The Criminal Conversation of Mrs. Norton

Victorian England's "Scandal of the Century" and the Fallen Socialite Who Changed Women's Lives Fore

Diane Atkinson

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781613748800
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613748831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Westminster, London, June 22, 1836. Crowds are gathering at the Court of Common Pleas. On trial is Caroline Sheridan Norton, a beautiful and clever young woman who had been maneuvered into marrying the Honorable George Norton when she was just nineteen. Ten years older, he is a dull, violent, and controlling lawyer, but Caroline is determined not to be a traditional wife. By her early twenties, Caroline has become a respected poet and songwriter, clever mimic, and outrageous flirt. Her beauty and wit attract many male admirers, including the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. After years of simmering jealousy, George Norton accuses Caroline and the Prime Minister of "criminal conversation" (adultery) precipitating Victorian England's "scandal of the century."

 In Westminster Hall that day is a young Charles Dickens, who would, just a few months later, fictionalize events as Bardell v. Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. After a trial lasting twelve hours, the jury's not guilty verdict is immediate, unanimous, and sensational. George is a laughingstock. Angry and humiliated he cuts Caroline off, as was his right under the law, refuses to let her see their three sons, seizes her manuscripts and letters, her clothes and jewels, and leaves her destitute. Knowing she can not change her brutish husband's mind, Caroline resolves to change the law.

 Steeped in archival research that draws on more than 1,500 of Caroline's personal letters, The Criminal Conversation of Mrs. Norton is the extraordinary story of one woman's fight for the rights of women everywhere. For the next thirty years Caroline campaigned for women and battled male-dominated Victorian society, helping to write the Infant Custody Act (1839), and influenced the Matrimonial Causes (Divorce) Act (1857) and the Married Women's Property Act (1870), which gave women a separate legal identity for the first time.

Notes

Prologue

1. Morning Chronicle, 23 June 1836, p.2; Meteorology Archive, Royal Society, 22 June 1836, MA/238

2. The Times, 23 June 1836, p.1

3. The Satirist and the Censor of the Times, 22 May 1836, p.162

4. ODNB online, Sir William Follett; John Bayley; Richard Crowder; Dr Mark Collins, Parliamentary Estates Archivist and Historian

5. ODNB online, Sir John Campbell; Serjeant Thomas Noon Talfourd; Frederic Thesiger

6. ODNB online, Queen Caroline

7. Lord Campbell, Speeches of Lord Campbell at the Bar and the House of Commons, A. & C. Black, London, 1842, p.2

8. Lawrence Stone, Road To Divorce: A History of the Making and Unmaking of Marriage in England, 1995, pp.256–66

9. The Times, 30 August 1875, p.9

10. ODNB online, Lord Wynford

11. The Age, 26 June 1836, pp.209–13

12. WO 97/850/16

Chapter I

1. ODNB: Thomas Sheridan; John Watkins, Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan with a Particular Account of His Family and Connexions, 1817, p.126

2. Percy Fitzgerald, The Lives of the Sheridans, 1886, Vol. 2, 1886, p.325

3. ODNB online, Elizabeth Ann Sheridan, née Linley; Lord Edward Fitzgerald; Fintan O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Brinsley Sheridan, 1997, pp.261–70

4. Ibid., pp.309, 311

5. Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: the Ultimate Dandy, 2005, p.60

6. Thomas Moore, The Memoirs of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Vol. II, 1825, p.314

7. Old DNB online, Thomas Sheridan

8. Old DNB online, Caroline Henrietta Sheridan, née Callander

9. Marriage register, St George’s, Hanover Square, 29 November 1805. In addition to it being the fashion for people of their rank to marry with more privacy by the more expensive mode of licence, this strategy was necessitated by her advancing pregnancy.

