three 65–85 and Helsinger et al., The Woman Question: Volume I – Defining Voices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 3–20. 134. Norton, English Laws 141. 135. [J. Waddington], Remarks on the Law of Marriage and Divorce – Suggested by the Hon. Mrs Norton’s Letter to the Queen (London: James Ridgeway, 1856) 3, 12. 136. Chetzoy, A Scandalous Woman 171. 137. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1877) I. 400–401. 138. Acland, Caroline Norton 128. 139. See Holcombe, Wives and Property 73–74. 140. J.W. Kaye, review of Letter to the Queen, by the Hon. Mrs Norton, North British Review 23 (May–August 1855): 536–562, 536. 141. George Eliot, ‘To John Blackwood’, 29 October 1871, in Gordon S. Haight (ed.) George Eliot Letters 7 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954– 1955) 208. 142. George Eliot, ‘Life and Opinions of Milton’, Leader 6 (4 August 1855) 750, reprinted in Thomas Pinney (ed.) Essays of George Eliot (London: RKP, 1963) 154–157, 156. 143. Eliza Lynn, ‘One of Our Legal Fictions’, Household Words 9 (1854): 257–260. 144. Lynn, ‘One of Our Legal Fictions’ 260. 145. Lynn, ‘One of Our Legal Fictions’ 260. 146. See Helsinger et al., The Woman Question: Volume II – Social Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 142–144, and Poovey, Uneven Developments chapter six. 147. Norton, Letters to the Mob 8. 148. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 36. 149. Poovey, Uneven Developments 73–74. 150. See Pearce, Reform! 87–88. 151. Dorothy M. Stetson, A Woman’s Issue: The Politics of Family Law Reform in England (London and Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982) 32. 152. Holcombe, Wives and Property 85. 153. Holcombe, Wives and Property 70. 154. Chedzoy, A Scandalous Woman 245. 155. See Holcombe, Wives and Property chapters eight and nine. 156. For a discussion of the rhetorical basis of the campaign, see Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics chapter five.

Notes 203

5 The Spectacle of Fiction: Self, Society and the Novel 1. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 12. 2. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes 22, and see Michael Curtin, Prosperity and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987) 29. 3. A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in NineteenthCentury Married Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 6–7. See also Curtin, Prosperity and Position 89. 4. Mulvey-Roberts, introduction, Cheveley xxvi. 5. For an account of Cheveley’s success, see Devey, Life 151–157. The number of reviews and anecdotal evidence of a wide readership support Devey’s claims. 6. Lady Cheveley; or, The Woman of Honour (London: Churton, 1839). The authorship remains uncertain: there are grounds for assuming that it was Edward Bulwer Lytton himself. See Devey, Life 151 and Mulvey-Roberts, Blighted xxiii. However, S.M. Ellis’s suggested attribution to his brother Henry Bulwer also fits the case (Unpublished Letters 87). 7. [Sydney Morgan], review of Cheveley, by Lady Lytton Bulwer, Athenæum (30 March 1839): 235. 8. Review of Cheveley, by Lady Lytton Bulwer, Fraser’s Magazine 19 (May 1839): 626, 628. 9. Review of Cheveley, Fraser’s 618, 629. For Fraser’s feud with Edward Bulwer Lytton, and especially the roles of Thackeray and William Maginn, see Sadleir, Bulwer 242–266. 10. Review of Cheveley, by Lady Lytton Bulwer, Monthly Review 157 (May 1839): 15. 11. Elizabeth Barrett (16 May 1839), letter 50 of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–1854, intro. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan (eds), vol.1 ([Waco, Tex.]: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, 1983) 50. 12. Jane Welsh Carlyle, letter 177 of Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, prepared for publication by Thomas Carlyle; edited by James Anthony Froude (London: Longman, Green, 1883). 13. From Edward Bulwer to John Forster, 6 April 1839, in the Michael Sadleir Papers#11033, General Manuscripts, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, subseries 4.3 folder 395. 14. Ibid. The correspondence between Bulwer and Forster (Cheveley’s ‘Fuzboz’) in this series over the next few months suggests that Forster flung himself all too enthusiastically into monitoring Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s activities and offering his services to suppress her works. 15. The novels before her husband’s 1844 inheritance are by ‘Lady Lytton Bulwer’, but the significance of the name remains the same. 16. Review of Cheveley, Monthly Review 15. 17. See esp. review of Cheveley, Monthly Review 16. 18. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, The Budget of the Bubble Family, 3 vols (London: Edward Bull, 1840) I. 67. The phrase itself is from Lady Cheveley 29. 19. Helsinger et al., The Woman Question III. 16–25.

204

Notes

20. Madeleine House and Graham Storey (eds) The Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965): I 579 n. 3. See also Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’, Cheveley, x–xi. 21. Rosina Bulwer Lytton (25 March 1854) Unpublished Letters of Lady Bulwer Lytton 80. 22. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Unpublished Letters 81. 23. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, ‘Preface’, The Prince-Duke and the Page (London: Boone, 1841) ii. 24. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, preface, Budget I. ix. 25. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Memoirs of a Muscovite, 3 vols (London: Newby, 1844) I. 165. 26. See, for example, Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, intro. Elizabeth Jay (ed.) (Oxford: OUP, 1990) 16. 27. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Miriam Sedley; or The Tares and the Wheat. A Tale of Real Life, 3 vols (London: W. Shoberl, 1851) II. 223; RBL, Very Successful! 49. 28. RBL, Budget I. v–vii. See Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman (London: Viking Penguin, 1997) 282–285. 29. RBL, Blighted 17–21, 63–65. 30. RBL, Very Successful! 139. 31. RBL, Very Successful! 391. 32. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, The World and his Wife; or, A Person of Consequence: A Photographic Novel, 3 vols (London: Skeet, 1858) III. 324, 318. 33. Morgan, review of Cheveley 235. 34. Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1839) 65 (First published London: Bull, 1839) 123–126. Subsequently cited in text. 35. RBL, Miriam Sedley I. 50. 36. See Sadleir, Bulwer 72, 79. 37. See Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978) 47–67. 38. See, for example, RBL, Very Successful! 190–208, and RBL, Cheveley 209–218. 39. RBL, ‘Preface’, Very Successful! v. 40. Cronin, Romantic Victorians 36. 41. See Thomas Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of His Life (London, 1830); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy (London, 1870); and Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (London: Macdonald, 1962). 42. For a discussion of this identification in the context of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s own work and homosocial relationships, see Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), chapter six 206–246. 43. For the influence of accounts of the Byron separation on Brontë, see F.B. Pinion, A Brontë Companion: Literary Assessment, Background and Reference (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975) 245. 44. Small, Love’s Madness 153. 45. Devey, Life 80. 46. Sadleir, Bulwer 83. 47. See esp. Devey, Life 29–30. 48. RBL, Miriam Sedley 260; see Lady Cheveley 47 and preface xiii-iv.

