©ff €i to ILdDlM Edited by JAMES O. HOGE and CLARKE OLNEY $10.7! The Letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne Edited by James O. Hoge and Clarke Olney The Norton divorce suit that is the chief center of interest of this hitherto unpublished col­ lection of letters was one of the major causes celibres of the nineteenth century. The co­ respondent was a prime minister of Great Britain, and on the outcome of the case de­ pended not only the future of his career, but also the fortunes of the Whig party itself. The accused wife, if not respected for be­ havior judged unorthodox by the standards of the day, was ungrudgingly admired as one of the great beauties of her time and was justly celebrated for her intellectual and artistic accomplishments. A granddaughter of the famous dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she had inherited some of his lit­ erary gifts, and, as the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels, and numerous political pamphlets, was both widely read and highly regarded. She was also, for quite sufficient reasons, a leading agitator in the struggle to free women from the considerable legal disabilities under which they labored, espe­ cially in respect to divorce, the custody of children, and the woman's rights to her own property. Caroline Norton wrote the first of her letters to her special friend and confidant in July of 1831, when she was twenty-three. The victim of an extremely unfortunate marriage, she was in the first flush of her enchantment with William Lamb, second viscount Melbourne, a man some thirty years her senior who, as home secretary in the cabinet of Earl Grey, was nearing the apex of a notable career, bid­ ding at last, after a decade of enforced inac­ tivity under the Tory ascendancy, to fulfill the promise of his enormous intellectual ca­ pacity and political acumen. (Continued on back flap) Mrs. Caroline Norton From a J. H. Robinson engraving of the Thomas Carrick portrait Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum Tfln© ILotlttcBirs NdDirtonu it© Edited by JAMES 0. HOGE and CLARKE OLNEY Ohio State University Press Copyright © 1974 by the Ohio State University Pres All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Norton, Caroline Sheridan, 1808-1877 The letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Norton, Caroline Sheridan, 1808-1877—Correspondence. 2. Melbourne, William Lamb, 2d Viscount, 1779-1848. I. Melbourne, William Lamb, 2d Vis­ count, 1779-1848. II. Hoge, James O., ed. III. Olney, Clarke, 1901- ed. IV. Title. PR5112.N5A845 1974 821'.8 [B] 74-12344 ISBN 0-8142-0208-X Cecil Y. Lang and James 0. Hoge, Sr. (1899-1966) Preface xi Introduction 3 The Letters 25 Bibliography 173 Index 175 Mrs. Caroline Norton. From a J. H. Robinson engraving of the Thomas Carrick portrait. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Museum. Frontispiece Lord Melbourne in 1838. From the painting by Sir George Hayter. Reproduced by kind permission of Lord Brocket, x Facsimile of Letter No. 4 S3 Facsimile of Letter No. 37 139 Lord Melbourne in 1838 From the painting by Sir George Hayter Reproduced by kind permission of Lord Brocket /P^AROLINE NORTON wrote the first of the letters in this ^\—^collection in July, 1831, when she was twenty-three and in the first flush of her enchantment with William Lamb, second viscount Melbourne, then home secretary in Earl Grey's cabinet. After years of Tory ascendancy, which he passed in enforced leisure at Brocket Hall, Melbourne at fifty-two was nearing the apex of his career, bidding at last to fulfill the promise of his enormous intellectual capacity and his political acumen. The last letter, which Mrs. Norton wrote in December, 1844, reflects the final phase of their relationship. Melbourne's decade of political authority had ended, and he was back at Brocket, neglected and ill. The feeling implicit in Mrs. Norton's final letters is that of an old friend, with pity for the infirmity and loneliness of the man who had known her admiration, her love, her anger, and her contempt and who had through the years been privy to her most intimate thoughts and to her innumerable tribulations. These letters have hitherto been inaccessible to the biog­ raphers of Melbourne and Caroline Norton. They constitute a small part of the extensive accumulation of records and papers relating to the Cowper and Lamb (Melbourne) families that until 1953 were kept at Panshanger, near Hertford, the country seat of the earls Cowper until 1905 when the title became extinct. In 1953 Panshanger was demolished, the salable contents of the house disposed of, and a century or more of papers were depo­ sited in the Hertford County Record Office. Professor Clarke Olney of the University of Georgia was subsequently granted access to the Panshanger Collection