Caroline Sheridan Norton, Part 2

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is the second part of our two parter on the life of Caroline Sheridan Norton. If you missed out on the first episode, you should go back so you're not lost. But also if you skipped the first episode because of our warning about domestic violence, just to assure you a little bit, this episode does not have any physical altercations, although it does feature a lot of manipulative and abusive behavior. So where we left off last time, the Custody of Children Act had just been made a law in Great Britain, and it gave mothers better legal standing to gain custody of their children and to have access of their children. Caroline had used her influence as a well known writer and a connected woman of society to advocate for the changes to the law. So as the parliamentary effort to pass this act was underway and it ultimately became successful, Caroline's husband, George Norton, took their three children to Scotland, where the new law did not apply. This made it harder than ever for Caroline to see her three boys, and George continued to try to dig up dirt on his wife that would enable him to revisit his accusations of adultery. There were definitely people who were happy to report on Caroline's movements. She had become infamous in a lot of Europe over this adultery scandal. Even when she traveled to other countries, people recognized her, so she really had to be extremely careful all the time. Yeah, we didn't put it in the recap, but in the first section there was an accusation of adultery between her and Lord Norton went to court found completely baseless. But I did read an account where she was talking about being in Italy people recognizing her and whispering about her and Lord Melbourne well after that had happened. But while George was busy being petty, there was then a tragedy in the early autumn of eighteen forty two. Their youngest son, William, who was eight at the time, was thrown from a horse and he survived that fall, but he had cut his arm in the incident, and that cut was left untreated and it became infected, which led to septicemia, and William became very, very sick, and although Caroline was called as things turned grave, she did not make it to Scotland in time to see her youngest child alive. Needless to say, Caroline was devastated by this loss. She wrote to one of her friends, quote, I still feel stunned by this sudden blow. He died conscious, He prayed and asked for me twice. He did not fear to die, and he bore the dreadful spasms of pain with a degree of courage which the doctor says he has rarely seen in so young a child. It is not the strength of human nature not to think this might not have happened had I watched over them. My poor little spirited creature was too young to rough it alone, as he was left to do. And this is the end of it. Her other writing describing her arrival in Scotland to discover this news about William's passing is so completely heartbreaking I dared not include it, as that writing suggests Caroline blamed George entirely for this tragedy because she thought he was not watching the boys carefully enough, and that he should have gotten medical help for the child much sooner than he did. After William's death, Fletcher and Brinsley went to live with Caroline, And there are some accounts that write this in a way that make it sound like she was merely given more visitations with them, or that it was some kind of a joint custody agreement and they were traveling back and forth between parents. The exact nature of what was going on here is a little hard to pin down. Yeah, but there was definitely a huge shift where she was with her kids a lot after she had not been able to see them at all for quite some time. And this sounds like maybe George stopped being allowed a little bit and acquiesced to Caroline's request to be with her surviving children, but he actually used this new arrangement to isolate her. He made it clear that if she became romantically involved with anyone, or if he even suspected as much, he would once again accuse her of adultery, and then her right to the children would evaporate. And this meant that she was kind of afraid to even socialize much because she didn't want any activity to be misconstrued or misrepresented, given that he thought that everyone she spoke with was potentially someone she was having an affair with. This is understandable, so she turned once more to her writing. Caroline's writing during this time earned her a great deal of praise. At one point, she was even referenced as the female Byron. Her epic poem The Child of the Islands, which addressed the then baby Prince of Way and asked him not to forget the poor as he grew up, was released in eighteen forty five to critical praise. She also produced Aunt Carrie's Ballads for Children in eighteen forty seven. But after a few years of having a relatively calm life with her boys and enjoying her writing, George once again became a problem for Caroline. He had, in the six years since he had handed off the children, burned through all of his money, but he had much earlier in the marriage set money aside in a trust fund for Caroline and the kids, and he wanted it back, or at least to have access to it, But as it was set up as a trust, he could not touch that money without Caroline's approval, So he made his wife an offer that he claimed would benefit them both if she gave him access to that money, she would get a stipend of six hundred pounds a year to live on and a separation. She would also be allowed to retain any money that she earned for herself instead of handing it back to him, which was how English law worked at the time. Caroline agreed to these terms, but then later that year in November, Lord Melbourne was once again a pivotal figure in her conflict ridden relationship with her husband. Melbourne died on November twenty fourth, eighteen forty eight, at Brocket Hall near Hatfield, and his cause of