It’s distressing to think that this unhappy man, so gifted with real talent, has been lost entirely by his own fault. But I think he’s been cured of his deplorable instincts. My pals in the Law Courts have assured me he has completely repented and that he has said he doesn’t know how he could have been such a boor [brute] and such an idiot. If he’s sincere, I think you might reply to his invitation. I’ll find that out for you. Ever since these friends at the Law Courts told me all this, I have really wanted to write him a word of sympathy. But I didn’t have his address. Since he’s given it to you, I have it, I’ll write to him, and I’ll soon know if he repents. If that’s not so, I counsel you not to accept his invitation.
She did not keep a copy of the letter she wrote to Wilde. The one remark she could remember of her sympathy toward a fellow martyr was this: “I can’t tell you how happy I would be to think that you have repented of your insane and unnatural conduct.” Wilde replied at once, and his letter is worth quoting in full:
My dear Mrs. Weldon,
So Phillip Treherne is your nephew. I wondered if he was kith and kin with the lady whom friends of mine remember as the beautiful Miss Treherne and whom the world will always remember as Mrs. Weldon. But we talked of books and art and the idea passed from my mind. How cultivated he is, and so well bred in his gravity and courteous ways. I enjoyed meeting him very much and hope he will do well. For the moment he has perhaps too much appreciation of the work of others to realise his own creative energy.
Yes, I think that, aided by splendid personalities like Michael Davitt and John Burns, I have been able to strike a heavy and fatal blow at the monstrous prison system of English justice. There will be no more starvation, nor sleeplessness, nor endless silence, nor eternal solitude, nor brutal flogging. The system has been exposed and so doomed. But it is difficult to teach the English either pity or humanity. They learn slowly. Next, the power of the judges (an entirely ignorant set of men—ignorant, that is, of what they are doing), their power to inflict most barbarous sentences on those that are brought before them must be limited. At present a judge will send a man to two years hard labour or five years penal servitude, not knowing that all such sentences are sentences of death. It is the lack of imagination in the Anglo-Saxon race that makes the race so stupidly, harshly cruel. Those who are bringing about prison reform in Parliament are Celts to a man, for every Celt has inborn imagination.
For myself, of course, the aim of life is to realise one’s own personality, one’s own nature, and now as before it is through Art that I realise what is in me, and I hope soon to begin a new play; but poverty with its degrading preoccupations with money, the loss of many friends, the deprivation of my children by a most unjust law administered by a most unjust judge, the terrible effect of years of silence, solitude and ill-treatment—all these have of course killed to a large extent, if not entirely, the great joy in living I once had. However, I must try, so the details of Prison Reform will have to be worked out by others. I put the fly in motion but I cannot turn the wheels. It is enough for me that the thing is coming—so that what I suffered will not be suffered by others. That makes me happy.
One word more. Your letter gave me pleasure. Charity is not a sentimental emotion; it is the only method by which the soul can attain to any knowledge—to any wisdom. Very sincerely yours, O.W.
Wilde was ill and had only two more years to live when he wrote this. It says wonders for his forbearance that he did not comment on Georgina’s desire that he should exhibit remorse for what he was. Nor did he mention that he would have perhaps avoided his own prosecution if he had not made the fatal mistake of bringing a suit against the Marquis of Queensberry for criminal libel. Wilde’s experience of the courts and the dangers of challenging the establishment was brief and chastening indeed. In February of 1895 he was the acclaimed author of that glittering new play The Importance of Being Earnest. On May 25 of the same year he began serving two years’ hard labor at Reading Gaol. In the circumstances his letter to Georgina Weldon was extraordinarily gracious. Repentant or not, he wrote her the most sympathetic commendation she ever received.
5
Work on the Mémoires came to an abrupt end at Christmas, 1901. The last words she wrote are tacked carelessly onto a lengthy section about papers lost or withheld twenty years earlier and the profound lack of interest shown in their recovery by the director of public prosecutions. The very last sentences of her monumental labors act like a switch thrown on a machine that might otherwise have run on forever.