Notes 205 49. See Mulvey-Roberts, Blighted xxi. 50. Devey, Life 30. 51. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, (28 October, Spring 1984): 125–133. 52. Norton, English Laws 125. 53. The Times (3–10 November 1852). 54. Norton, letters to Edward Bulwer Lytton, D/EK C24/99/16–20, Hertfordshire. 55. Ibid. 19, CN’s emphasis. 56. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics 142. 57. Norton, English Laws 82, 86. 58. Norton, English Laws 84; Caroline Norton, ‘Books of Gossip: Sheridan and his Biographers’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 3 (January 1861): 176. 59. The items of the 1857 Act which Norton most influenced were Clauses 21, protecting a deserted wife’s earnings; 24, allowing the Court to direct payment of separate maintenance; 25, enabling a wife to inherit and bequeath property; 26, giving a separated wife the power of contract, suing, and being sued, in any civil proceeding. See Acland, Caroline Norton 206. For the unease generated by provisions relating to wives’ financial control, see Poovey, Uneven Developments, chapter three, esp. 74. 60. Norton, English Laws 83. 61. Norton, English Laws 25. 62. See Benhabib, ‘Models of Public Space’ 86. 63. Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 33. 64. Caroline Norton, Lost and Saved, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1863) III. 33–34. 65. Helsinger et al. Social Issues 112–113, 135–140. 66. Collini, Public Moralists 106. 67. Collini, Public Moralists 106. 68. Morgan, Manners 56. 69. The Times (25 October 1871): 6. 70. CN, letter to Alexander Macmillan (2 November 1871), Add MS 54964, Macmillan Archives, British Library, 26 (author’s emphasis). For Norton’s difficulties with her various publishers, see Acland, Caroline Norton 220. 71. Norton, Macmillan Archives, 1871, 28–40. 72. Caroline Norton, Review of Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot, Edinburgh Review 110 (July 1859): 245. 73. See Mermin, Godiva’s Ride 50; Catherine Judd, ‘Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England’, in John Jordan and Robert Patten (eds) Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Publishing Practices (Cambridge: CUP, 1995) 255; and Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 123. 74. Norton, Review of Adam Bede 243–244, 246. 75. Norton, Macmillan Archives (April 1866) 12. Norton’s first real publication, The Sorrows of Rosalie, was anonymous, but its ‘Dedication’ made her identity quite clear to her social circle (Adburgham, Silver Fork 195); the rapid identification in The Times review of 26 December 1828 indicates how this knowledge would spread. I discussed the anonymity and pseudonymity of

206 Notes

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

her first two pamphlets, and the little real attempt at concealment, in the previous chapter. Caroline Norton, Review of Adam Bede 223. Norton, English Laws 90. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics 148–159. Dolin, ‘The Transfigurations of Caroline Norton’ 504. Norton, Stuart II. 25; Caroline Norton, ‘Woman’s Reward’, The Wife and Woman’s Reward, 3 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1835) II. 68, subsequently cited in text. Perkins, Life 71–72. Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 32. Acland, Caroline Norton 149–150. See also Perkins, Life 276–277. Lost and Saved is very much in the then-popular sensation mode, and her redemption of a seemingly doomed heroine may have been inspired by M.E. Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862). Leckie, Culture and Adultery 126. Mary Poovey, Making A Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995) 5–6. Norton, Stuart I. 129. Norton, Stuart I. 261. Norton, ‘The Wife’ 228. Norton, ‘The Wife’ 54–55. Norton, Stuart I. 281. Norton, Lost and Saved III. 308.

6 Affairs of State: Aristocratic Women and the Politics of Influence 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

Thomas Arnold, quoted Brock, The Great Reform Act 331. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 154–156. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 168. Richardson, ‘Well-neighboured Houses’ 64. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) 196–197. Lady Granville, quoted Adburgham, Silver Fork 120. For the salons of Lady Holland, Lady Ashburton and Lady Blessington, see Janet E. Courtney, The Adventurous Thirties: A Chapter in the Women’s Movement (London: OUP, 1933) 233–274. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 84. Justin McCarthy, ‘The Petticoat in the Politics of England’, Lady’s Own Paper (9 July 1870): 20. Elaine Chalus, ‘ “That Epidemical Madness”: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds) Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York: Longman, 1997) 151–78. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996) 251–296. Colley, Britons 257–263, and see Foreman, Georgiana 141–159.

Notes 207 12. Judith Chalmers, ‘1784 and All That: Aristocratic Women and Electoral Politics’, Vickery, Women, Privilege and Power 89–122. 13. P.J. Jupp, ‘The Roles of Royal and Aristocratic Women in British Politics, c.1782–1832’, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen – Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, 1995) 113. 14. Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics 12; Matthew Cragoe, ‘ “Jenny Rules the Roost”: Women and Electoral Politics, 1832–1868’, Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics 153–168. 15. See Vickery, ‘Introduction’, in Women, Privilege and Power 19. 16. Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics 11. 17. Mandler, Review of Reynolds 3. See Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929). 18. Perry, Novel Relations; Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Parenting Was for Life, Not Just for Childhood: The Role of Parents in the Married Lives of Their Children in Early Modern England’, History 86 (2001): 313–327. 19. For example, Reynolds notes the social polarisation generated by party identities, but also its gradual relaxation in response to changing circumstances after 1845, and particularly the need for more inclusive entertaining in the period after the Second Reform Bill. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 162. 20. See Hilary Callan and Shirley Ardener (eds) The Incorporated Wife (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 21. Perry, Novel Relations 36. 22. Guest, Journal 127 (3 February 1842). 23. Alan Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism 1776–1988 (London and New York: Longman, 1997) 21, and 19–45, and see Abraham D. Kriegel, ‘Whiggery in the Age of Reform’, Victorian Studies 9 (July 1993): 290–298. 24. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform 2, 1. 25. Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism 20. 26. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 452. 27. See Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics 7. 28. Duke of Bedford (Lord John Russell’s brother), quoted Mandler, Review of Reynolds 5. 29. Mandler, Review of Reynolds 5. 30. John Prest, Lord John Russell (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972) 334–349. 31. Colley, Britons 179. 32. Mandler, Aristocratic Government 84. 33. McCarthy, ‘The Petticoat in the Politics of England’ 20. 34. Charles Dickens, chapter XXI, Little Dorrit, eds Stephen Wall and Helen Small (1855–1857; London: Penguin, 1998) 243–250. 35. Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866; London: Penguin, 1986) 337. 36. Trollope’s Barsetshire novels view middle-class female domination with similar ambiguity; Mrs Proudie certainly seems to corroborate theories of virtual representation. 37. Mary Augusta Ward, Sir George Tressady (1896; London: Nelson’s Library, n.d.) 29. 38. For a discussion of Ward’s representation of upper-class women, see my forthcoming ‘ “An Unfortunate Comparison”: Influence, Ideology and the

