You certainly need to fasten your seatbelt for Brian Thompson’s biography The Disastrous Mrs Weldon. Wilkie Collins couldn’t have created the eponymous heroine, even if he’d been a bit heavy-handed with the laudanum. During her extraordinary life, Georgina Weldon married an impecunious army officer against her family’s wishes, set up an orphanage in Charles Dickens’ former home, held a famous French composer captive, had a lesbian affair, and represented herself in over 200 court cases.
Perhaps the most pivotal moment of her life was when she scuppered her husband’s plans to incarcerate her in a lunatic asylum. Mr Weldon, who felt his wife was getting in the way of his relationship with another woman, hired renowned alienist Dr L. Forbes Winslow, along with others, to section her on the grounds of her spiritualist beliefs. Georgina got wind of what they were up to and, with the help of a friend and a sympathetic policeman, managed to repulse their efforts. Rather than quietly thanking her lucky stars, she hired men to parade outside Forbes Winslow’s house wearing sandwich boards bearing the slogan “medical body snatchers”. She later successfully sued all four people involved in the failed plot and earned the unlikely support of The Times in the process.
Although incarcerating an inconvenient spouse (usually the wife) in a lunatic asylum is an episode straight out of the pages of a sensation novel, it was a very real problem in the late nineteenth century, and alienists were earning a reputation as “traders in lunacy”. Georgina Weldon’s high profile challenge to such patriarchal expedience, therefore, makes her a very important figure. With the passing of the second Married Women’s Property Act in 1882, Georgina discovered she could finally sue in her own right and represent herself in court. Although much of the subsequent outbreak of litigiousness concerned her rather erratic musical career, many cases gave voice to the idea that “liberty of the subject” applied also to women.
A rare defeat in a libel action saw her consigned to Holloway Prison for six months. She was remarkably sanguine about the whole business and remained positive throughout. On her release, The Times was there to greet her, along with members of Legal Defence Committee, which included, incredibly, two of the doctors who had tried to section her. She proceeded to make public appearances wearing her prison garb and promoted her earlier work, How I Escaped the Mad Doctors.
As well as spearheading this extraordinary campaign, Georgina also ran an orphanage in Tavistock House, the former home of Charles Dickens. Like everything else in her life, it was entirely unconventional. The children all addressed her as “Grannie” and were required to participate in a quarter of an hour’s organised yelling every morning in order to get the naughtiness out of their systems. I might try that myself. Her charges came from a variety of backgrounds, including the Rawlings family who had been fathered by a blind man in Lambeth. He formed them into a bell-ringing act and sent them to Georgina with his best wishes. Lovers of Cold Comfort Farm will be reminded of the jazz band. The children were required to share Georgina’s great love of music, and she drove them to concerts in a converted milk float, on the side of which she had emblazoned “Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage”.
Perhaps the most curious episode in her life was her affair with the French composer Charles Gounod. The stress of his musical career, unhappy marriage, and extra-marital relationship with Georgina had all taken their toll on him and he reached a state of near nervous collapse. Unsurprisingly, Georgina refused to have any truck with doctors and insisted on trying her own unorthodox remedy. This involved wrapping poor Gounod in furs and India rubber sheets to make him sweat. She would then throw buckets of cold water at him and commence the sweating process all over again. The unfortunate consequences included a nasty bout of colic and dysentery, and it didn’t do a lot for his mood, either. His enervated state continued for three years before he fled back to France and the bosom of the family he had abandoned.
The biographer’s handling of this episode makes Georgina sound like Kathy Bates in Misery. Without extensive use of primary sources, it would be very difficult to establish the veracity of his claims. However, Gonoud certainly seems to have possessed the means of escape throughout their relationship, had he wished to do so. One of my problems with this biography is that Thompson has little sympathy for his subject and rather labours the point that he finds her repellent. Of course, it’s quite common to feel disappointed when a heroine turns out to have feet of clay, but whatever sparked the initial attraction still remains. I suspect Thompson’s interest was piqued by the sensational nature of her story, rather than any admiration for what she achieved. Indeed, he repeatedly downplays her achievements and suggests they were entirely inadvertent. The very title itself – The Disastrous Mrs Weldon – clearly shows he thought her without merit. He obviously thinks she was two hoops short of a crinoline and that the lunacy order was justified.
Georgina Weldon was incontrovertibly eccentric, solipsistic and more than a handful, but historically this is exactly the type of person who is prepared to poke their beak above the parapet and challenge injustices. I don’t think one could possibly overstate the significance of a Victorian woman taking on both her husband and the medical establishment, and winning. She was indefatigable and seemingly unravaged by her experiences. After reaching her half-century, she appeared on the side of London omnibuses with the slogan: “Though I am 50 I have the complexion of a girl of 17 – thanks to Pears Soap.”
Thompson does not give serious consideration to any other recent account of Georgina’s life. Judith Walkowitz’s chapter in City of Dreadful Delight is dismissed in an endnote as “a much less successful attempt to shoehorn her into nineteenth-century feminist history.” How can she not be part of feminist history? He claims that she was against women’s suffrage, thereby impugning her credentials. However, Alex Owen in The Darkened Room tells us that, although a supporter, she simply chose not to participate in the campaign. Frankly, she already had quite enough going on in her life. Georgina’s campaigns were part of a wider movement, including causes such as the anti-vivisection movement, which aimed to constrain the limits of both medical science and patriarchal authority. Her firm and unrepentant occupation of the public sphere put many men on the defensive for the first time and was an important blast on the trumpet for women’s rights. It’s a shame that the only modern full-length biography focuses mainly on the sensational aspects of her life. Georgina Weldon, for all her faults, deserves much better.
The Disastrous Mrs Weldon by Brian Thompson