death was listed as dyspepsia or indigestion. His health had been failing for several years following a stroke in eighteen forty two. On his deathbed, Melbourne remained adamant that he and Caroline had never had an inappropriate relationship and that they were simply close friends. That may have been a move to try to preempt any possible rumors that started when it was revealed that he had asked his heirs to ensure that Caroline was financially taken care of after his death. Yeah his sister set up basically an annual payment system for Caroline. The following year, and when George Norton heard about this, he stopped paying Caroline her annual six hundred pounds, and in turn, she started sending any of her creditors to her separated husband for payment. George refused to pay them, and as a consequence, was sued by Thrupp's Carriage Company in August of eighteen fifty three. There's a little bit of debate here in that I had seen some accounts that suggested that Caroline urged them to sue George. I don't really know if that's true, but this particular bill that they were arguing over was one that Caroline was expected to pay in the gap between her last payment from George and her first expected payment from her bequeathments. George Norton's entire defense was that he had a contract with Caroline that stipulated that she would only receive an allowance of funds withdrawn from the trust so long as she had no other income. George invoked not only Melbourne's post mortem financial support, but also a small all inheritance that Caroline had received when her mother passed. His point was that she had her own money and that she should be paying for her own things. This was a bold tactic because the deed of separation that had set up George's access to the trust was easily brought into the proceedings, and it had no clause that suggested that Caroline could only receive income from George so long as it was her sole source of support. However, the bill from Thruppe's carriage company had been presented to Caroline before George renecked on his payments to her. She lost the case. One of the details that emerged from all of this was separated or not. She was still married, and a married woman couldn't enter into a contract of any kind anyway, not with her husband, not with a carriage company, and not with anyone else. Yeah, so that whole deed of separation that had been drawn up was not a legally binding document anyway. And despite being off the hook in the whole matter, Norton took a vengeful and rather unhinged path. After the court case, he started writing letters to the Times in which he asserted once again that Melbourne and Caroline had had an affair. This was actually very embarrassing to everyone. It became so embarrassing that George's own lawyer sent a statement to the press that he was not responsible for what Norton was saying publicly. When other public figures also spoke out against Norton and suggested that he was being irrational, he then accused all of them of wanting to sleep with his wife. We'll talk a bit about some of Caroline's writing during this time after we pause for a sponsor break. As George was once again accusing the now deceased Lord Melbourne of adultery, Caroline kept on writing. In eighteen fifty one, she published a novel titled Stewart of Unleath, and this story hinges on the titular character, who is the guardian of a girl named Eleanor Raymond Stewart uses the money that is intended for Eleanor's inheritance on a bad gamble, and this plunges Eleanor into poverty. But Eleanor is in love with Stuart. This is obviously completely problematic because he is her guardian she's underage, but she ends up having to marry a baronet named Sir Stephen Penryn to survive, and Stephen is clearly based on George. He is abusive and he is selfish. Eleanor wants to seek a divorce, but worries about the consequences, and this plot, which is fairly convoluted, ends in a sort of sad place for both Stuart and Eleanor, who both have spouses in the end that they don't really love. And it's one of the many examples of the way that Caroline integrated her own experiences into her writing. As a side note, a review of Caroline's work, which was published in eighteen ninety seven as part of a large examination of Victoria era women writers, noted that the novel had been edited a lot over the years to streamline the story. We're including an excerpt of that review here because it gives a sense of Caroline's rather florid writing style. Quote forty five years ago, when Missus Norton wrote Steward of Dunleath, the reader had to pass through a wide porch and many long passages before he reached the inner chambers of the story. An account of the hero and heroine's families, even to the third and fourth generation, was indispensable, and the minutest particulars of their respective abodes and surroundings were carefully detailed. The tale traveled by easy stages with many a pause where byways brought additional wayfarers to join the throng of those already traveling through the pages, while each and all, regardless of proportion, were described with equal fullness, whatever their degree of importance. It's very funny to read old reviews of Carolines Drating, because a lot of it is like, why are there so many characters? So many characters? I feel like I just read a book that was very like this, where when I was done, I was like, a third of that should have been cut out? Why? Why are there so many characters? Why do we need to know about the small characters dishes? I don't know. But like Eleanor in her novel, Caroline had of course wanted out of her legal connection to her husband for a long time, but she had pursued the matter only to be told she had no real recourse. Part of this problem and this is so irritating, And how this worked sprang from the adultery case that her husband had instigated. Because the jury had determined that Caroline had not committed adultery, there were no grounds for divorce, and as a