The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th-century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women, by Antonia Fraser
cooked him dinner – what a shit he was! – she drank half a bottle of gin and penned a 23-pager, while turning back to marking exam papers. ‘I am almost weeping at the badness of the finalists’ scripts.’
When the poet’s monumental selfishness – getting one of the girlfriends pregnant (there was a miscarriage, perhaps mercifully), lying about keeping two others on the go in Hull – overcame her, she hit the bottle, and on these occasions the reader is reminded less of the acerbic Mrs Carlyle and more of hysterical Fanny Squeers – ‘I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather.’
The only child of working-class parents, Monica did not have a brother – or any close friends to help her through the bad times. ‘I blame you for destroying my confidence,’ she railed, rightly, at Larkin. (In the same letter, while hating him for going off with ‘bloody Patsy’, a married woman in Northern Ireland, she changes gear abruptly and recommends that he paint his awful Hull flat with Dulux.)
‘I dread the whole of the rest of my life,’ she wrote, not only truthfully but rationally, on the last day of 1960, when she was a mere 38. To judge from these letters, her life was awful, and her having a truly awful temperament, washed down with gin, did not make it happier. She went on loving her old pupil Sutherland, and he has done her proud – or as proud as possible in this attempt to keep the Jones flame burning.
The trouble is, the loathing of the human race, and of herself, into which she slithered, is not redeemed, as Larkin’s was, by any immortal poem. Sutherland gives us delicious lines, but they tend to be his own – as when he sees that ‘malice isolated her’ or when, mentioning how much she liked another of her pupils, Tom Craik, he observes that ‘she forgave his being anti-oswald Mosley’.
That is a brilliant sentence, in a brilliant book.
Crim Con – or criminal conversation – was a euphemism for adultery. And Crim Con trials, in which a cuckolded husband sued his rival for damages to his property were, in the days before The
Jeremy Kyle Show, a source of popular entertainment.
The most sensational Crim Con case of the 19th century took place in the Palace of Westminster during the summer of 1836, when George Norton, Tory MP for Guildford, sued Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister, for £10,000.
The damaged property was his wife, the black-eyed Caroline Norton. Those, including Charles Dickens, who attended the nine-day hearing learned that Norton was a violent husband, that Melbourne spent his afternoons giggling with Mrs Norton in her sitting room, and that a married woman had no legal existence.
With Norton written off as a noodle and Melbourne as a Regency relic, it was Caroline’s beauty, brains and rackety breeding that became the focus of interest. Her grandfather was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author, appropriately enough, of The School for Scandal; her father, Tom Sheridan, had died a penniless playboy.
Caroline was married off to Norton aged 19, and her friendship with Melbourne began soon afterwards. While she claimed that their afternoons were spent talking politics, the servants reported that she did so splayed at his Lordship’s feet, her skirts around her waist.
But, as Antonia Fraser points out, it is unlikely that Caroline would ring for a servant while lying on the floor with her legs apart. As evidence, Melbourne’s love letters failed to convince: ‘How are you?’ he asked her in one. ‘I will call at halfpast four, Yours,’ he wrote in another.
It was their very flatness, argued the prosecution, that proved his guilt. Pickwick Papers, then being serialised, contained Dickens’s parody of the supposed encryptions of the now famous billetsdoux: ‘Dear Mrs B,’ reads out Sergeant Buzfuz, counsel for Mrs Bardell, ‘Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, PICKWICK.’
Mr Norton lost the case, but Mrs Norton lost everything else. Regardless of a wife’s innocence, the law was on the side of the husband. The custody of her three young sons went to their father, and the youngest died in his care: it was with the loss of her children that her life as a writer began. Caroline Norton looked on her pen, she said, as a soldier looked on his sword.
Her poetry and fiction showed strength, but her pamphleteering had steel. Her arguments for the natural rights of mothers led to the Custody of Infants Act 1839, which allowed women who had not been found guilty of Crim Con to have custody of their children over the age of seven. Her pamphlets on the Divorce Bill led to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, which granted women, for the first time, a legal identity separate from their husbands. So we wives and mothers have Caroline Norton to thank for those rights that we now take for granted. Caroline Norton deserves the same fame as Florence Nightingale.
Caroline also lost her friendship with Melbourne. ‘I hear nothing of you, as I used to do,’ she pleaded after the trial, ‘and feel much the same dreariness of heart that one does when watching by a sickbed.’
Melbourne had a new admirer in the form of the young Queen Victoria, whose mentor he now became. While he was flirting with the monarch, Caroline pointed out, she was considered unfit to associate with ladies of the court. The only thing she did not lose in 1836 was her ghastly husband, to whom she remained married until his death 40 years later.
Once she was widowed, Caroline married again – this time for love. She was 69, and died three months later.
It is Norton’s life as a campaigner that interests Antonia Fraser, who will be 89 this year. The Case of the Married Woman, Fraser suggests in her introduction, is a biography and also the third in a trilogy of books about 19th-century reforms, coming after Perilous Question and The King and the Catholics.
Unlike Norton’s previous biographer, Fraser believes that her subject was innocent of adultery: Caroline and Melbourne doubtless canoodled but full ‘conversation’ did not take place, not least because Melbourne was keen on flagellation and Caroline, having been beaten by her husband, lacked the same taste for it.
The argument is convincing, but then everything Fraser says about Caroline and her world is convincing, steeped as she is in the lives and politics of the 19th century.
Any biography in which the author and subject are well matched contains a certain magic, and the sympathy that Fraser feels for her heroine is what ignites this remarkable study.