Georgina Weldon: The Fearless Life of a Victorian Celebrity by Joanna Martin (review)

Georgina Weldon was notorious in the mid-Victorian years. She was (among other things) a singer, a promoter of education, a campaigner, a spiritualist, and probably the first married woman to represent herself in a court of law. She was also, as the saying goes, a piece of work.

Weldon will be familiar to Victorianists from the scholarship of Judith Walkowitz and Susie Steinbach. The book under review is not the first biography of her. It is, however, likely to be the standard work on a figure who was well known at the time to regular readers of the press that covered her exploits. Joanna Martin enjoys a family connection with Weldon and has been given access to her papers that have never been used in such depth before. Family loyalty does not, however, cloud her judgment. Georgina Weldon: The Fearless Life of a Victorian Celebrity is a clear-eyed account of a challenging woman.

Weldon was born into the Welsh landed gentry. Her ill-advised decision to marry the young soldier Harry Weldon led to her father disinheriting the couple. Weldon later claimed that she entered into what proved a disastrous marriage because she had been led astray by reading the tales of Charlotte Mary Yonge, which filled her head with romance. The Weldons, though poor, mixed with some illustrious figures including William Makepeace Thackeray and the artists George Frederic Watts and John Everett Millais. Weldon wanted to become a singer but was prevented from becoming a professional by her husband’s disapproval, one of the many tensions in the marriage.

Her voice, however, led to an intense friendship with the French composer Charles Gounod who ended up living with the Weldons at their house on Tavistock Square in London. There were rumours about whether she and Gounod were just good friends. Certainly, Weldon became his muse and champion while also operating as a surrogate parent, looking after him during his periods of illness and incessant tantrums. She appeared in concerts (technically, not as a professional) singing his music, which is why this book should be read by scholars interested in the musical scene in mid-Victorian years. When Gounod and Weldon fell out, the rupture was devastating with Weldon refusing for a long time to hand over a score that he had written in her house.

Weldon founded a small orphanage despite having little interest in children. She saw this as a vehicle for promoting her views on training children to sing. The school was notable for its vegetarianism and insistence on rational dress. It was her growing interest in spiritualism that produced the decisive break with Harry Weldon, who decided to have her committed to a lunatic asylum. In a famous episode, she managed to elude the doctors who were sent round to take her away (partly through the intervention of Louisa Lowe of the Lunacy Law Reform Association).

Although free, Weldon refused to let the matter rest and embarked on a series of lawsuits against Harry Weldon and the medical figures, such as Doctor Forbes Winslow, who had tried to incarcerate her. The passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1882 allowed her to undertake her own representation in the courtroom, where she proved an exasperating but also formidable figure. At one point she had some seventeen lawsuits in train. She won several of these but lost others with enormous financial consequences. On two occasions she ended up in jail herself. The author of numerous pamphlets such as How I Escaped the Mad Doctors (1879), she put on concerts to raise funds and then actually took to the stage, even appearing in music halls to talk about her plight. She collaborated with the playwright George Lander on a play titled Not Alone (1886), which fictionalized her struggles. She naturally played the lead role of Hester Stanhope (an anti-vaccinator, anti-vivisectionist, teetotaler, and vegetarian...