If I had been able to produce this document in the trial against Neal, it would have been impossible for the judges to non-suit me. The jury would have awarded me heavy damages that my cowardly robber of a husband (up to his back teeth in perjury) would have been obliged to pay. And I, at the age I am now, would at least have the needs of my old age provided for. I hope that everyone who reads this work—even those of whom I have spoken most severely—will admit that out of consideration to them I could not speak too frankly. They will regret having being led astray by the secret dossiers on me and they will thank me for having taken so much trouble to give the public the fruit of my experiences, which cannot miss being the most useful of the nineteenth century.
Darantière’s anxieties about legal proceedings may have been partly responsible for the peculiar abruptness of this ending. The remnants of the Menier gang—Eugène Menier, Marie Helluy, and Victoria Claisse—had got wind of the work and, cheated of any money from Angele’s will, were making one last attempt to fleece Georgina by threatening to sue her for defamation. In England she was involved in a similarly bitter squabble with Emily over Louisa’s will. Beset with irritations on all sides, summoned to appear before the Procurator General in Paris, she arranged to have the copies of her great work sent from Dijon by freight train to Gisors. It was time to throw herself on the mercy of the public. Crippled with arthritis, hugely heavy with twelve years of institutional cooking, but still possessed of an amazing soprano voice, she crossed the Channel for the last time and went home to London, taking the cartons of books with her. Though the work was nominally addressed to the French, she was determined to publish it first in England. She did not want her English public to think she lacked the relish for a fight.
The Mémoires were never commercially published in the sense that most books are, and it is small surprise that they did not sell. Those copies she sent for review were studiously ignored, and the general reader in France and England remained (and remains) hardly aware of the book’s existence. The few friends in England who read the work were scandalized on three counts. The minuteness of the detail and the many digressions she had been drawn into made her six volumes extremely difficult to read. The willful defamation of people still living was impossible to countenance, even among her loyalest allies. But most of all, what she had written that was spiteful to others or just too self-incriminating about herself contradicted the desire her closest friends had to remember her courage and discount all her other shortcomings. She had done wonderful things, and the world that knew her best wished to cherish the myth of Mrs. Weldon, “the modern Portia,” rather than have the unvarnished truth. Those who welcomed her home and looked on her so benignly wished to see reflected in their eyes a calm and dignified old lady. It was a popular misconception in the press that she had long ago retired altogether and that the purpose of her sojourn in France had been to cultivate orchids. To have come home with this monster was a terrible embarrassment.
Her opinions were curiously out of joint with the times. She held that men in prison should be whipped once a month to keep them up to the task of repentance (though here she may have been speaking particularly of Frenchmen). When she came home, all London was talking about the Boer War. Her more liberal friends were pro-Boer on the grounds that a big country was oppressing a minority but she would have none of that. “I am in a fury with the Government,” she wrote to Phillip Treherne, “for keeping all those dirty Boer prisoners in the concen
tration camp. Draining, ruining the country because a few ignorant Yahoos whose only merit is to shoot, slaughter and sjambok since they first learned to walk choose to keep on a useless, murderous warfare, dressing up in our khaki, murdering, massacring bewildered boys who do not know if they have to do with friend or foe.”
Her answer was to issue an ultimatum to the Boers: stop now or face complete annihilation. Her views on suffrage were similarly out of step with the times. Emmeline Pankhurst’s husband had drafted the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, from which all Georgina’s court actions flowed. Though she never acknowledged it, she owed the Pankhurst family a vote of loyalty. She was in the audience at the Albert Hall in 1906 when Christabel Pankhurst addressed the Women’s Social and Political Union rally but was considerably put out not to be asked to speak. She was unaware that the politics of feminism had grown beyond individual acts of heroism, nor did she ever grasp that the WSPU was brought into being for the benefit of all women, of all classes, everywhere.