208 Notes

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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Notes 209 69. See Edward Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700 (Totawa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977) and Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 70. Arguments to this effect, though concentrating on the later part of the century, include G.E. Maguire, Conservative Women: A History of Women and the Conservative Party, 1874–1997 (London: Macmillan Press, 1998). For a discussion of ‘aristocratic women under pressure’, see Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s’ 156–160. 71. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics 221–249. 72. Davidoff, Best Circles, although Reynolds emphasises the wider function of the social rituals Davidoff discusses as tools for party politics (Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 73–74). 73. Combermere and Knollys, Memoirs I. 17. 74. Tamara Wagner, ‘ “A Strange Chronicle of the Olden Time”: Revisions of the Regency in the Construction of Victorian Domestic Fiction’, Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 66.4 (December 2005): 443–475. 75. Frank O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meanings of Elections in England, 1780–1860’, Past & Present 135 (May 1992): 108, 91–94. 76. Davidoff, Best Circles 38–39. 77. See my ‘The Victorian Suburb as Imperial Stage: Emily Eden and the Theatrics of Empire’, Journeys 7.1 (June 2006): 51–65. 78. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 79. I am indebted to Nicholas Shrimpton for a discussion of this point. 80. Emily Eden, The Semi-Detached House, London: Bentley, 1859, reprinted The Semi-Attached Couple and The Semi-Detached House, ed. Valerie Myer (London: Virago, 1979) 112. Subsequently cited in text. 81. See Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (eds) Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge: CUP, 1997); Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture 1837–1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Helsinger et al., The Woman Question I. 63–76. 82. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 195–196. 83. RBL, Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal 4. 84. Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets 5. 85. Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 442. 86. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes 150; Wahrman, ‘ “Middle-Class” Domesticity’ 404, and see 399–409. 87. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, ‘ “Be No More Housewives, But Queens”: Queen Victoria and Ruskin’s Domestic Mythology’, Homans and Munich, Remaking Queen Victoria 105. 88. See Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London: Virago, 1990) 31–35; Chase and Levenson, chapter two, 46–62 and Reynolds 191–212.

210

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89. Chedzoy, A Scandalous Woman 165–166, and see the correspondence between Norton and Alexander Macmillan regarding insults to Victoria in Old Sir Douglas: April 1866, Macmillan Archives 5–16. 90. See Elizabeth Longford, Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) 108–114; Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy 46–62; and Reynolds, Aristocratic Women 191–212. 91. Norton, Lost and Saved I. 133–147. 92. Homans, introduction, Royal Representations xxix. 93. A ‘Drawing-room’ at Court was a royal morning reception, the English equivalent of the French levées.

Conclusion: 1867 and Beyond 1. See Hall, McClelland and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation and Hall, Civilising Subjects. 2. Keith McClelland, ‘England’s greatness, the working man’, Hall, McClelland and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation 71–118, esp. 71–72. 3. Jane Rendall, ‘The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867’, Hall, McClelland and Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation 161. 4. For an argument to this effect, and a critique of Davidoff, Best Circles see Curtin, Prosperity and Position 256–261. However, Curtin’s focus on the relatively small category of political hostesses underestimates the relevance both of the role itself, and of women’s more general politicised activities, in the mid-Victorian period. 5. Margaret Elizabeth Child-Villiers, Countess of Jersey, The Rise of English Liberty: An Address to the Middleton Conservative Association (Oxford, 1887), and see The Speeches of the Countess of Jersey, preface by the Earl of Jersey (Bicester: T.W. Pankhurst, 1885). 6. Constance Lytton [Jane Warton], Prisons and Prisoners, Some Personal Experiences, intro. Midge MacKenzie (1914; London: Virago, 1988) 164–165. For a discussion of the class dynamics of Lytton’s imprisonment and writing, see Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Militancy, Masochism or Martyrdom? The Public and Private Prisons of Constance Lytton’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (ed.) Votes for Women (London: Routledge, 2000) 159–180. 7. Philip Waller, ‘The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle’, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: OUP, 2006) 523–559. 8. Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics, esp. 202–214. 9. Sutherland, Stanford Companion 102.

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Index Notes: Individuals are referred to by their names except in such cases where they are better known by their titles. Names or titles in brackets are pseudonyms or ones acquired earlier or later in life. Individual texts (if significant in discussion) are listed under authors’ names.

Almack’s, 51, 75, 161 Anglo-Irish, see Ireland annuals, 10, 58, 63, 65, 66–70, 79, 133–4, 193 (26n) Arendt, Hannah, 14, 84, 87 aristocracy adaptability of, 4, 6–7, 10–12, 26, 49, 60–1, 114, 158–72, 179 and anti-aristocratic discourses, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 23, 38–9, 51, 58, 60–1, 69, 71–4, 80, 83, 104, 130–3, 146, 153, 158, 163, 180, 184 (9n) and country houses, 5, 25–6, 90, 150, 154, 165, 167, 174–5 and the Court, 175 definitions of, 7–10 eighteenth-century models of, 10–11 maintenance of power, 11–13, 84, 120, 154, 156, 173–5, 180 and religion, 7, 25–6 aristocratic men hostility towards aristocratic women, 158, 163–4 and leisure, 81–2 and political allegiances, 157–8 as targets of moral reform, 25–6 aristocratic women adaptability of, 1–5, 7, 10–11, 16, 19, 25–6, 33, 51, 70, 77, 93, 115, 126, 153, 155, 160, 164–72, 183 attacks upon, 10, 16, 61–2, 63, 70–86, 99, 153, 158–64, 179, 183 and collective relevance, need to obtain, 15–17, 18, 21, 26, 87–8,

93, 100, 104, 108–9, 112, 114–15, 121, 184 (1n) commercial potential of, 11, 35–9, 46, 52–3, 55, 66–7, 78, 130–3, 141, 147 and domestic values, 6, 25, 30–4, 40, 44–5, 99, 109–28, 130–3, 155, 157, 174–5 and feminist traditions, 5, 12–13, 94, 117–18, 181–2 as ‘gatekeepers’ of society, 2, 7, 11, 28, 51–2, 64–5 and party politics, 11–12, 156–7, 164, 166, 168 and philanthropy, 11, 26, 29, 42, 187 (18n) political influence of, 12–13, 16, 33, 64–5, 153–79 and property, 31, 84–5, 142 public sphere, ambiguous relationship to, 14–17, 23–4, 26, 39 as receptacles for lineage, 30–3, 100 and religion as motivating force on, 25–6, 42–5, 75–7 sense of themselves as, 9, 53, 88, 95, 100, 112, 134–5 and sexuality, 11, 23, 80, 155, 157, 160 and socialised interaction, 1–4, 8, 11, 14–18, 21, 25–6, 28, 33, 36, 51–2, 64–9, 78–80, 153–5, 182 weakening influence of, 55, 74, 120, 126, 155, 172–3, 181 Arnold, Thomas, 153 Ashburton, Harriet Baring, Baroness of, 206 (6n) 231