in 1954. Professor Olney recognized the Caroline Norton letters as a treasure trove of new information about Mrs. Norton and Lord Melbourne and their controversial relationship, including the criminal conversation suit of George Chappie Norton against Melbourne. After secur­ ing microfilms of all the Norton letters, with the kind assistance of Lady Monica Salmond, legatee at that time of the Cowper Papers, Olney worked at editing and arranging them; but he died leaving his projected edition unfinished. Four years ago the heirs of Professor Olney presented the Clarke Olney Papers to the Special Collections Department of the University of Georgia Libraries; and it is through the generosity of the Olney heirs and of the University of Georgia Libraries in kindly allowing me to use their property, that I have been able to complete this edition. The merits of these letters individually and as a collection are clear. Caroline Sarah (Sheridan) Norton was a notable literary figure in the nineteenth century, particularly during the 1830s and 1840s. A granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she inherited much of his literary gift, including a remarkable facil­ ity in composition. Although her works by now have been largely forgotten, in her day Mrs. Norton was widely read and highly regarded. She was constantly involved in one literary project or another, and her output of both poetry and fiction, in the face of all the distractions that disturbed her career, is proof both of the ease with which she wrote and of her compulsion for literary expression. By the time she was twenty-one, she had published two books of poetry; and she subsequently published four more volumes, as well as many short miscellaneous poems in the Edinburgh Review, in Bulwer-Lytton's New Monthly, and in her own La Belle Assemblee and Court Magazine, which she edited from 1832 until 1837. When The Dream appeared in 1840, Hartley Coleridge was so impressed with the tender grace and elegance of that wistful, romantic poem that he wrote a review in which he termed her "the Byron of modern poetesses" and placed her first in a list often British poetesses, of whom Elizabeth Barrett was the second. Though she was best known for her poetry, Mrs. Norton also published three novels and two novellas, all of which bear the stamp of her notoriously tragic marriage; and she edited several periodicals of the "keep­ sake" variety, in addition to La Belle Assemblee. The collection is significant for its candid disclosure of Caroline Norton's immediate reactions both to events in her always tempestuous personal life and to contemporary political transactions, particularly as they involved Lord Melbourne. The letters contribute to our understanding of Mrs. Norton herself, and of course they shed further light on the nature of her friendship with Melbourne, a subject of speculation ever since George Norton entered suit for damages in an adultery action in May, 1836. But in addition to their biographical interest and their state­ ment about the relationship of two eminent Victorians, the letters are readable in their own right. Virtually every letter testifies to the composition of a professional writer. Mrs. Norton's language is both passionate and learned, and she is always spontaneous, frank, and vivid in her expression of per­ sonal feelings or in her chronicle of domestic life in London at her own home in Storey's Gate or at her sister's home in pastoral Wiltshire. Of all her literary contemporaries Mrs. Norton drew highest praise for her conversational powers, and the urbanity, good humor, and daring unconventionality that informed her speech are evident in her letters to Melbourne. Her flirtatious letters are charged with spirited intelligence and with a uniquely Sheridan wit. And when she found Melbourne blameworthy, she wrote withering criticism, denouncing what she saw as indolence, cowardice, or infidelity. The supreme virtue in letter-writing is spontaneity. Caroline Norton wrote these letters to the man she loved and respected above all others, and she intended them only for his eyes. The fact that they were undoubtedly not written with an eye to ultimate publication (as many eighteenth- and nineteenth- century letters were) adds to their importance as an authentic record of her thoughts and feelings. The letters of Melbourne to Mrs. Norton have not been similarly assembled, and it is likely that most of them have not been preserved. Nonetheless, sev­ eral have been reproduced in scattered sources, and from these it would appear that most of his side of the correspondence, at least after Norton's initial accusation, consisted of attempts to offer her sympathy and advice, while discreetly disengaging himself from her affections. Much of what he had to say to her is implicit in Mrs.