Christabel Pankhurst was twenty-six when Georgina sat in the audience listening to her. It may have struck the older woman that nobody that young could speak with any real authority. But Miss Pankhurst had a first-class degree in law and a complete willingness to subsume her own desires and ambitions to a greater good, something Georgina never really acquired. In 1908 the two Pankhurst sisters and their mother organized a rally in Hyde Park that drew half a million people. Measured against this, Georgina’s story was a relic of the past. She was an eccentric old woman with but one tale to tell.
She remained estranged from her family to the end. What cosseting she got was from friends like Ellen Terry, her faithful Lise Grey, Bernard de Bear, and Phillip Treherne and his wife. When she first came home, she was astonished to find Captain Harcourt still alive and still as impudent as ever. He was planning to emigrate to Canada but was momentarily strapped for the £25 fare. She could not keep herself away from the courts completely and tried to sue the authors of two biographies of Gounod for libel. It was a lost cause. She herself had written the epitaph for all that. “Old man gone and I fast going. His music is thought nothing of now.” All that was embers now, and try as she might, she could not fan the flames. Before he died, Gounod wrote down a sentiment she would have understood and might have taken to herself. “I feel as young as I was at the age of twenty,” he said. “What ages in us is the dwelling. The tenant doesn’t.”
About the time of her seventieth birthday, she moved to Brighton, where fifty years earlier she had thrown away her chance of marrying Merthyr Guest in favor of the penniless and indolent Hussar, Harry Weldon. Guest had married a daughter of the Duke of Westminster and died with assets of £177,000. As for Harry, the chance meeting at Lady Sudeley’s ball had changed his life, not always in ways that reflected credit on him. The acting king of arms kept well out of her way and though he may have read the Mémoires made no comment on them.
Brighton was breezy and vulgar, but she liked it. She rose at six every morning and took a cold bath, read the papers (especially the law reports), and then tried to master the typewriter, tapping out letters to her nephew and trying to console Apsley’s widow. Dal was also dead, and of all the Trehernes only she and Emily survived. Even so late in the day, the two sisters could not be reconciled. They agreed to hate each other. As for the Mémoires, they were all but forgotten, apart from the nuisance of what to do with the boxes in which they were stored. They had not crossed the bridge between the centuries, any more than she had herself. In a curious last act of defiance, in 1913 she summoned a photographer and had her portrait taken in bed, her eyes closed, her face composed in the image of death. The youthful cast of her features, which so many people had remarked over the years, the famous Pears complexion, all that had fled. Her cropped hair peeps out from under a nightcap, her cheeks have fallen away, and her nose rises like a beak. Her landlady, Mrs. Gunn, was sufficiently alarmed to phone Lise Grey in London, so strange was the job Georgina had asked the photographer to do. But Georgina knew exactly what she wanted from the image. The photograph is saying more powerfully than any words that its subject might as well be dead.
The end came on Monday, January 12, 1914. It was snowing in Sussex. Four days after her death, the body was taken to Mayfield, but not along the same roads that Harry had ridden out along on his horse Multum to ask for her hand in marriage. The coffin went by train, attended by the funeral director and a reporter from the Brighton Gazette. The paper had noticed her death in a short front-page column on January 14:
Mrs. Georgina Weldon died on Sunday [sic] at Brighton. To the present generation the name may not be very familiar, but the lady who passed away quietly at a Brighton boarding house—she was in her seventy-seventh year—had in her time been a conspicuous figure in musical and legal circles, and was, for several years, the despair of Her Majesty’s judges. In her prime she was of very attractive appearance, had a voice of great sweetness and flexibility, was a ready wit, and an accomplished woman.