232 Index Athenæum, 38, 67–8, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 131 Auckland, George Eden, Earl of, 9, 173 authorial identity, 3, 6–7, 10, 18, 21, 23, 25–30, 31–2, 39, 41, 44–5, 49, 53–62, 63–86, 110–13, 129, 130–7, 140–1, 144, 146–52, 183 acceptability of, for aristocrats, 3, 53–4 aristocratic models of, 6–7, 10, 21, 23, 52–62, 74–6, 87–8, 121, 140–1 commercial potential of, 11, 31–2, 35–9, 52–3, 56, 66–7, 78, 130–3, 141 and copyright, 3, 84–5, 113, 128, 144, 146–7 and cultural criteria, 49, 63, 67–8, 70–86, 135 and finance, 53, 68–9, 71, 83–6, 135, 144, 146–52 gendering of, 39, 52–62, 63, 83–4, 140–1 and genres, 7, 36, 74, 77–8, 82, 110–12, 136–7 professionalisation of, 54, 63–86, 144 and religion, 25–30, 75–77 and women’s writing, 39, 54, 63 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 110, 132 Bell, John, publisher, 68 Bentley, Richard and Son, publishers, 3, 38, 133 Bertie, Georgina, 32–3, 79 Blackwood, William, and Sons, publishers, 65, 147 Blessington, Countess of, Marguerite Gardiner (1798–1849), 2–5, 8–9, 18, 35–7, 38, 41, 47–8, 53, 56–62, 64–9, 74–5, 77, 79, 93, 155, 160, 184 (2n) and the annuals, 65–9 and autobiographical writing, 3–4, 35–7 and the Bulwer Lyttons, 2–3, 77, 106 Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1834), 35–7, 53, 61, 93, 106

financial pressures on, 2–3, 53, 66, 68–9 Grace Cassidy; or, The Repealers (1833), 3–5, 59, 74, 106 Irishness, sense of, 2–5, 36, 106 as political hostess, 2–3, 36, 155, 160 and Reform, 2–5, 57 and the silver fork novel, 47–8, 53, 56–62 and social exclusion, 2–5, 66, 69, 77 The Victims of Society (1837), 48, 56–62 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith, 127 Bonner, Hypatia Bradlaugh, 31 Book of Beauty, 66 bourgeois, see middle classes Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1835–1915), 206 (84n) British and Foreign Review; or, European Quarterly Journal, 74, 114, 116, 118, 194 (53n), 201 (103n) Brontë, Anne, 139, 204 (43n) Brontë, Charlotte, 135, 139, 204 (43n) Brougham, Henry, 29, 38, 43, 81–2, 114–15 Bulwer, Henry, 203 (6n) Bulwer Lytton, Edward (Edward Lytton Bulwer) (1803–1873), 2–4, 18, 36, 41, 47–8, 50–1, 54, 65, 77, 88–90, 93–6, 99, 100–8, 113, 129–41, 142, 161–2, 169, 170–2, 184 (3n), 196 (4n), 197 (1n), 198 (48n), 203 (5n) (6n) (9n) (14n), 204 (42n) biographical accounts of, 93–4, 197 (1n) Byron, identification with, 139 class identity of, 89, 95, 100–2, 131 and committal for lunacy of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, 89, 90, 94, 98, 101–8 Godolphin (1833), 2nd edn. (1840), 140, 161–2 Lamb, Caroline, affair with, 140, 148 name and title, usage of, 132, 141, 184 (3n), 196 (4n)

Index 233 Bulwer Lytton, Edward (Edward Lytton Bulwer) (1803–1873) – continued Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), 48, 50, 54–5, 57, 60, 130, 161–2 and politics, 89, 107–8, 161–2, 164, 170–1 and the silver fork novel, 47–8, 50–1, 54–5, 130, 161–2 see Bulwer Lytton, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Elizabeth, 170 Bulwer Lytton, Emily, 88–90, 98–100, 137 Bulwer Lytton, Robert (Owen Meredith), 88, 95, 100, 137–8 Bulwer Lytton, Rosina (1802–1882), 9, 18, 23, 29, 35, 38, 41, 53, 77, 88–91, 93–109, 110–14, 117–19, 122, 127, 129–41, 142, 148–9, 161–2, 169, 170–2, 176–8, 181–2, 196 (4n), 197 (1n), 198 (48n), 203 (14n) (15n) and authorial identity, development of, 99, 133–5 and autobiographical writing, ambiguities of, 94–5, 133, 135–8, 140–1 biographical accounts of, 93–4, 197 (1n) A Blighted Life: A True Story (1880), 94–7, 100–5, 113, 135, 139, 171, 176, 198 (48n) and the Brontës, 135, 139 Byron, representation of, 94, 138–40, 148 Cheveley; or, The Man of Honour (1839), 88, 105, 129–33, 136–41, 148, 162, 169, 170–2, 203 (5n) class identity of, 53, 88, 95, 100, 112, 134–5 and committal for lunacy, 89–90, 94, 97–8, 101–8, 134, 198 (48n) and domestic values, 95–6, 98–102, 106–7, 129–31 Irishness, sense of, 106–8 Lady Bulwer Lytton’s Appeal (1857), 94, 99–100, 176

