Caroline'Norton

(1808-1877)

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Sheridan Norton, one of seven children of Thomas and Caroline Henrietta Callander Sheridan, from the beginning seemed des­ tined for fame. Richard Brimley Sheridan was her paternal grandfather; her paternal grandmother was the soprano Elizabeth Linley; and her mother was the author of Aims and Ends, Carwell, and other novels well known in their time. Today she is best known as a political reformer who played a pivotal role in influencing the passage through Parliament of the Infants' Custody Bill (1839) and the Marriage and Divorce Act of 1857. But Norton was known in her own time not only as the author of important political pamphlets but as a poet, a fiction writer, an essayist, an editor, and a fashionable celebrity at the center of a major political scandal. Caroline Norton was born in on 22 March 1808, a year before her family lost its fortune in the Drury Lane Theatre fire. When she was only five, she and several of her siblings were sent to Scotland to live with her mother's family. Her parents went to live at the Cape of Good Hope for the health of her father, who was seriously ill, and so that he could assume the position of colonial secretary. When he died in 1817, her mother's fiction writing became the family's major source of income. Even so, Norton grew up in privileged surroundings, for the duke of York gave her mother apart­ ments in , and the family eventually moved to Great George Street, Westminster, for part of the year. She was sent for a short time to school at Wonersh, Surrey, and she published a jeu d'esprit entitled The Dandies' Rout, illustrated with her own drawings, at age thirteen. When she was introduced to London society in 1826, Thomas Moore was among her admirers, singling her out as "the handsomest of any." 1 He appreciated her Irish wit as much as her beauty and in 1831 dedicated to her his poem "Summer Fete."

r. See his diary entry for 31May1826 in The journals of Thomas Moore, ed. WilfredS. Dowden, 5 vols. (Newark, NJ, 1983), 3 :94J. Caroline Norton

There was as much tragedy in Norton's life, however, as glitter. It began in the summer of 1827, when, at age nineteen, yielding to family pressure and the reality that she had no dowry, she married George Chapple Nor­ ton, a barrister M.P. for Guildford and the younger son of the first Lord Grantley. She regretted the marriage almost immediately. He was moody, violent, selfish, coarse, and childish, once setting fire to her writing materials to "discipline" her even though the family was supported mainly by her liter­ ary earnings. The realities of her public and private lives could not have been more different. To the world she was "the ornament of brilliant society." 2 Edward Bulwer Lytton, , Edward John Trelawny, Isaac Disraeli, , and Lord Melbourne all attended Norton's salon at her home in Storey's Gate. The actress and author Frances Kemble described Norton at this period as a woman with "a deep, sweet, contralto voice" and an un-English character of beauty, her rather large and heavy head and features recalling the grandest Grecian and Italian models, to the latter of whom her rich coloring and blue-black braids of hair gave her an additional resemblance .... [She] was extremely epigrammatic in her talk, and comically dramatic in her manner of narrating things. I do not know whether she had any theatrical tal­ ent, though she sang pathetic and humorous songs admirably, and I remember shaking in my shoes when, soon after I came out, she told me she envied me, and would give anything to try the stage herself. I thought, as I looked at her wonderful, beautiful face, "Oh, if you should, what would become of me!" 3 Mary Shelley told Trelawny, "I do not wonder at your not being able to deny yourself the pleasure of Mrs. Norton's society-I never saw a woman I thought so fascinating-Had I been a man I should certainly have fallen in love with her." 4 Privately, though, Norton was the victim of continuing mental and physical abuse from her husband. Writing became Norton's refuge, and the world increasingly saw her as a major player on the literary stage. She had published anonymously in 1829 The Sorrows of Rosalie. A Tale. With Other Poems, praised by James Hogg;5 ac­ cording to Norton, "The first expenses of my son's life were defrayed from that first creation of my brain." 6 In 1830 she acknowledged on the title page her authorship of The Undying One, a poem based on the legend of the Wan-

