Prev. posted on WAYR Spring 2014, originally published in WSJ--- Mrs. Norton was AT's friend, basis of Lady Carbury:
The Criminal Conversation Of Mrs. Norton
By Diane Atkinson
Chicago Review, 486 pages, $29.95
review By
Alexandra Mullen
Nov. 22, 2013 3:41 p.m. ET
Was there an evil fairy at Caroline Sheridan's christening? Born in 1808 into the theatrical and political family of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she was graced with beauty, intelligence, wit and industry; her pen poured forth popular songs, poems and novels, which brought her early fame as "the female Byron." Yet all anyone pays attention to is a scandal that happened to her when she was only 27. It left her, as she wryly noted, with a reputation "something between a barn-actress and a Mary Wollstonecraft."
Diane Atkinson begins her biography of Mrs. Norton—as she was known after her marriage to George Norton—with this scandal. In 1836, the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was sued for £10,000 damages for having "criminal conversation" (adulterous sex) with the wife of an undistinguished barrister from a Tory family. Over the course of the 14-hour trial, the all-male jury and audience enjoyed the sexually suggestive testimony about the high and mighty. Norton's lawyer was disconcerted when their "explosive laughter" greeted his innocently stated fact that Lord Melbourne didn't knock at the front door of the Nortons' house: Instead he "invariably went in . . . by the passage behind."
image: An oil sketch for Daniel Maclise's 1849 mural in the House of Lords. Caroline Norton served as the model for the figure of justice; the painting hangs not far from Westminster Hall, where the trial that made her infamous took place. Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tmaki, gift of James Tannock Mackelvie, 1881.
Melbourne's lawyer cannily exploited the jury's worldly attitude to suggest that the case against the prime minister wasn't one of a cuckolded husband seeking justice, but a political enemy seeking to score a blow. In Ms. Atkinson's words, "the Honourable George Norton had been shown to be a man lacking in honour," exploiting his failed marriage for party-political maneuverings. Melbourne got off. The Whigs were thrilled, while the Tories made the best of it. As one grumbled, he "really couldn't see why Lord Melbourne should be so triumphant at the verdict given, as it had been proved that he had had more opportunities than any man ever had before, and had made no use of them."
But despite being officially proved virtuous, which perhaps she was, Mrs. Norton was now notorious. Even many years later, acid tinged her review of a book that brought up the gossip that always swirled around her famous grandfather: "Obscurity is a thicker shield than virtue."
She wrote her friend Mary Shelley after the trial: "[To count] for nothing, in a trial which decided one's fate for life, is hard." She wasn't exaggerating. Legally, as a married woman, she did count for nothing. Under the laws of coverture, a married couple was considered to be one legal person in which the wife was "covered" by the husband: She had no legal right to enter into contracts or own property, including any income she might earn.
Nor did a wife have any right to her own children. During the trial, George had spirited away the couple's three children—sons aged 7, 5 and 18 months—and forbidden Caroline to see them. Distraught and furious, but with no recourse at law, Caroline turned to her family's standby, the pen: "It is not from choice that I left poetry and pleasant themes,—for defence of the better part of life." To get back her sons, she lobbied, wrote and contrived to change the law. The Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers of good character a right to custody of children under 7—only with the Lord Chancellor's approval!—was passed in 1839.
With cruel irony, the law only applied to England and Wales—and George had taken the boys to his brother's estates in Scotland. Mrs. Norton wasn't reunited with her sons until 1842, under bittersweet circumstances. George notified Caroline too late that their youngest son was ill, and by the time she reached him he was dead. Thereafter George allowed Caroline restricted access to the two other boys. She was only freed from George's influence upon his death more than 30 years later, by which time her older, more responsible son had died of tuberculosis, and the middle son had become both financially dependent on his mother and often violent toward her.
The current fashion that "the personal is the political" was not a Victorian vogue. The reformer Harriet Martineau, for instance, sympathized with Mrs. Norton yet disapproved of her efforts because women "must be clearly seen to speak from conviction of the truth, and not from personal unhappiness." Mrs. Norton reflected some of this sentiment herself in 1855, when she wrote a public letter to the queen to support the Matrimonial Causes Act, which among other things eased procedural restrictions on divorce and began to recognize marriage as a mutual contract: "I do not consider this as my cause," she wrote of the bill that finally passed in 1857, "though it is a cause of which . . . I am an illustration. It is the cause of all women."
Some richly colored refractions of Mrs. Norton can be found in literary works lighted by her case and character. Ms. Atkinson mentions the one that appeared a year after the trial, written by a court reporter there. In "The Pickwick Papers," the young Charles Dickens replayed the case mostly for laughs, partly by switching the adultery trial to a breach-of-promise suit. William Makepeace Thackeray also clearly studied the courtroom shenanigans for "The Newcomes" (1855), while 30 years later, after the deaths of the main actors, George Meredith based the heroine of "Diana of the Crossways" on his friend Caroline and followed the background facts of her marriage very closely.
Ms. Atkinson doesn't mention Dickens's more subtly serious view of themes inspired by the Norton case: In "Hard Times" (1854), which appeared as a weekly serial while Parliament debated the first Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Bill, he depicted the unhappy marriages of both Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Gradgrind. Nor does Ms. Atkinson point out the shades of Caroline Norton that appear in novels by Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, and in Tennyson's long poem on women's education. Mrs. Norton even makes an appearance in John Fowles's 1969 novel, "The French Lieutenant's Woman."
To her credit, Ms. Atkinson's selections from Mrs. Norton's letters allow us to see her private side—whimsical, querulous and sometimes even whiny—but this biography represents a lost opportunity. Much of the material I've drawn from for this review comes not from Ms. Atkinson's book but from Randall Craig's excellent "The Narratives of Caroline Norton" (2009)—a book I discovered in Ms. Atkinson's bibliography. Scholarly studies aren't for everyone, but Ms. Atkinson's popular approach doesn't quite satisfy either. Like Alan Chedzoy's "A Scandalous Woman" of 20 years ago, "The Criminal Conversations of Mrs. Norton" lets the shadow of the scandal obscure the woman herself. The author of five novels and 11 books of poetry, Mrs. Norton considered herself a woman of letters; she once wrote a friend, semi-facetiously, that she hoped that "a hundred years hence," after people had read a biography of "that remarkable woman," literary tourists would be drawn to scenes from her novels.
Are her novels any good? I wish I knew. Her evil fairy must be cackling.
—Ms. Mullen writes for the Hudson
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