Lamb, Caroline, influence of, 88, 139–41, 148 and melodrama, use of, 96, 103–6, 111, 135–7, 147 and mimicry, 140–1, 131, 169 name and title, usage of, 95, 132, 141, 203 (15n) and Norton, Caroline, 90–1, 114, 117, 171–2 paranoia, or lack thereof, 95, 108–9, 113, 135, 198 (48n), 203 (14n) and politics, 109, 170–2 and public voice, nature of, 94–8, 108, 139–41 and publishers, 99, 133 and sexuality, 96, 106, 130, 132–3, 136, 172 and the silver fork novel, 53, 130–1 and Wheeler, Anna, 88, 101, 107–8 Burney, Fanny, 48 Bury, Charlotte Campbell (1775– 1861), 9, 35, 37–9, 47–9, 51–4, 57, 61, 81, 93, 169, 177 The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting (1838, from Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth), 9, 37–9, 61, 81, 93, 177 Butler, Josephine, 31, 105, 172, 199 (63n) Byron, Annabella, 36, 106, 139–40 Byron, Lord, George Gordon (Noel), Baron Byron (1788–1824), 35–7, 41–2, 53, 61, 93, 94, 106, 110, 138–40, 148, 204 (42n), 204 (43n) and Blessington, 35–7, 53, 61, 93, 106 and Lamb, Caroline, 41–2 marriage of, 35–7, 106, 138–40, 204 (43n) in the silver fork novel, 61, 138 and women, 61, 106, 138–40, 148 Campbell, Lady Colin, Gertrude Elizabeth (1861–1911), 182–3 Campbell, Theophilia Carlile, 31 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 132 Carlyle, Thomas, 30, 55, 132, 188 (30n) Caroline of Brunswick, Queen, 9, 37–8, 61, 80–1, 93, 176–7

234 Index Catholicism, 11, 26–30, 33, 42–4 see also religion character, 24, 42, 60, 67, 93, 96, 103, 106, 145–6, 168 concept as part of anti-aristocratic discourses, 146 economic value of, 145–6 performance of, 96 Charke, Charlotte, 35 Charleville, Catherine Maria Bury, Countess of, 4 Charleville, Charles William Bury, Earl of, 4 Chartism, see working classes Chatterton, Georgiana (1806–1876), 9, 29, 32–3, 75–6, 79 Christian Remembrancer, 79 Churchill, Lady Randolph, Jeanette, 34 Clarke, Mary Ann, 35 Colburn, Henry, 37–8, 41, 47, 52–3, 65, 74, 80–1 Coleridge, Hartley, 110 Collins, Wilkie, 102 colonialism, see empire and race Combermere, Mary Cotton, Viscountess (c.1799–1889), 32, 34, 38, 93, 173 Constable, Archibald, publisher, 65 Contagious Diseases Acts, campaigns against, 127, 172 copyright, see authorial identity country houses, see aristocracy Court Journal, 65 criminal conversation, see divorce Custody of Infants Act, 1839, 18, 89, 91, 113–16

Dickens, Charles (1812–1870), 65, 96, 105, 113, 123, 159, 164 and aristocratic patronage, 65 Little Dorrit (1855–1857), 159 Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), 113, 164 and professionalisation of authorship, 65 treatment of his wife, 105 disguise, 40–1, 53, 71, 96, 121, 181 of authorial identity, 53, 121 of class status, 53, 181 of gender through cross-dressing, 41 see also names, use of Disraeli, Benjamin (1804–1881), 26, 47–8, 54, 61, 110, 114, 130, 162–4, 166, 169–70, 181, 198 (48n) and the Bulwer Lyttons, 47, 130, 198 (48n) Coningsby (1844), 26, 130, 163 and politics, 114, 130, 162–4, 166, 198 (48n) and the silver fork novel, 47–8, 54, 61, 130, 162 social status, ambiguity of, 47, 163, 166 Sybil or The Two Nations (1845), 110, 130, 162–3, 169–70, 181 Vivian Grey (1826), 48, 54, 130, 162–3 divorce, 9, 37, 49, 89–90, 102, 109, 112–13, 121, 123–6, 155, 182, 200 (84n), 200 (94n) D’Orsay, Alfred, Count, 4, 35, 160 duelling, 50 Dufferin, Lady, Helen Blackwood, 90 Durham, John Lambton, Earl of, 3

Daily News, 65 dandy, the, 48, 55, 56–7, 59–60, 182 Dering, Edward Heneage, 29 Devey, Louisa, 94–6, 141 Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of (1757–1806), 9, 25, 39–42, 44, 155, 157, 182 Devonshire, William Cavendish, Sixth Duke of, 25, 65 Dickens, Catherine, 105

economy, 2, 11, 13–16, 18, 24, 30–1, 35, 38–9, 40, 49–52, 68, 70, 89–90, 101, 108–10, 119, 126–8, 138, 141–52, 156, 167, 174, 196 (97n), 205 (59n) aristocratic models of, 108–9, 141–52, 196 (97n) and books as commodities, 52, 66, 68, 70 as corrupting to middle-class values, 15, 73, 143–5

Index 235 economy – continued and marriage, 49, 119, 143–4 and property, 2, 11, 14, 24, 31, 49–50, 52, 83–6, 101, 126–7, 141–3, 196 (97n) see also authorial identity; women Eden, Emily (1797–1869), 9, 164–6, 167, 171–5, 178 Edinburgh Review, 38, 81, 147 Eliot, George (1819–1880), 9, 63, 71–3, 75–8, 81–2, 123, 134, 147, 194 (37n) Adam Bede (1859), 147 and anti-aristocratic values, 63, 71–3, 76, 78, 81–2 and leisure, artistically damaging effects of, 72–3, 81–2, 134 ‘Life and Opinions of Milton’ (1855), 123 ‘Lord Brougham’s Literature’ (1855), 81–2 and Norton, Caroline, 123, 147 on personal motivations for politics, 123 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856), 9, 63, 71–3, 75–8, 123, 194 (37n) Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 121–2 Ellis, S.M., 203 (6n) empire and race, 3–4, 19, 27–8, 29, 35–6, 41, 57, 88–90, 106–8, 117–18, 126, 141, 150–2, 173–4, 181–2 etiquette guides, 51, 54 Evangelicalism, see religion finance, see economy Forster, John, 101–2, 203 (14n) Foxe, John, 32 Fraser, James, publisher, 105 Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 38, 68–9, 131, 193 (28n), 203 (9n) Froude, James Anthony, 30, 188 (30n) Fullerton, Georgiana (1812–1885), 9, 29, 39, 42–5, 79 Gambier, Admiral Lord, James, 32–3 gambling, 40, 50