2. Fraser's Magazine 3 (March r831): 222. 3. See Kemble's Records of a Girlhood (New York, r879), r74-75. 4. Letter dated r2 October 1835, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore, r980-88), 2:256. 5. In the Noctes Ambrosianae in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 48 (April r830), reprinted in 5 vols. (New York, r863), 3 :458. 6. DNB. Caroline Norton dering Jew and condemning corporeal punishment of children, the harsh educational system, and inhumane prison conditions. Fraser's, the Edinburgh Review, and the New Monthly Magazine all praised it.7 In May of the follow­ ing year, Covent Garden produced her play The Gypsy Father. In the early thirties she earned as much as fourteen hundred pounds a year publishing poems and prose works in the annuals, editing gift books such as the English Annual (1834-35), and editing La Belle Assemblee; or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine (1832-37). In June 1836 Norton's private misery was broadcast to the world in the most public way imaginable: George Norton filed a ten-thousand-pound law­ suit against the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, for allegedly committing adultery with his wife. He had originally encouraged his wife's friendship with Melbourne, then home secretary, who had helped him land a judgeship paying one thousand pounds a year in the Lambeth division of the Metro­ politan Police courts. The jury threw the case out, never even asking the accused to testify. Many considered the suit a Tory ploy to unseat the prime minister, but it was the scandal of the year, and Caroline Norton paid the usual price of women caught in such a web-excoriating journalistic attacks on her character, including fabricated stories of adventures not only with Lord Melbourne but with other men as well. Worse than the assault on her reputation was the separation from her three sons-Fletcher, born in 1829, Thomas Brinsley, born in 1831, and William, born in 1833. George Norton, from whom she was never to be divorced, refused her all access to them. She discovered that she had no legal redress under English law. Even the most vicious and unprincipled husband had indisputable custody of minor children; moreover, George Norton, not she, owned the copyrights to her books and was entitled to keep her literary earnings as well as all her personal possessions, including her jewelry, clothing, books, and letters. Outraged that her husband could legally keep her from seeing her children, Caroline Norton decid~d to change the law, tirelessly lobbying politically powerful friends, writing and circulating pamphlets such as Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother to the Custody of her Infant Children (1837) and A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill (1839). She wrote directly to the lord chancellor, to the queen, to every peer, to every member of Parliament, and to . Thomas Noon Talfourd introduced in Par­ liament the Infant Custody Bill, and after a long and stormy debate it passed in 1839, granting women the right to apply to the courts for custody of their children. Eventually, after six years and the death of her youngest son, Nor-

7. Fraser's Magazine 3 (March 1831): 222; Edinburgh Review 53 (June 1831): 361-69; New Monthly Magazine 31 (January 1831): 180-83. Caroline Norton ton was able to be with the two remaining children for part of the year. Educated by her own suffering, Norton continued to publish more pam­ phlets, poems, and books of fiction to awaken the social consciousness of her readers. Her long poems, A Voice from the Factories (r836) and The_ Child of the Islands (r845), condemn child labor and argue for better living and working conditions for the poor. Her imaginative writing continued to earn respect. Henry Nelson Coleridge, in the Quarterly Review, called her the "Byron of our modern poetesses" and praised her sonnets as "worthy to be laid up in cedar with the best in our language." 8 Richard Hengist Horne thought her the equal of Elizabeth Barrett.9 Many of her songs, some of which she set to music, enjoyed popularity, especially "I Do Not Love Thee;" 10 several of her poems, including "The Arab's Farewell to His Horse" and "Bingen on the Rhine," were standard anthology pieces well into the twentieth century. In r85r Norton's husband, having heard that her mother had left her a small legacy, terminated her allowance. In the ensuing dispute he learned that she had received a legacy from Lord Melbourne in r848. Once more, this time in the pages of the Times, he accused her of adultery. Discover­ ing that she had no legal right to her legacies, she determined once again to challenge the system. Her moving pleas for women's rights in pamphlets such as English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (r854) and A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill (r855) played a crucial role in the passage by Parliament of the Marriage and Divorce Act