The reporter who attended the interment contradicts Phillip Treherne, who was present and who says “we saw her laid to rest in the Dalrymple vault near the entrance of the fine old church of St. Dunstan’s.” Instead, the Gazette mentions how the vault that Morgan prepared for himself—and which was inside the church fabric—was opened after an interval of fifty-one years. The reporter was very struck by the good condition of the remains within and the extraordinary size of the provision. There were “thirty spaces, sufficient to accommodate forty coffins.” Though no one present remarked upon it, the vault was found to contain not one coffin, but three. Georgina was interred with her father, her baby sister Cordelia, who had been removed from Clapharn Parish Church at some time in the fifties, and another child, Gilbert Offley Thomas, born November 27, 1845, died June 29, 1846. This was not Morgan’s child but almost certainly his brother’s. What strange fate had brought him to be reburied in Sussex with an uncle the whole family detested is the last of the mysteries surrounding this unhappiest of families.
There was one final indignity to be posthumously endured by the dedicated searcher after truth. As Georgina joined her father, the man from the Gazette duly noted down: “The coffin was of polished oak with brass furniture and bore the inscription Georgina Weldon, born May 23, 1838, died January 11, 1914.” Of the twelve digits in these dates, six were wrong.
It was bitterly cold in the church, though while the committal service was being read, a pale wintry sun came out. Only seven mourners were present to see her home: Phillip and Beator Treherne; Apsley’s widow; Lise Grey and her brother; Mrs. Gunn, the boardinghouse keeper; and an old man named Tom Bridger who had once worked for Morgan and alone could say what kind of a prison Gate House had been in the days when the father had forbidden his most talented child permission even to sing in the choir of the church in which they now lay side by side.
On the previous Sunday, perhaps a more oblique but fitting epitaph to Georgina’s life of triumphs and tribulations had taken place at the parish church of Aldrington, near Hove. At the end of the second collect, an unidentified woman stood and cried out, “God save Rachael Peach, Sylvia Pankhurst and all the women who are persecuted and suffer in prison for conscience’s sake, and open the eyes of Thy Church, we beseech Thee, Amen.”
Bibliography
The primary source for this book has been the six volumes of Mémoires de Georgina Weldon: Justice (?) Anglaise, self-published as from Gisors/34 Hart St., Bloomsbury, 1902. This huge and ramshackle work includes French translations of some but not all of the other pamphlets published by Georgina. It is especially rich in letters to and by her. English-language copies of the pamphlets, as well as the shortlived newspaper Social Salvation, can be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Her contemporaries had much less to say about her than might be imagined. Her nephew, Phillip Treherne, published an affectionate and uncritical portrait of her nine years after she died in A Plaintiff in Person (Heinemann, 1923). It is
from this book that the letter from Oscar Wilde is quoted.
Georgina’s only other biographer has been Edward Grierson, in his Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon (Chatto and Windus, 1959). Grierson had access to the entire Weldon chronofile, and quotations from her diaries and journal in the present work can be traced to his genial and entertaining book.
A much less successful attempt to shoehorn her into nineteenth-century feminist history can be found in City of Dreadful Night: A Narrative of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London by Judith Walkovitz (Virago, 1992).
One of the satisfactions in hunting for her ghost in the Tavistock House years has been the chance to read the wise and witty Gounod by James Harding (Allen and Unwin, 1973).
Other works that bear directly on the story are listed below:
Bancroft, Squire. The Bancrofts. Murray, 1909.
———Empty Chairs. Murray, 1925.
Bessborough, Earl of, ed. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extracts from her Journals. Murray, 1952.
Blunt, Wilfred. England’s Michelangelo. Hamish Hamilton, 1975.
De HegerMann-Lindencrone. In the Courts of Memory. Harper & Brothers, 1912.
Doggett, Maeve E. Marriage, Wifebeating and the Law in Victorian England. University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Du Maurier, Daphne, ed. The Young George Du Maurier, Letters 1860–67. Peter Davies, 1951.
Kennedy, A. L. My Dear Duchess. Murray, 1956.
Scull, Andrew, with Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey. Masters of Bedlam. Princeton University Press, 1996.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 34