Gaskell, Elizabeth (1810–1865), 74, 159 Gentleman’s Magazine, 65 George IV (1762–1830) (Prince Regent, 1811–20), 9, 34, 37–9, 61, 80 Gladstone, William Ewart, 42, 79, 180 Gore, Catherine (1799–1861), 47–9, 51, 53, 55, 56–7, 59–62 Cecil (1841), 48, 56–7, 59–62 Gorham decision (1850), 29 Greg, W.R., 73, 194 (48n) Greville, Charles, 37–8, 43 Guest, Charlotte (1812–95), 80, 157–8, 169 Guild of Literature and Art, 65, 96, 193 (10n) Habermas, Jürgen, 15, 87, 111, 123 Harvey, Daniel, 114 Hayward, Abraham, 71, 113 Hazlitt, William, 47 Heath, Charles, 69, 193 (26n) Herbert, Mary Elizabeth, Baroness Herbert of Lea (1822–1911), 29, 121 Herbert, Sidney, 29, 90, 121, 124 historical fiction, 43, 77, 133, 138, 169 Holland, Elizabeth Fox, Baroness, 26, 36, 80, 154–5 Holland, Henry Fox, Baron, 26 Holland House, 26, 65, 154–5 Hook, Theodore, 47, 191 (19n) India, 9, 107–8, 152, 173–4 influence, see aristocratic women; political influence, socialised interaction Ireland, 3–4, 9, 27–8, 29, 35–6, 41, 42, 88–90, 106–8, 152, 182 Jersey, Margaret Child-Villiers, Countess of, 34, 181 Jersey, Sarah Villiers, Countess of, 51, 163, 181 Kaye, J.W., 123 Keepsake, 65, 67–9 Kemble, Fanny, 201 (103n) Kemble, John Mitchell, 201 (103n)

236

Index

Kerr, Amabel, 29 Knollys, W.W., 32, 34, 38, 173 Lamb, Caroline (1785–1828), 9, 39–42, 43, 88, 139–40, 148, 167 Glenarvon (1816), 39–42, 43, 88, 139–40 Landon, Letitia (L.E.L.), 47, 67–8 leisure, 3, 4, 6–7, 26, 47, 58–62, 67, 69, 71–4, 78–9, 81–6 in anti-aristocratic discourses, 4, 6–7, 58–9, 60–1, 69, 71–4, 83 aristocratic associations of, 3, 7, 58, 60, 67, 71–4, 81–3, 134–5 and authorial identity, 6, 47, 54, 58, 60–2, 66–7, 69, 71–4, 78–9, 81–6, 134–5 middle-class views of, 26, 60–1, 67, 71–4, 83 and men, 81–2 and women, 61–2, 69, 71–4, 78–9, 81–2 Lewis, Theresa, 32, 79, 174, 200 (101n) Liberal party, 12, 49, 121, 158, 174–5, 180 life-writing, 21, 23–45, 55, 59, 75, 88, 93–6, 129–41, 148–9, 187 (7n) aristocratic origins of, 31 and autobiographical fiction, 21, 23, 39–45, 55, 88, 129–41, 148–9 and the domestic memoir, 24, 30–4, 35, 75, 93, 95 generic traditions of, 23–4 and the spiritual autobiography, 25–30, 32, 42–5, 93, 95, 187 (7n) and the scandalous memoir, 23–4, 34–9, 41–2, 44, 93, 96 Lisle, Ambrose Phillips de, 26 Lister, T.H., 48, 174 Literary Gazette, 65 literary marketplace, see authorial identity; economy literary nation, 5, 10, 13–14, 19, 160, 170, 174, 183 definitions of, 13–14 inclusion in and exclusion from, 13, 174, 183 Long, Catharine (1797–1867), 76–7

Longman, publishers, 53, 81 Lothian, Marchioness of, Cecil Kerr, 29 Lyndhurst, Lord, John Copley, 113–14 Lynn, Eliza (Eliza Lynn Linton), 123–4 Lytton, see Bulwer Lytton Lytton, Constance (Jane Warton) (1869–1923), 101, 181–2 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, 80 Macmillan, Alexander, publisher, 146, 193 (28n), 210 (89n) madness, 43, 96–108 Maginn, William, 193 (28n), 203 (9n) Manning, Cardinal, Henry Edward, 29 Married Women’s Property Bill (1857), 110, 126, 145 Martineau, Harriet, 43, 123 Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), 18, 89, 91, 109, 126, 144, 205 (59n) Mayhew, Henry, 115 Maynard, Julia, 127 McCarthy, Justin, 155, 159 Melbourne, Lady, Elizabeth Lamb, 40 Melbourne, Lord, William Lamb, 18, 89, 90, 110, 113–14, 121, 124, 139, 143, 148, 150, 167–8, 177 melodrama, 96, 103–5, 111–12, 129, 135–7, 144, 147–8 Meredith, George, 89, 121, 182 middle classes, 1, 5–6, 10–12, 15, 16–17, 25–6, 29, 30–2, 37, 44, 46–7, 51–5, 57–8, 60–2, 63–5, 66, 67, 68, 70–80, 83, 97–100, 109, 114–15, 120–8, 129–33, 134, 142–3, 146, 148, 153, 156, 160, 170–1, 174–5, 177–9, 180–1 and anti-aristocratic critiques, 4, 6–7, 10, 99, 123–4, 130–1, 142–3, 153, 158, 163, 180, 184 (9n) and cross-class unity, 10–12, 120, 126, 177, 180–1 domestic values of, 44, 54–5, 74, 98–100, 114, 127–8, 130–3, 142–3, 170, 174–5, 177

Index 237 middle classes – continued as readers, 37–9, 51–3, 73, 130–3, 160 religion as formative force for, 25–6, 76 see also leisure; private and public spheres; women mimicry, see parody and satire Monthly Review, 131–2 Moore, Thomas, 68 Morgan, Sydney (Sydney Owenson) (c.1783–1859), 4, 8, 27–8, 47, 53, 65, 131, 137 motherhood, 18, 32, 60, 95–6, 98–101, 109, 115–22, 124–7, 143–4, 148, 161, 175, 178, 198 (44n), 201 (120n) Mudie’s Circulating Library, 77 Murray, John, publishers, 65, 82 names, use of, 3, 11, 38, 39, 40–1, 44, 47, 53–4, 69, 71, 73, 75, 85, 112, 131, 133–4, 141, 147, 174, 203 (6n), 205–6 (75n) Namier, Lewis, 157 national identity, 3–5, 10, 13, 27–8, 43–5, 106–7, 116–18, 160–1, 180–1 Nevill, Dorothy, 32, 34 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 9, 26, 29, 42, 75, 79 New Monthly Magazine, 36, 74 Nightingale, Florence, 124 Normanby, Marquis of, Constantine Phipps, 47, 65 Norton, Caroline (1808–1877), 9, 16–18, 18, 29, 53, 57, 65–8, 74–5, 86, 88–91, 93, 105, 109–28, 135, 141–52, 167–8, 169, 171–2, 176–8, 182, 200 (82n), 201 (103n), 201 (120n), 205 (59n), 205 (70n), 205–6 (75n), 206 (84n), 208 (58n), 210 (81) and aristocratic leadership, models of, 109, 114–15, 120–2, 124–5, 127, 146 and aristocratic women’s political influence, 122–3, 127, 167–8