8. "Modern English Poetesses," Quarterly Review 66 (September 1840): 376, 38i. Later in the century, D. M. Moir would refine this judgment by saying that "in her tenderer moods she pitches on a key somewhat between Goldsmith and Rogers-with here the sunset glow of the first, and there the twilight softness of the latter: in her more passionate ones we have a reflex of Byron; but it is a reflex of the pathos, without the misanthropy of that great poet" (Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half Century (Edinburgh, 1851 ], 275). . 9. Horne wrote, "The imagination of Mrs. Norton is chiefly occupied with domestic feel­ ings and images, and breathes melodious plaints or indignations over the desecrations of her sex's loveliness; that of Miss Barrett often wanders amidst the supernatural darkness of Calvary sometimes with anguish and tears of blood, sometimes like one who echoes the songs of tri­ umphal choirs. Both possess not only great mental energies, but that description of strength which springs from a fine nature, and manifests itself in productions which evidently origi­ nated in genuine impulses of feeling. The subjects they both choose appear spontaneous, and not resulting from study or imitation, though cast into careful moulds of art. The one records and laments the actual; the other creates and exults in the ideal. Both are excellent artists; the one in dealing with subjects of domestic interest; the other in designs from sacred subjects, poems of religious tendency, or of the supernatural world. Mrs. Norton is beautifully clear and intelligible in her narrative and course of thought and feeling; Miss Barrett has great inventive­ ness, but not an equal power in construction. The one is all womanhood; the other all wings" (A New Spirit of the Age (London, 1907], 338-43). IO. For a list of fifty-five of her songs see.Jane Gray Perkins, The Life of the Honourable Mrs. Norton (New York, 1909), 300-30I. 510 Caroline Norton of 1857, allowing a woman to be treated as a legal entity distinct from her husband, with the right to own property, enter into contracts, sue, bequeath and inherit in her own right, and protect her earnings from the demands of her husband. An English divorce would now be more accessible, no longer requiring an act of Parliament. Although she did not consider herself a femi­ nist, Caroline Norton probably accomplished more for women's legal rights in than any other woman of her time. When Daniel Madise painted a fresco in the , he used Caroline Norton as the model for his depiction ofJustice. Like her poems, her four novels and many short stories reflect the realities of her own life, centering on loss and on love turned painful or tragic. Her women struggle to achieve their own identity in a patriarchal culture and are often betrayed or abandoned. But there are some notable exceptions. "The Lost Election," for example, is a witty and amusing political satire. Some­ times, as in her novel Lost and Saved, a rebellious "ruined" heroine goes on to live happily ever after, defying conventional wisdom. In the novel Old Sir Douglas Norton achieves literary revenge on her husband, portraying him as the selfish and brutish Kenneth Ross. Her last major poem was The Lady of La Garaye, published in 1861. Norton's personal journey was not entirely bleak, though her own story has a plot worthy of fiction. (, who admired Norton as a writer, used what was purported to be an incident in her life as an inspira­ tion for Diana of the Crossways [1885]; Dickens is said to have based "Bardell vs. Pickwick" on the 1836 trial that made Norton the subject of controversy; and Tennyson is said to have used Norton as the prototype for his Princess Ida in The Princess [1847].) In 1870 Norton had the pleasure of seeing Par­ liament pass the Married Women's Property Act. In February 1875 George Norton died, and on 1March1877 Caroline Norton, aged sixty-nine, married her intimate friend of nearly thirty years, the Scottish historian Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. She died fourteen weeks later, on 15 June 1877.

MAJOR WORKS: The Sorrows of Rosalie. A Tale. With Other Poems (London, 1829); The Undying One, and Other Poems (London, 1830); The Coquette, and Other Tales and Sketches, in Prose and Verse, 2 vols. (London, 1835); The Wife, and Woman's Reward, 3 vols. (Lon­ don, 1835); A Voice from the Factories. In Serious Verse (London, 1836); Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother to the Custody of her Infant Children (London, 1837); The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of "Custody of Infants," Considered (London, 1838); A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill (London, 1839); The Dream, and Other Poems (London, 1840); The Child ef the Islands. A Poem (London, 1845); Stuart of Dunleath. A Story of Modern Times, 3 vols. (London, 1847); Tales and Sketches, in Prose and Verse (London, 1850); English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Caroline Norton 5n

Century (London, 1854); A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill (London, 1855); The Lady of La Garaye (Cambridge, 1861); Lost and Saved, 3 vols. (London, 1863); Old Sir Douglas, 3 vols. (London, 1867) .

EDITED WORKS: Fisher's Drawing-Room Scrap-Book (1846-49); English Annual (1834- 35); La Belle Assemblee; or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine (1832-37); Keep­ sake (1836).

TEXTS USED: Text of "I Do Not Love Thee" from The Sorrows ef Rosalie. Texts of "The Faithless Knight," "We Have Been Friends Together;' and "The Arab's Farewell to His Horse" from The Undying One, 2nd ed.

I Do Not Love Thee

I do not love thee!-no! I do not love thee! And yet when thou art absent I am sad; And envy even the bright blue sky above thee, Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad.

I do not love thee! -yet, I know not why, Whate'er thou dost seems still well done, to me­ And often in my solitude I sigh- That those I do love are not more like thee!

I do not love thee!-yet, when thou art gone I hate the sound (though those who speak be dear) IO Which breaks the lingering echo of the tone Thy voice of music leaves upon my ear.

I do not love thee!-yet thy speaking eyes, With their deep, bright, and most expressive blue­ Between me and the midnight heaven arise, Oftener than any eyes I ever knew.

