Antonia Fraser’s tale of double standards is a delight
Combining high society campery and historical scholarship in ways rivalling Nancy Mitford, Antonia Fraser, 88, is the great chronicler of melodramatic queens and fearsome princes, from Boadicea to Louis XIV, even Harold Pinter. She is peerless at pageantry, and no slouch when it comes to technical footnotes – there are plenty in her new book, The Case of the Married Woman, about the Factory Act (1833), the topography of late-18th-century Mayfair, the décor of the House of Lords, the use of hair-dye and the telling fact that Members of Parliament only began receiving a salary in 1911.
The latest in Fraser’s gallery of “handsome, adorable hussies” is Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan, the playwright’s granddaughter, who was born in 1808, “a queer darklooking little baby”, evidently a bit of a handful. “This is not a child I would care to meet in a dark wood,” said the author of The School for Scandal, who promptly died, depressed that his theatre, Drury Lane, kept burning down.
As her parents were always absent in South Africa – where her father was Postmaster General – Caroline was raised by relatives in Scotland, later living with her widowed mother in a grace-and-favour apartment in Hampton Court. In 1827, she married George Norton, MP for Guildford, who abruptly lost his seat. He was late for the wedding at St George’s, Hanover Square, as the cabriolet broke down. Matters went downhill from there.
Caroline had three children within five years, but her husband was physically abusive. “Norton took to kicking his wife, pushing and shoving her, when she displeased him in some way”, e.g. pulling a face if he lit a cigar. Norton threw Caroline down the stairs, and caused a miscarriage “by a vicious blow”. He once poured the contents of a kettle on her hand – and
Caroline was quite unprotected by the law. Husbands believed they had a right to beat wives, as they would their dogs: “the suffering party must bear in some degree the consequences of anything injudicious.” In other words, like rape victims, they were asking for it.
By 1835, “Norton’s treatment of his wife degenerated horribly”, so Caroline and the children left him, taking refuge with her sister. Caroline promptly suffered another miscarriage, owing to “the agitation and misery to which she had been exposed”. Worse followed. In April
1836, the children were “bundled into a hackney coach and taken away” by their father, who, as Caroline wrote, “inflicts vengeance, as bitterly as he can.” They were abused, locked in dark rooms. “Flogging was used as a method of correction.” One son, Willie, died of medical neglect after a riding accident, aged nine; another, Brin, went clinically mad.
The major theme of Fraser’s book is rage – hers and Caroline’s – that women in those days had no rights over their children. In the eyes of the law, married women simply didn’t exist. “The female is by a law of nature put under the dominion of the male”, an assumption that had scriptural authority, as “superiority is not a thing of man’s devising, but of God’s”. Nor were women allowed to own anything, of any kind. Caroline’s grandfather’s pension and property, worth £40,000, which she’d inherited, “belonged legally to her husband”, who cut her allowance, giving her trouble at the bank.
Out of her rage, Caroline composed and printed a pamphlet, snappily entitled Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother to the Custody of Her Infant Children as Affected by the Common Law Right of the Father. That this prompted the reforming Infant Custody Act of 1839 was not hindered by the fact that Caroline, who “prided herself on her beautiful bosom”, was vivacious and smart at public gatherings, had been presented at Court, and her chief admirer was Lord Melbourne, Home Secretary in the Grey Administration and Prime Minister from April 1835. His wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, having died in 1828, Melbourne enjoyed “a gentle, rallying, teasing relationship”. Fraser also says, by-the-by, that Melbourne liked “flagellation in the course of consensual sex”, but then who doesn’t.
Melbourne’s reputation as a garter-snapper certainly reached George Norton, who brought an action against him for “criminal conversation”, or “illicit intercourse”, i.e. cuckoldry. Fraser has huge fun describing the court case, which titillated London in June 1836: Melbourne fondly called Caroline “Car”, “Cary”, “Carey”, “Carly” and “Carry”; “the frequency of his visits, however innocuous, could not fail to be remarked upon by the servants”; “a great deal of detail followed, including Melbourne’s use of the back entrance”.
“Were they in fact innocent?” asks Fraser, eyebrow mock-innocently raised. “The question can never be answered with absolute certainty”, though she does go on to wonder whether a beautiful, unhappily married young lass would be completely satisfied conversing over tea day after day solely about Whig politics. And as regards the trial itself, “since Caroline had no legal existence outside marriage, she was not represented in court”. Melbourne was acquitted, Caroline spent the rest of her days “under a cloud”. She remained formidably polemical, lobbying for the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which at last permitted divorce – albeit, where a man could sue a wife for adultery, a woman had to prove an adulterous husband additionally guilty of cruelty, desertion, incest or bigamy. The shocking double standard was not abolished until 1923. Caroline died of “detestable headaches” and rheumatic gout in 1877.
This is a rousing book – classic Antonia Fraser – about a time (not that distant, either) when women were automatically and crushingly considered weaker, delicate and timid, in need of masculine “protection”, as they still mostly are in Islamic nations, where they are trussed up underneath parachutes. I was interested to learn that Dickens slyly put the Melbourne suit in The Pickwick Papers, as a case which “seemed to impart much more than mere words convey”. Caroline also inspired George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, a novel about a forceful heroine trapped in a hellish marriage, who is involved with a charismatic politician. In a screen adaptation, what a perfect role for Helen McCrory, had she lived. Caroline herself wrote novels and poems, illustrated by Landseer: “Watch the sleek puppy lap its milky food/ And fright the hen with all her clucking brood.” Terrible, yet the stuff was admired by Queen Victoria and sold well, allowing Norton to pocket the royalties without qualm.
Caroline Norton lobbied for the 1857 Act that at last permitted divorce – though shocking double standards remained