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Caroline'norton 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 London 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 Hampton Court Palace, 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, Samuel Rogers, Edward John Trelawny, Isaac Disraeli, Mary Shelley, 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 the Times. 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.
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