and authorial identity, development of, 53, 66–8, 74–5, 121, 141–2, 144, 146–7, 205–6 (75n) and the Bulwer Lyttons, 90–1, 113–14, 117, 135, 142, 148–9, 171–2 and Byron, attitude towards, 110, 148 class identity of, 16–17, 74–5, 88–9, 90, 93, 109, 118–20, 122, 126, 144, 148, 176–7, 200 (82n) domestic values, appeal to, 16–17, 89–91, 93, 105, 109, 111–12, 114–20, 121–2, 124–6, 143–4, 146, 178 and economy, 53, 68, 86, 119, 127–8, 141–7, 205 (59n) English Laws for Women (1854), 120, 122, 125, 143–4, 147 and genre, choice of, 110–13, 121, 149–52 and the law, 18, 29, 89–91, 109, 111, 121, 205 (59n) Letters to the Mob (1848), 120, 124, 126 A Letter to the Queen (1855), 111–12, 120, 123, 125–8, 144, 169, 176 Lost and Saved (1863), 75, 142, 145, 149, 151–2, 177–8, 206 (84n) and melodrama, use of, 105, 111–12, 144, 148 name and title, usage of, 53, 111, 120–1, 141–2, 205–6 (75n) A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor (1839), 111, 114–19, 125 and politics, 57, 88, 109–4, 113–15, 120–3, 125–6, 167–8 public voice, nature of, 89–91, 93, 111, 123, 126, 177 and publishers, 68, 144, 146, 205 (70n), 205–6 (75n) and Reform, 113, 168, 208 (58n) and scandal, effects of, 75, 93, 127, 141–3 and sexuality, 114, 135, 143 and social interaction, use of, 65, 68, 109, 112–13, 122–3, 126–7, 177 ‘The Wife’ and ‘Woman’s Reward’ (1835), 148–9, 150–1, 167–8

238 Index Norton, George, 16, 89, 114–15, 120–2, 124, 128, 141–5, 147–50, 168 Oliphant, Margaret, 134, 204 (26n) Owenism, 88, 108 Oxford Movement, 28, 29, 43, 55, 76–7, 187 (12n) Palmerston, Emily Temple, Viscountess, 80, 90, 155 Palmerston, Henry Temple, Viscount, 155, 180 parliament, 1–2, 11–14, 18, 26, 29, 88–9, 111, 113–16, 117, 119, 124–6, 154–8, 162–4, 166, 168, 170, 172, 178, 180–1, 190 (10n) class bases of, changes in, 12–13, 121, 155–6, 181 extra-parliamentary pressures, responses to, 11–13, 113–16, 119, 124–6, 155, 162–4, 166 and religion, 29 social facilities of, 154 speech constraints within, 111, 157–8 and men, 26, 113–16, 125–6, 156–8, 163, 180 and women, 1, 12, 18, 26, 88–9, 113, 117, 119, 125–6, 154–7, 162–4, 166, 170, 178, 181 see also party politics; politics parody and satire, 3–4, 41, 48–50, 56, 59–61, 88, 95–6, 105, 114, 128, 129, 131, 133, 139–41, 155, 161, 163, 169, 170 party politics, 11–12, 55, 110, 113–15, 126, 155–8, 164, 166, 168, 171–3, 177, 207 (19n), 209 (72n) criticism of, 55, 158, 168, 171–2, 177, 181 and individuals, importance to, 11–12, 156–7, 164, 166, 168 and lack of clear definitions, 11–12, 157–8 and organisations, strengthening of, 126, 155–6, 172, 181 see also Liberal party; parliament; politics; Tory party; Whig party

Patmore, Coventry, 111 Pennington, Sarah, 98–9 philanthropy, 11, 26, 29, 42, 187 (18n) poetry, 7, 9, 16, 36, 47, 66–8, 78, 89, 90, 91, 110–12, 116, 119–20, 138 political hostesses, 1–4, 8, 9, 32, 36, 54, 64–5, 75, 154–5, 159–60, 161–4, 169–70, 173, 210 (4n) politics definitions of, 1–2, 21, 87–8 socialised modes of, 1–5, 13, 88, 153–7 see also aristocratic women; parliament; party politics; the social Ponsonby, Emily, 9, 25 private and public spheres, 1–4, 5–6, 11–19, 24, 30–4, 40, 44, 51–2, 55, 74, 78, 80, 83–6, 95–100, 104, 106–7, 110–12, 116, 119, 121–5, 127, 130–1, 136–7, 141–5, 153–9, 164, 166, 167–8, 170–2, 177–8 aristocratic women’s positioning in, ambiguity of, 1–4, 13–16, 24, 83–6, 97–100, 110, 153–9, 166, 178–9 definitions of, 15–17, 33, 123 and the social, 1–4, 6, 14–17, 19, 78, 154 widening range of vocabularies concerning, 13 women’s positioning in, 6, 11–16, 19, 30–4, 44, 55, 78, 80, 98, 104, 107, 111, 121–4, 177–8 professional identity, see authorial identity property, see economy Protestantism, 26, 27–9, 32, 44 Quarterly Review, 38 race, see empire and race radical movements, 2–3, 12, 31, 65, 87, 104, 114, 118, 130, 161, 169, 170–2, 180 Reade, Charles, 94, 102 readers, 9–10, 16–17, 21, 46–8, 51–3, 72, 73, 77, 78, 85, 87–8, 141

Index 239 reform, 65, 82, 120–1, 172 as alternative to rebellion, 57, 116, 120, 129 aristocratic responses to, 7, 11, 56–9, 114 and fiction as agent of reform, 27–8, 58–62, 74–5, 134–5 of laws, 89, 105, 110, 113–18, 120–4 leadership towards, 16, 26–8, 121, 123 and religion, 7, 16, 25, 29–30, 76, 165 and social interaction, 11, 15, 25, 30 Reform Act of 1832 (The Great Reform Act), 1–7, 10–13, 18–19, 23–4, 27, 38, 46, 49, 51, 57, 58, 60–1, 64, 114–15, 119–21, 124, 153–6, 158–65, 167–73, 179, 180, 183, 184 (9n), 190 (10n), 191 (18n) and anti-aristocratic discourses, 4, 6–7, 10, 153, 158, 163, 180, 184 (9n) aristocratic responses to, 4, 6–7, 10–12, 49, 60–1, 158–72, 179 and aristocratic women, responses to, 7, 16, 51, 153, 160, 164–72, 183 and aristocratic women as repositories of class critiques, 153, 158–64, 179, 183 extension of the franchise in, 13 and leadership, 7, 115, 121, 167–72 maintenance of existing power structures in, 11, 13, 120, 156 property qualifications in, 2, 49 and religion, 27 and rotten boroughs, 162, 190 (10n) and the Tories, 114–15 traditional historiography on, 11 and the Whigs, energising effect upon, 4, 7, 11–12, 49, 60–1, 115, 119–21, 168 women, exclusion from, 12–13, 24 Reform Act of 1867, 5, 10, 13, 19, 23–4, 34, 43, 85, 174, 180–1, 207 (19n) extension of the franchise in, 23–4, 85