10. Cecil Price (ed.), The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Vol. 2, p.249

11. Old DNB online, Caroline Sheridan née Callander; Fitzgerald, 1886, Vol. 2, p.333

12. The Times, 28 May 1806, p.2

13. Morning Post, 8 July 1807; ‘The Proceedings Against Thomas Sheridan, Esq, for Criminal Conversation With The Wife of Peter Campbell, Jun, Esq, July 1807’, 1807, pp.1–7; Journals of the House of Lords, 49, GEO III, 1809

14. Letters from Thomas Sheridan to Richard Peake, BL Eg 1976, f.7 and f.11; Kelly, 2005, p.292

15. Letter from Caroline Sheridan to George Callander, 30 March 1808, PRONI, D1071/B/E3/2

16. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (eds), The London Encyclopaedia, 1983, pp.291–2, 445–6, Letter from Thomas Sheridan, June 1808, BL 3518, f.1179

17. O’Toole, 1997, pp.430–31

18. Baptism record, Jane Georgiana Sheridan, St Peter’s Church, Petersham, 1815

19. Letter from Thomas Sheridan to Charles Ward, 13 February 1809, BL Eg 1976, f.26; Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis, 1999, p.41, pp.44–6

20. Price, 1966, Vol 3, pp.66–8

21. The Times, 20 July 1810, p.3

22. Jane Gray Perkins, The Life of Mrs Norton, 1909, p.2

23. Baptism record, Thomas Berkeley Sheridan, St Peter’s Church, Petersham, 1815

24. Price, 1966, Vol. 3, pp. 147–51

25. Letter from Tom Sheridan to Richard Peake, 1812, BL Add. 35118, f.117

26. Ibid. and f.181

27. Price, 1966, pp.175–78; Letter from Richard Brinsley Sheridan to the Earl of Lonsdale, July 1814, Cumbria Record Office, LONS L/2/27

28. Dormandy, 1999, p.39

29. John McAleer, Representing Africa: Landscape Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870, 2010, pp.39–41

30. Price, 1966, Vol. 3, p.217

31. The Times, 8 July 1816, p.3; 15 July 1816, p.3

32. Will of Thomas Sheridan, PROB 11/1678. Brief and simple though the document was, things were never easy or straightforward for Tom or his widow; the will would not be proved for another six years.

33. Letter from Charles Brinsley Sheridan to Thomas Le Fanu, 1817, King’s College, Cambridge, Le Fanu 2/24

34. Madeline Masson, ‘Birds of Passage’, unpublished typescript, Chapter 9, p.9

35. The Times, 27 January 1818, p. 2; Dr J. McAleer, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. There is no captain’s log for the Abeona.

36. ‘In memory of Thomas Sheridan the eldest son of the Right Honble. Richard Brinsley Sheridan by his first wife Elizabeth Brinsley who was buried in the cathedral of Wells … and was buried by the side of his mother.’ Society of Genealogists, DO/M34

37. Moore, 1825, Vol. II, p.315; The Times, 1 July 1819, p.3

38. Sarah E. Parker, Grace and Favour: A Handbook of Who Lived Where in Hampton Court Palace 1750–1950, 2005, pp.11, 14; Lucy Worsley and David Souden, Hampton Court Palace: The Official Illustrated History, 2000, pp.98–9

39. Perkins, 1909, pp.4–5

40. Alice Acland, Caroline Norton, 1948, pp.21–2

41. Perkins, 1909, p.6

42. The Times, 5 November 1822, p.4. In May 1823 he attended a public meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London to raise money ‘to assist the Greeks in their present efforts to establish their independence’....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Book Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue The Trial of the Nineteenth Century
• I Caroline Sheridan and George Norton
• II Wedding Bells
• III The Honourable Mr and Mrs Norton
• IV 1836: ‘Norty Mrs Norton’
• V A Large Black Slug in a Damp Wood
• VI The Infant Custody Act
• VII Wrangling, Dangling and Death
• VIII A Storm of Expostulation (1843-51)
• IX ‘The Clouded Moon of the Sun’ (1851-9)
• X Life After George (1860-77)
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements