Adultery was therefore a nearly unspeakable crime, regarded with almost Biblical ferocity. Indeed it was inextricably involved with a Victorian vision of apocalypse. Tennyson’s ideal society of the round table, in Idylls of the King, was utterly wrecked by adultery, which was the Laureate’s serious prediction about his own society too. Love and Marriage and Womanhood and Motherhood and all manner of similar sacred things were invested with sanctity solely in the vain hope of shoring up a morality which was not, as Tennyson and others clearly saw, getting better as mankind progressed but worse. More prostitution. More anxiety. More censorship. More prudery. The closer the awareness of the base desires that prompted man, the more frantic he became to deny them. In the confusion of guilt and shame that engulfed them, good Victorians (like George) clung to the view of Holy Matrimony in the hope it would float them above the danger. The danger was within. They tried to keep their bodies “pure.”
The realistic, the ironic, the old-fashioned just shook their heads in wonder and did not understand at all. Like Mary Ellen. She seems to have seen it much as her father’s old friend Shelley saw it. Shelley had said, “A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. . . . Love is free. . . .”
If you do not cherish illusions, you do not suffer when they are blighted. Mary Ellen knew all along that love could die—that physical passion is no respecter of empty vows. That marriage is sometimes a mockery. She copied out a passage that interested her, from Dumas, discussing how the very word “adultery” had come to be used at all only in the nineteenth century—was not even used by, say, Molière, who was merely amused by cuckoldry. “Has society [in the nineteenth century] become more moral? At first glance it would seem so.” But no, it is merely a legalistic development: “From the first moment that the husband saw that children had a legal right to his inheritance, he wanted this to be a natural right; and from that moment on the word ‘adultery’ became a real word, that is to say, synonymous with ‘crime’ for the wife, with ‘flight’ for the child. That is how the nineteenth century came to take seriously the word the eighteenth century took as comical.” Mary Ellen copied this passage in her book.
•
The embraces of a new lover in all ages for all women have surely been attended by the same uncertainties and ardor. We may only guess at the mysteries of Mary Ellen’s mind now, wherever she and Henry are, in some lodging on a bed, or out of doors behind a hedgerow. Fleeting comparisons to whose advantage we have no way of knowing. A different man will touch you in a different way. A woman near forty must try hard to please.
Perhaps Mary Ellen, a little cynical and thirty-six years old, found the twenty-seven-year-old Henry easy prey for a beautiful and sophisticated woman. Perhaps Henry, though he loved her dearly, found Mary Ellen a little faded. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they thought each other absolutely wonderful. Did Mary Ellen prefer painters to writers after all? Writers to naval lieutenants? It is a question she must have asked herself. Was it not perhaps imprudent to establish a durable relationship with a lady who was someone else’s wife? Henry must have asked himself. But no doubt they thought each other absolutely wonderful.
We can only guess, too, at the scene between Mary Ellen and George, at which it was decided that they would separate for a time. Mary Ellen seems to have handled it smoothly. A trial separation. “The parting was not so bad as the anticipation. It never is,” Mary Ellen had copied in her book.
“The Separation was her own doing, though not regretted by me, save for my boy’s sake. It was not a formal separation, and was not considered to be final, until I had reason for knowing that it must be so,” George explained a few years later to a new prospective father-in-law. They were both Victorians; George did not need to elaborate for Mr. Vulliamy the meaning of the last phrase, “it must be so.”
•
Whatever happened to the marriage of Mary Ellen and George, it must have been bad indeed, for women did not often leave their husbands in Victorian times. A woman without her natural protector was a woman in peril, devoid of legal rights, money (for that would remain with her husband since a married woman could not hold property on her own), her children (for the law awarded children to even the cruelest of fathers rather than to the mother); she was prey to seducers, scandal, social ostracism. Women, unless they were very independent, aristocratic, and rich, would bear dreadful abuses, would allow themselves to be beaten or starved—even sold, as in Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge—before they would leave.