I know I do not love thee!-yet, alas! Others will scarcely trust my candid heart; And oft I catch them smiling as they pass, Because they see me gazing where thou art. 20 (1829) 512 Caroline Norton

The Faithless Knight

The lady she sate in her bower alone, And she gaz'd from the lattice window high, Where a white steed's hoofs were ringing on, With a beating heart, and a smother'd sigh. Why doth she gaze thro' the sunset rays - Why doth she watch that white steed's track­ While a quivering smile on her red lip plays? 'Tis her own dear knight-will he not look back?

The steed flew fast- and the rider past- IO Nor paus'd he to gaze at the lady's bower; The smile from her lip is gone at last- There are tears on her cheek-like the dew on a flower! And "plague on these foolish tears," she said, "Which have dimm'd the view of my young love's track; For oh! I am sure, while I bent my head, It was then-it was then that my knight look'd back."

On flew that steed with an arrow's speed; He is gone-and the green boughs wave between: And she sighs, as the sweet breeze sighs through a reed, 20 As she watches the spot where he last has been. Oh! many a sun shall rise and set, And many an hour may she watch in vain, And many a tear shall that soft cheek wet, Ere that steed and its rider return again! Caroline Norton

We Have Been Friends Together

We have been friends together, In sunshine and in shade; Since first beneath the chesnut trees In infancy we played. But coldness dwells within thy heart, A cloud is on thy brow; We have been friends together­ Shall a light word part us now?

We have been gay together; We have laughed at little jests; IO For the fount of hope was gushing Warm and joyous in our breasts. But laughter now hath fled thy lip, And sullen glooms thy brow; We have been gay together- Shall a light word part us now?

We have been sad together, We have wept with bitter tears, O'er the grass-grown graves, where slumbered The hopes of early years. 20 The voices which are silent there Would bid thee clear thy brow; We have been sad together­ Oh! what shall part us now? Caroline Norton

The Arab's Farewell to His Horse

My beautiful! my beautiful! that standest meekly by With thy proudly arched and glossy neck, and dark and fiery eye; Fret not to roam the desert now, with all thy winged speed- ! may not mount on thee again - thou'rt sold, my Arab steed! Fret not with that impatient hoof-snuff not the breezy wind- The further that thou fliest now, so far am I behind; The stranger hath thy bridle rein-thy master hath his gold- Fleet-limbed and beautiful! farewell!-thou' rt sold, my steed-thou'rt sold!

Farewell! those free untired limbs, full many a mile must roam, To reach the chill and wintry sky, which clouds the stranger's ro home; Some other hand, less fond, must now thy corn and bed prepare; The silky mane I braided once, must be another's care! The morning sun shall dawn again, but never more with thee Shall I gallop through the desert paths, where we were wont to be: Evening shall darken on the earth; and o'er the sandy plain Some other steed, with slower step, shall bear me home agam.

Yes, thou must go! the wild free breeze, the brilliant sun and sky, Thy master's home-from all of these, my exiled one must fly. Thy proud dark eye will grow less proud, thy step become less fleet, Caroline Norton

And vainly shalt thou arch thy neck, thy master's hand to meet. 20 Only in sleep shall I behold that dark eye, glancing bright- Only in sleep shall hear again that step so firm and light: And when I raise my dreaming arm to check or cheer thy speed, Then must I starting wake, to feel-thou'rt sold, my Arab steed!

Ah! rudely then, unseen by me, some cruel hand may chide, Till foam-wreaths lie, like crested waves, along thy panting side: And the rich blood, that is in thee swells, in thy indignant pain, Till careless eyes, which rest on thee, may count each started vein. Will they ill-use thee? If I thought-but no, it cannot be- Thou art so swift, yet easy curbed; so gentle, yet so free. 30 And yet, if haply when thou'rt gone, my lonely heart should yearn- Can the hand which casts thee from it now, command thee to return?

Return!-alas! my Arab steed! what shall thy master do, When thou who wert his all of joy, hast vanished from his view? When the dim distance cheats mine eye, and through the gath'ring tears Thy bright form, for a moment, like the false mirage appears. Slow and unmounted will I roam, with weary foot alone, Where with fleet step, and joyous bound, thou oft hast bourne me on; And, sitting down by that green well, I'll pause and sadly think, "It was here he bowed his glossy neck, when last I saw him drink!" 40

"When last I saw thee drink!-away! the fevered dream is o'er- Caroline Norton

I could not live a day, and know, that we should meet no more! They tempted me, my beautiful! for hunger's power is strong- They tempted me, my beautiful! but I have loved too long. Who said that I had given thee up? Who said that thou wert sold? 'Tis false- 'tis false, my Arab steed! I fling them back their gold! Thus, thus, I leap upon thy back, and scour the distant plains; Away! who overtakes us now, shall claim thee for his pains! (r830)