woman, Caroline could not initiate new divorce proceedings even if she thought her husband was committing adultery. In the early eighteenth fifties, there had already been discussion in political realms about revisiting divorce law in Great Britain, but after the Thrup's case, Caroline began to actively lobby for a change in the law, similar to how she had done regarding child custody. Since she had been deemed unable to enter into the contract that she and George had initially decided on that allowed her to keep her own earned money, and since the money she made from writing at this point would once again go to her estranged husband, Caroline vowed she was pretty public about it, that she was only going to write about the need to change the laws that had put her at such a disadvantage to a man who had only ever been cruel to her. In May of eighteen fifty four, Lord Cranworth introduced a bill that would make minor tweaks to the law, but Caroline wanted to push for far more agency for wives. She consulted with and wrote to members of Parliament who she thought would be willing to advocate for a new divorce law that would enable women like herself to get out of bad marriages, and she wrote pamphlets which exposed all of the horrors of her life with George Norton. In eighteen fifty four, she published a pamphlet titled English Laws for Women, which was printed quote for private circulation. And while she did talk about George's horrifying abuse, she also framed the entire thing in an interesting way, saying, quote, to publish comments on my own case for the sake of obtaining sympathy, to prove merely that my husband has been unjust and my fate a hard one would be a very poor and barren ambition. I aspire to a different object. I desire to prove not my suffering or his injustice, but that the present law of England cannot prevent any such suffering or control any such injustice. I write in the hope that the law may be amended, and that those who are at present so ill provided as to have only true and justice on their side, may hereafter have the benefit of law and lawyers. So those mentions of truth, justice, law and lawyers are in reference to Charles Dickens quote, it won't do to have truth and justice on our side. We must have law and lawyers. And in her campaign, Caroline also wrote a lengthy letter to Queen Victoria to make her case that women were in a position of complete powerlessness under the existing marriage laws. It was published under the title A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill. And it is a long letter, but we are going to read just one brief excerpt here. And even this seems kind of long, but it sums up the situation in ways that we haven't entirely touched on here. She wrote, quote, a married woman in England has no legal existence. Her being is absorbed in that of her husband. Years of separation of desertion cannot alter this position unless divorced by special enactment in the House of Lords. The legal fiction holds her to be one with her husband, even though she may never see or hear of him. She has no possessions, unless by special settlement her property is his property. An English wife has no legal right even to her clothes or ornaments. Her husband may take them and sell them if he pleases, even though they be the gifts of relatives or friends, or bought before marriage. An English wife cannot make a will. She may have children or kindred whom she may earnestly desire to benefit. She may be separated from her husband, who may be living with a mistress. No matter the law, gives what she has to him, and no will she could make would be valid. An English wife cannot legally claim her own earnings, whether wages for manual labor or payment for intellectual exertion, whether she weed potatoes or keep a school. Her salary is the husbands, and he could compel a second payment and treat the first as void if paid to the wife without his sanction. An English wife may not leave her husband's house. Not only can he sue her for restitution of conjugal rights, but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge, and who may harbor her as it is termed, and carry her away by force, with or without the aid of police. If the wife sue for separation for cruelty, it must be cruelty that endangers life or limb. And if she has once forgiven or in legal phrase, condoned his offenses, she cannot plead them, though her past forgiveness only proves that she endured as long as endurance was possible. If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself. She has no means of proving the falsehood of his allegations. She is not represented by attorney nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover for damages. If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again, but she cannot divorce the husband a vinculo, however profligant he may be. No law court can divorce. In England, a special Act of Parliament annulling the marriage is passed. For each case. The House of Lords grants this almost as a matter of course, to the husband, but not to the wife. In only four instances, two of which were cases of incest, has the wife obtained a divorce to marry again. She cannot prosecute for a libel. Her husband must prosecute, and in cases of enmity and separation of course, she is without remedy. She cannot sign a lease or transact responsible business. She cannot claim support as a matter of personal right from her husband. The general belief and nominal rule is that her husband is bound to maintain her. That is not the law. He is not bound to her. There's also a tricky aspect to this letter where Caroline compares her work advocating for white married women to the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe for enslaved people. This is a theme that comes up and a lot of advocacy of people comparing what they're doing to slavery. Caroline is often lauded in modern discussions as an early feminist, and while she definitely did advocate for women to be treated equally to men in terms of how the law was applied, she also made it really clear that she did not think women were equal to men in a larger sense. She wrote, quote, the natural position of woman is inferiority to man. I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality. So that's all a little cringey. But we are going to talk about some of the less problematic aspects of Caroline's rhetoric after we come back from a quick sponsor break. So a less problematic aspect of Caroline's letter to the Queen makes it clear that she is not really doing this for herself, and we'll discuss in a moment how little she actually had to gain from this law changing. But she did acknowledge that the recognition of her name as a writer gave her a platform that she could use to help other people writing. Quote. I do not consider this as my cause, though it is a cause of which, unfortunately for me, I am an illustration. It is the cause of all the women and of a large proportion of the tradespeople in England. If I were personally set at ease about it tomorrow, that would not alter the law. The same injustice might happen next day to some woman who could not struggle or earn or write, for whom no one would come forward, and to some petty tradesmen grievously injured by the law loss of even a small sum. What is needed is not the arranging of one particular case, but a tribunal of control, a tribunal for marriage and divorce, to decide all such cases, and to prevent the possibility of the shame to England and to English law entailed by throwing the sum secured by a magistrate's signature, the signatures of two peers brothers and a lawyer among a tradesmen's list of bad debts. She's kind of inflating her efforts and conflating things here by going like there's can actually one it helps women, but also they are all of these offshoot financial issues that can happen that can really mess up other people as collateral damage. Caroline's advocacy got a lot of attention. We mentioned already that she was famous, but we probably haven't been clear about just how famous. On the one hand, there was the infamy of all of her legal tangles with her husband and the adultery accusations, But on the other she did seem, no matter the drama of her personal life, to maintain a really high degree of respect for her work as a writer. In eighteen fifty, she had even been considered for the position of Poet Laureate, and she definitely had support as a candidate for that position. So when she turned her pen exclusively to the marriage law issue, it helped get the cause more attention. She certainly was not the only person campaigning for reform, and she was not the first, but there was a degree of gravity that was lent to it by her vocal position. Soon there was a movement to petition for women to have equal rights in legal matters to those of men. The groups that were advocating for equality managed to get twenty six thousand signatures on a petition that was brought before Parliament. And the result of all of this work, both by Carolina and other advocates was a serious examination of the marriage issue through a proposed Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act that was introduced in eighteen fifty seven. This act, which sought to level the agency of men and women somewhat, had very vocal detractors, but it did pass in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords and it became law in eighteen fifty eight, and a lot of the language in it was directly related to Caroline Norton's life experiences in her writing about them. It outlined that if a husband deserted a wife, he no longer had any right to her earnings. Wives could inherit property in the same way single women could, and they could bequeath property as well, and women could enter into legal contracts on their own as well as be involved in legal proceedings if they were separated from their husband. But it wasn't an ideal piece of legislation by a long stretch. While a husband could petition for divorce exclusively on the grounds of adultery on the wife's part, a woman seeking a divorce would have to prove adultery plus some other wrongdoing, like the adultery had to also include actual assault or some other layer of illegal behavior, or she had to prove both adultery and something like abandonment or excessive cruelty. Prior to this law, only three hundred twenty four legal divorces had happened in English history, and only four of those were initiated by a woman. This new legislation did not help Caroline get a divorce, so because she had returned to George briefly in eighteen thirty five after she initially left him, that was still considered to have condoned or forgiven his prior transgressions from a legal standpoint. But she was able to get a legal separation in place in eighteen fifty nine, and that let her live as a single woman. Although she could not remarry. She could, however, keep the money that she earned through her writing, and there were rumors that she had romances in her time separated from George, going all the way back to eighteen forty, but not including those here because it's really all speculation at this point. Caroline's son Fletcher, died of tuberculosis in eighteen fifty nine, and she grieved very deeply for a long time. His funeral was the last time that she saw George Norton in person. Her only surviving son, Brinsley, had health issues throughout his life. There's some speculation that he might have had both physical and mental health conditions. He lived who adulthood, got married and assumed the family title of Lord Grantly, but continued to really depend on Caroline for a lot of care and support up until his death in eighteen seventy seven. In the years after Fletcher's death, Caroline continued to write to support herself and to cover many of Brinsley's expenses. She published the verse story Lady of Legaret in eighteen sixty two, and in the following year released a well received novel title Lost and Saved. Lost and Saved as a romance in which the heroine of the story elopes with a man who turns out to be very selfish and kind of a villain and a hero all in one After an early good run, critics started to see the book as a moral and it fell out of favor. Her final novel was titled Old Sir Douglas. This work was published first as a serial in McMillan's magazine. That same eighteen ninety seventh survey of her work that we referenced earlier describes Old Sir Douglas this way quote. It is planned on the same lines as her previous works of fiction, the plot rather complicated, the characters extremely numerous. Among these is an almost abnormally wicked woman who works endless mischief. George Norton died two years before Brinsley in eighteen seventy five, and for the first time in almost fifty years, Caroline was completely single again. Starting in the eighteen fifties, she had become good friends with Sir William Sterling Maxwell, a writer and politician from Scotland. William's wife, Lady Anna Maria Leslie Melville, died in eighteen seventy four, and there's a fairly popular theory that if Karine had been able to divorce George William would have married her instead of Lady Anna, But once again that speculation the year George died Stirling Maxwell was named Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and Caroline and William got married in the spring of eighteen seventy seven. Caroline was sixty nine, but though she was finally in a marriage that she chose to a man with whom she shared mutual affection, this marriage was very brief. Caroline died three months later on June fifteenth, eighteen seventy seven, in London. Her cause of death was paratonitis. She was buried in William's family vault. The preface to Steward of Dunleath, which she wrote in eighteen fifty one, includes a quote that Caroline shared in Norton wrote which really sums up her own view on her life. So it seems kind of a good place to me to close out her story, she wrote, quote, the power of writing has always been to me a source of intense pleasure. It has been my best solace in hours of gloom, and the name I have earned as an author in my native land is the only happy boast of my life. In twenty twenty one, Caroline's home at three Chesterfield Street, Mayfair in London, was commemorated with an English heritage plaque. I am one hundred percent going to see that plaque soon. Yay. I have a funny listener mail has nothing to do with any of this. Hooray from our listener, Becky. I just thought, you know, we've done a lot of I keep trying to do light listener mail because we've done a lot of very heavy episodes recently, so I'm like, yay, fun things. Becky writes, Hello, I was just listening to the mini episode about war balloons and was laughing when you mentioned Bellock near the end. Paul Freeman is in a Sherlock Holmes movie with Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine without a clue, as Moriarty. He is also, funnily enough, in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, not as Bellock, but as Frederick sella noted British explorer, hunter, conservationist, and friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Indie runs into him at least twice on different adventures. I still haven't made my way through all the episodes, so I don't know if there's another appearance. If you have not watched the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and you like Indiana Jones at all, you are missing out. That is my little addition there. It is good the format I have them on DVD. They are clumped into ninety minute episodes and not as they were released when they were originally aired on TV. Essentially two episodes that are chronological issue in order, but again not as they aired on television. I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the chronicles and it mentioned that it's a great way to teach about early twentieth century history. I kind of agree anyway, just a little fun Paul Freeman related knowledge to pay my listener mail toll. Here is a picture of my almost nineteen year old cat, Petra the pest, Yes, nineteen years. I got her in two thousand and five when she was about a year old. She moved with me from Oklahoma to Chicago, moved between four different apartments and finally our house. She's a little worse for aware, but she's happy. Her little pink kitty bandage was from a recent blood draw. She had hyperthyroidism and increased kidney enzymes. Happy Monday. I love I love this picture. She looks so sweet and so serene. I also love an old cat. I have two that are quite elderly. They're my little angels. And I know Tracy has had old cats before, and Petra is very pretty. My oldest cat lived to be almost twenty. She's sadly no longer with us. But yeah, I remember very well the years of senior cat. Yeah, listen, I don't know about Petra. Mine are getting really clingy as they get older, where they want to be held all day every day. And my line are clinging now and therefore ours are always clingy. But like there was like a level up at age seventeen where it was like you hold me always right, don't put me down, you can cook with me in your arm, like it's just like always. Even the sound of like the frying pang, which they haven't always liked, the sound that like it startles themiluminely don't like it. They're like, I'll put up with it. Just keep holding me please. It's very cute. But thank you, thank you, thank you, Becky, because this made me laugh again. Paul Freeman's been in a lot of stuff. It's a very good actor. And I love I will always, always always put in a plug for the Young Indiana Jones chronicles because they are so incredibly good. So if you haven't seen those in you of access. Highly recommend. There is also an episode about Mantahari, which is written by Carrie Fisher what It's very good. Oh yeah, did you not know about this? Um No, I don't think I did. We'll talk about it and behind the seats. It's excellent though. So if you would like to write to us, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.