The very rich sometimes did divorce. Until 1858 it took an act of Parliament. After 1858 there was Sir Creswell Creswell’s divorce court, but that was too late for George and Mary Ellen. George could not charge Mary Ellen with adultery because he had not in fact done so earlier—which, to the British mind, represented a tacit complicity. Adultery was of course the only ground for divorce. Unbearable cruelty, for example, would not count; and of course it was far easier for a man to divorce a woman for infidelity, since infidelity in a woman was utterly reprehensible. The courts were apt to wink if a woman charged her husband with the same thing. A desperate woman had nothing on her side in Victorian England; so, most often, she stuck.
Consequently, either the Meredith marriage was unusually awful, or Mary Ellen was unusually independent. This latter seems to have been it. She had confidence in her own resiliency and gifts of mind. Refused to accept a condition of life that bound people together in loveless chains. She had a little money; she could write; she did not care about public opinion. Mary Ellen thought of herself as a person, as Victorian women often did not.
It was her upbringing. Got it from old Peacock. Fascinating woman; very charming; very brilliant, no doubt—but you’re better off with a nice, old-fashioned girl.
•
1857. Summer again. Mary Ellen alone in Seaford, the break with George complete. She has been ill, has been convalescing slowly in the late spring as the days brighten, but is feeling better now. She and Henry have probably become lovers, but Mary is her own woman, independent. Now that she is feeling better she must think of her living: “I cannot bear my life of illness here and am full of schemes of work that I want your advice and help in,” she writes Henry, whom she is expecting for a visit.
Like everyone else in England that summer, Mary had become interested in the murder trial of Madeleine Smith. Mary had perhaps more reason than most Englishwomen to feel a sneaking sympathy for Madeleine, an affinity: sisters under the skin. Madeleine Smith was a high-spirited young Scottish girl, from a wealthy and utterly respectable, even exemplary, family in Glasgow. Like Mary Ellen, she was the oldest, intelligent and capable, responsible for many matters in their genteel household. Like Mary Ellen, she was passionate. “Madeleine Smith was born before her time,” says Madeleine’s historian, F. Tennyson Jesse, whose book, The Trial of Madeleine Smith, in the series Notable British Trials, contains transcripts of the evidence, testimony, and summations. “She had all the profound physical passion . . . which was a thing supposed at that particular date not to exist in a ‘nice’ woman.” And, with a most horrifying singlemindedness, a most shocking unwomanliness, with the most daring abandon of every good principle with which she had undoubtedly been imbued, she had allowed herself to be seduced by a penniless young clerk named Emile L’Angelier, who wanted to marry her. They were in love, they made love, and Madeleine enjoyed it—she said so in her ardent letters to him, which were found and offered in evidence at her trial.
The problem was that Madeleine’s parents wanted her to marry a rich neighbor, to whom she was engaged, and they would never have approved of Emile L’Angelier. Would sooner disown her than allow her to marry a penniless young clerk. An old story—with the added difficulty that L’Angelier did not want a disowned Madeleine; he wan
ted her with her family status and marriage portion intact, the complete package. Would not marry a disowned Madeleine. Emile felt that if Madeleine would just explain to her parents not only that she was in love with him but that she was “spoiled” already, no longer a virgin—they would instantly allow them to be married. Such situations were the continual secret dread of every Victorian parent.
“Think of the consequences if I were never to marry you . . .” he wrote her. (A draft of this letter was found in his rooms after his death.) “Try your friends once more—tell your determination—say nothing will change you, that you have thought seriously of it—and on that I shall fix speaking to Huggins for September. Unless you do something of that sort, Heaven only knows when I shall marry you. Unless you do, dearest, I shall have to leave the country. . . . It is your parents’ fault if shame is the result; they are to blame for it all. . . . Mimi, dearest, you must take a bold step to be my wife. I would entreat you, pet, by the love you have for me, Mimi, do speak to your mother. . . . Oh! Mimi, be bold for once, do not fear them—tell them you are my wife before God. Do not let them leave you without being married, for I cannot answer what would happen. My conscience reproaches me of a sin that marriage only can efface. . . . I was not angry at your allowing me, Mimi, but I am sad it happened. You had no resolution. . . . It was very bad indeed. I shall look with regret on that night. No, nothing except our Marriage will efface it from my memory. Mimi, only fancy if it was known.” From which it can be seen that Emile was a repulsive little man indeed. But he was right, no doubt, that if her “shame” was known, on one else would have her, and her parents would be obliged to let them marry.
Why, then, did Madeleine not tell her parents? Apparently not from fear of the consequences. The truth was that she had been getting tired of Emile, and was rather disposed to marry the rich neighbor, with whom, after all, she was bound to be more comfortable. She tried to break off the secret affair with Emile. She tried to get her letters back. But he would not give them back. He grew difficult. And then, to judge by a new flurry of fond letters from Madeleine, the affair was on again, and Madeleine was kind to him again, and then one night poor Emile had a funny attack of something awful—the third such attack—and died in hideous pain and a pile of green vomit, before his landlady could get help for him.
Madeleine, it seems, had bought arsenic three times just about then, quite openly, “for her complexion,” and there was quite a lot of arsenic in poor Emile’s stomach. And the red-hot letters were found in his room from—of all people—little Madeleine Smith.
It is still not known whether Madeleine murdered Emile or not. The evidence was circumstantial but suggestive. People debated it and the related moral problems endlessly, the length and breadth of England.
•
A lot of people felt that Madeleine should be hanged. This feeling, a very powerful, emotional one, was related to their sense of sexual outrage. A girl of good family who could allow herself to be seduced was clearly capable of doing murder too, and deserved an awful fate in either case. Her poor parents—no wonder they stayed in their sickbeds the whole time; of course they could not have been expected to attend the trial of a daughter who had so disgraced them. Madeleine was a kind of public enemy, for the bad example she set for the daughters of England, if for nothing else. And the worst thing of all was that she had not been seduced out of mere weakmindedness; she was apparently unrepentant about having had sexual relations and even—this was awful—even apparently had enjoyed them. This was a point dwelt upon by the Lord-Justice in the prosecution, with a particular sense of dazed, bewildered dismay. He says, in his summation: “The letters continued on her part in the same terms of passionate love for a very considerable time. I say ‘passionate love,’ because, unhappily, they are written without any sense of decency and in most licentious terms.” His Lordship then read one of the letters which ended, “Oh, to be in thy embrace, my sweet love. Love again to thee from thy ever-loving and ever-devoted Mimi, thine own wife.” “What,” asks his Lordship, “could she expect but sexual intercourse after thus presenting and inviting it?” His Lordship cannot conceive of a nice girl wishing sexual intercourse, but she did, of course, and if Emile had “only let her go when she got tired of him she would probably have never regretted it. . . .” As the Historian of the affair tells us:
Her candour seemed to the Lord-Justice almost incredible, and he continues as follows: “Can you be surprised after such letters . . . that, he got possession of her person? On the 7th of May she writes to him, and in that letter is there the slightest appearance of grief or remorse? None whatever. It is the letter of a girl rejoicing in what had passed, and alluding to it, in one passage in particular, in terms which I will not read, for perhaps they were never previously committed to paper as having passed between a man and a woman. What passed must have passed out of doors, not in the house, and she talks of the act as hers as much as his.” These remarks, which at that time were considered the most severe condemnation, convey a truth which was Madeleine’s only justification. The act was as much hers as his, and she never pretended otherwise. As to the satisfaction of her desire, she probably thought that it made small difference whether it took place respectably in a bedroom or beneath the trees at Rowaleyn. “This letter from a girl,” continued the Judge, “written at five in the morning, just after she had submitted to his embraces. Can you conceive any worse state of mind than this letter exhibits?”
Many Englishmen could not.
But Madeleine had partisans, too. A lot of people thought her innocent (a woman, an Angel in the House, could not possibly murder someone), or that the evidence was too slight to convict her without injuring irreparably the British system of jurisprudence and the presumed rights of free British subjects. People who thought her truly innocent also pointed out that she seemed innocent. She was so forthright, her head held so proudly, such an air of honor and rectitude about her. And, too, people of her social class did not commit murder. That she had been seduced—well—that was another matter, and certainly unfortunate; but murder—impossible.
Other people felt that she probably did it but that Emile deserved it—the most unmitigated scoundrel that ever lived. They would not condone murder, of course, but would not be sorry to see Madeleine get off, because the fellow was so unspeakable. Seducing above his station was bad enough, but threatening to expose her was dastardly beyond anything. And his letter reproaching her for the whole thing was unbelievable: “I was not angry at your allowing me, Mimi, but I am sad it happened. You had no resolution. . . . It was very bad indeed. I shall look with regret on that night.” Indeed! (Though these reproaches were probably not so much a function of Emile’s unscrupulous calculation as of his own truly Victorian, conflicted sexual values. Still it is hard to sympathize with a fellow who says such things to the maiden he has just “ruined.”)
In any case, in a trial that remains a model of scrupulous courtroom procedure, Madeleine won a verdict of “not proven.” She was swept off home for a time, later married an artist, became a socialist, and, it is said, went to America. Doubtless she prospered.
If for no other reason, this trial is interesting because it shows how a pleasant, apparently normal girl, weighing the relative consequences of either the exposure of her sexual misbehavior or putting some arsenic in her lover’s cocoa might choose to offer the cocoa. The one way lay certain ruin; the other way she merely ran the risk of being hanged and the certainty of a lifetime of bad conscience. Poor ruined Mary Ellen Meredith must have reflected upon this choice with special interest.
Mary Ellen seems to have looked upon Madeleine as the victim of a male society, and to have identified somewhat with Madeleine’s plight, but her comment is not entirely clear. In a letter to Henry she quotes from a newspaper account of the trial which a friend has sent her:28
“Madeleine Smith is a very young lady of short stature and slight form, with features sharp and pr
ominent and restless sparkling eye, with keen and animated expression and healthful complexion. She was dressed simply yet elegantly, a small fashionable bonnet exposing the whole front of her head. She also had lavender coloured gloves, a white cambric handkerchief, and a silver-tipped smelling bottle. She was perfectly self-possessed and even sometimes smiled with all the air and grace of a young lady in the drawing room. Altogether she had a most attractive appearance, and her very aspect and demeanor seemed to advocate her cause.” [The underlines are Mary Ellen’s.] Do all men think a woman’s attractiveness lies in her accomplishment in the science of forgetting, even if she be guiltless of crime? My conclusion is very different—but then—,
An enigmatic comment. Whether or not she considered herself guiltless of some “crime” or other, her tone is one of tired injury, expressive of something she had not been able to forget. But then . . .
Like Mary Ellen, Miss Smith may have read The Spectator:
Spectator, Feb. 9th, 1856. Arsenic is taken for cosmetic purposes. It is taken at first in very small quantities; the quantity may be increased as is the case with many other poisons, until it reaches an amount that would be dangerous if not fatal to begin with. But the arsenic remains, and it is said that the patient may continue the practice for a lengthened period, though with certain death at a distant date; but that if he stops short and abstains, the body loses its faculty for resisting the poisonous agency, and he dies of the arsenic he has left off taking.
Mary Ellen had copied this passage out in her Commonplace Book.
•
1857. Whether or not the connection between Mary Ellen and Henry was of a “criminal” character yet, it would soon become so. But Mary Ellen thought of herself as an independent woman. This attitude, unusual in an Englishwoman of her day, was rather French. In France, women of the demimonde, to which she apparently thought of herself as now belonging, conducted their own lives, finances, and business affairs with considerably more freedom and practicality than their married British sisters could imagine doing. Leaving George had been her notion and she would abide by the consequences; the liaison with Henry is evidently quite unrelated in her mind.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 13