leadership of nation, 34 property qualifications in, 85 women, exclusion from, 24, 85, 180–1 working classes in, 10, 85, 180–1 Reform Act of 1884, 181 Regency, 42, 46, 51, 55, 57, 59–62, 173 see also George IV religion, 25–6, 28, 29, 33, 76–7, 79, 181, 187 (10n), 187 (18n) and the aristocracy, effects upon, 25–6 Evangelical revival, 25, 29, 76–77 and philanthropy, influence on, 26, 29, 42, 187 (18n) as political force, 27–8, 29, 187 (10n) see also Catholicism; Oxford Movement; Protestantism Richardson, Samuel, 50, 58 roman à clef, 4, 39–45, 46, 90, 129–33, 136–41, 182 rotten boroughs, see Reform Act of 1832 Ruskin, John, 177 Russell, Lady John, Frances (Countess Russell), 158 Russell, Lord John (Earl Russell), 82, 158, 161, 180, 184 (9n) salons, 2–3, 28, 65, 154, 161, 175, 182, 206 (6n) satire, see parody and satire scandal, 2, 4, 9, 23–4, 34–9, 41–2, 44, 53, 56, 74–5, 77, 83, 87, 89–90, 93, 94, 96, 102, 107, 110, 124–5, 127, 129–30, 132, 139–40, 141–3, 150, 160, 181–2 associations with aristocracy, 77, 83, 142 detrimental effects of, 37–9, 74, 85, 110, 133, 141–2, 182 market value of, 37–9, 41, 53, 85, 129–30, 141–2, 182 and the scandalous memoir, 23–4, 34–9, 41–2, 44, 93, 96 Scott, Caroline (1784–1857), 48, 74, 76, 78

240 Index Scott, Walter, 49, 105–6 sensation novels, 74, 102, 105, 134, 142, 151–2, 177–8, 206 (84n) separate spheres, see private and public spheres servants, 69, 120, 145, 173 Sewell, Elizabeth Missing, 30 Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, Earl of, 26 Shelley, Mary, 113 silver fork novels, 3, 10, 18, 21, 38, 46–62, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 75–6, 130–1, 138, 149, 161–2, 182, 191 (19n), 191 (32n) appeal of, 46–8, 51–3 authors, social status of, 47–8, 53, 72 as commodities, 52, 132–3 critical views of, 46–7, 55 decline of, 46, 54–5, 62, 191 (32n) definitions of, 46–7 and reform, influence of, 46, 49, 51, 58–62 spaces in, 51–2, 55, 191 (19n) slavery, 100, 118, 165 social, the, 1, 5, 14–19, 21, 27–8, 40, 51–2, 64–9, 67–9, 77, 85, 87–8, 148, 154–5, 166, 178, 179, 183, 191 (19n) and authorial identity, 64–69 changing definitions of, 14–17 collective resonance of, need to obtain, 16–17, 21, 87–8 gendering of, 15 as privacy, 15 spaces of, 1, 5, 15, 28, 40, 51–2, 64, 67–8, 154, 191 (19n) Somerset, Duchess of, Georgiana Seymour, 90 Stepney, Catherine (c.1785–1845), 9, 169–70 Strickland, Agnes (1796–1874), 65, 78–81 Strickland, Elizabeth (1794–1875), 65 Strickland, Jane (1800–88), 65, 78, 80–1 Stuart-Wortley, Emmeline (1806–1855), 9, 67, 69 Sutherland, Duchess of, Harriet Leveson Gower, 158

Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 113–14, 116 Tennyson, Alfred, 115 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), 38, 50, 55–6, 58, 105, 203 (9n) Vanity Fair (1847–8), 50, 55–6, 58 Thompson, William, 118 The Times, 38, 53, 79, 107–8, 121, 142, 146, 205 (75n) Tory party, 27, 55, 89, 114–15, 143, 155, 158, 162–3, 167–8, 170–2, 200 (82n) and reform, 114–15 and Catholicism, 27 and party politics, critique of, 172 and political hostesses, 155 Trevelyan, Hannah More, 80 Trollope, Anthony (1815–82), 8, 81, 159–60, 207 (36n) Trollope, Frances (1780–1863), 135 upper-classes, definitions of, 7–10 see also aristocracy Victoria, Queen, 38, 80, 120, 126, 175–9, 198 (48n), 210 (89n) Villiers, Charles, 114, 200 (101n) Wallace, Grace Jane Maxwell, 81 Ward, Mary Augusta (Mrs Humphry Ward) (1851–1920), 83, 160 Ward, Robert Plummer (Robert Plumer Ward), 48 Weldon, Georgina, 102 Westminster, see parliament Westminster Review, 71, 78 Wheeler, Anna, 88, 101, 107–8, 118, 161, 198 (44n) Whig party, 4, 7, 11–12, 26–7, 36, 49, 55, 60–1, 65, 89, 109, 112, 114–15, 119–21, 131, 154–5, 158–9, 161, 164, 167–8, 171, 174–5, 177, 180 and aristocratic leadership, 4, 7, 11–12, 60–1, 114, 168, 174, 180 and Catholicism, 11, 26–7, 168 and the Liberals, mid-century incorporation into, 12, 49, 121, 158, 174, 180

Index 241 Whig party – continued and political hostesses, 36, 154–5, 159, 164, 177 and reform, energising effect of, 4, 7, 11–12, 49, 60–1, 115, 119–21, 168 and the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, 115 Wilberforce, William, 33 Wilson, Harriette, 35 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas, 27–8, 131 women and authorial identity, 55, 73–4, 83–4, 134, 140–1 as [non-]economic entities, 15, 54, 72, 85, 110, 126–7, 134, 142–5, 205 (59n) and the franchise, exclusion from, 12–13, 24, 85, 156, 180–1

gender roles of, 16–17, 25–6, 30–1, 53, 75, 124, 129, 170, 173, 176 and genres, 6, 79, 82, 110–13 and politics, 12–13, 31, 126–7, 156, 180–1 and religion, 25–6, 29, 181 in the working class, 25, 35, 120, 126 see also aristocratic women; private and public spheres; middle classes Wood, Ellen (Mrs Henry Wood), 123 Woolf, Virginia, 5 working classes, 5, 10, 25, 70, 74, 85, 97, 104, 120, 126, 180 and Chartism, 55, 74, 120, 126 in the Reform Act of 1867, 10, 85, 180–1 Wycliffe, John, 27 Wynford, Lord, William Draper Best, 115

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