NORTON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF CAROLINE NORTON (1808-1877)

Publisher's Note

Caroline Norton’s life reads like a rather improbable Victorian melodrama.  She was born on 22 March 1808, the third child of Caroline Henrietta (née Callander - a novelist) and Thomas Sheridan (a poet, soldier and colonial administrator - son of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist.)  Whilst they had a certain celebrity status, they were not wealthy, and her father was sickly.  He left for the Cape of Good Hope for the sake of his health, together with her mother and eldest sister, Helen, when Caroline was only five. Caroline and Georgiana were sent to Scotland, while her elder brother, also named Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was at school. By the time she was nine her father had died.

Her mother returned and the family was brought together again, living in a grace and favour residence in Hampton Park.  There were now three boys (Richard, Frank and Charles - the latter two born at the Cape) and three girls (Helen, Caroline and Georgiana) all having to be cared for on a meagre pension.

The three girls (known widely as the ‘Three Graces’) felt some pressure to marry. At the age of fifteen Caroline was taken on a visit to Wonersh Park, the home of Lord Grantley, by her governess.  Beautiful and high-spirited, Caroline made a strong impression on George Norton, heir to the estate, and he proposed marriage to her.  She was not sure, and did not love him, so he was told to wait for 3 years until she had reached the age of eighteen and had come out in society.   In the meantime, Helen married in 1826 to Captain Price Blackwood, heir to Lord Dufferin.  She was also uneasy to start with, but grew to love her husband.  Caroline had hoped to receive other offers but, despite being named one of the twelve prettiest debutantes at Almack’s, she did not.   With her younger sister, Georgiana - “the beauty” - attracting much greater attention, Caroline was terrified of “living and dying a lonely old maid.”  As such, when George Norton repeat his offer, she accepted. They married on 30 June 1827.  He was 26, she was 19.  Her situation was similar to that of one of her characters in her novel, Stuart of Dunleath - “She had married a man she did not love; whom she did not profess to love; for certain advantages - to avoid certain pressing miseries.”

Fresh miseries piled upon her.  Her husband was frequently drunk and he beat her.  Her  fame - as a Sheridan and also as a poet - only served to inflame his temper. Her quick tongue and refusal to succumb provoked him further. The only relief was the birth of their son, Fletcher - on whom they both doted - and the publication of her book, The Sorrows of Rosalie, a Tale with other poems (1829).  James Hogg praised this highly in Noctes Ambrosianae and it shows similarities in style and effect to Byron’s verse.

aroline took refuge in literary and political society, which George Norton only condoned because he hoped for some appointment or sinecure.  Their new home at Storey’s Gate became a noted Salon and Lord Melbourne - then Home Secretary, later Prime Minister - became a regular visitor.  Other visitors included Disraeli, Abraham Hayward, Bulwer Lytton, and Samuel Rogers.  George Norton was uncomfortable in such company and continued to physically assault her after the guests had gone.

Another two children followed, Brinsley in 1831 and William Charles in 1834, and there were patches of happiness, but the arguments grew worse and worse.  Even though George Norton gained a lucrative position from Melbourne as a magistrate in the Metropolitan Police Courts (at £1,000 per annum), he was jealous when she was made editor of La Belle Assemblée and Court Magazine, claiming that it occupied too much of her time.  On one occasion, when she was pregnant again, he threw her down a flight of stairs, causing her to miscarry.  On another, he half strangled her.  The Sheridan family refused further contact with him and the relationship went beyond the point of reconciliation when, in April 1836, Caroline Norton returned from her a visit to her sister to find that the children had been sent away and she was locked out of their house.

It was at this point that she learned that she was named in a divorce suit - George Norton suing her on the basis of her affections for Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister.  Norton vs Melbourne, 1836, was a sensational scandal and the press had a field day.  The Tories made political capital over the embarrassment of their Whig rivals.  The accusations were ungrounded and the divorce suit failed,  but Caroline Norton realised how weak women were in the eyes of the law.  At that time woman had no legal status and all of their property belonged to the husband, who also had automatic rights to the custody of the children.  In her own case that meant that George stopped her from seeing her children and received all the royalties from her poetry.  As she was to say later, “I have no rights; I have only wrongs”  (Thrupps vs Norton, 1853.)

Caroline Norton decided that enough was enough and embarked on a career of campaigning to change the law.  Her first campaign concerned the custody of children.  Her lawyer friend Abraham Hayward introduced her to Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, serjeant-at-law and Member of Parliament for Reading.  Having had considerable experience in child custody cases, he was already considering proposing a Bill on the subject. She wrote a number of pamphlets to plead the case that the prime concern should be the well-being of the children.  Chief of these was ­A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infant Custody Bill (1839) written under the pseudonym of Pearce Stevenson.   The Infant Custody Bill was duly passed in Parliament that year, but Caroline Norton was still largely denied access to her children. The few meetings that she had with them were heart-rending encounters, often ending with the children being forced out of her embrace.  Her last meeting with all of them was at Christmas 1841, when she spent a whole week with them. In July 1842, William had a riding accident, fell ill and died before his mother could see him.  After this, George Norton relented and allowed the remaining two boys to spend half the year with their mother.  

Her literary career continued with the publication of The Dream  (1840), The Child of the Islands (1845) and Aunt Carry’s Ballads (1847), the first of which earned her the title of the “Byron of her sex” from the Quarterly magazine.

In 1848 she signed what amounted to a separation agreement with her husband, in which he guaranteed her an allowance of £500 per year, while she granted him access to a Trust Fund account and agreed to meet her own expenses.  He soon reneged on the allowance when he learned that she had received legacies on the death of Lord Melbourne (who swore to her innocence on his death-bed) and her mother totalling £680 per annum.  George Norton declared their agreement null and void on account of the fact that she was still his wife and, as such, was unable to make a contract.  She retaliated by presenting a bill to him (from Thrupps, the carriage-makers, for £47) which she was unable to pay.  He refused to pay and Thrupps vs Norton, 1853, was the result.  Caroline Norton lost this case, as the bill had been presented to her before George Norton had reneged on the payments, but the case spurred her into action once again, this time to campaign for the right of married women to have a clear legal existence,  to divorce, and to own property.

In 1854 she put her case forward in English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (a full html text of this document is freely available on the internet at The Victorian Women Writers Project [Indiana] web site.)  This was followed in 1855 with A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill. The Bill became law in 1857 and gave women the right to inherit and bequeath property, to sue and be sued, to make contracts, and to keep her earnings if she had been deserted by her husband.  Above all, it gave married women existence in the eyes of the law.  The Bill was further strengthened in 1870. 

During this period, Caroline Norton continued to earn a living as an author, publishing The Lady of La Garaye (1862) (often regarded as her finest poem), Lost and Saved (1863) (praised by The Examiner as, “A novel of rare excellence. ... Mrs Norton’s best prose work”), Old Sir Douglas (1868) and The Rose of Jericho (1870).

Fletcher, died of tuberculosis in 1859, leaving Brinsley as a her sole surviving son.  He acceded to the peerage in 1875 when both George Norton and his elder brother, Lord Grantley, died in 1875.  Caroline Norton was free at last and, despite poor health, she married a long time friend, Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, on 1 March 1877.  Less than three months later, on  15 June 1877, she died - but it had been a happy coda to a troubled life.  Her life is said to have inspired George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways.

Caroline Norton did not live to see the passage of  the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1882, but she had long since passed the torch to Barbara Leigh Smith (Bodichon) who was a more forthright advocate of the equality of women.

This project brings together the poetry,  novels and pamphlets of Caroline Norton including The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), The Undying One (1830), The Wife and Woman’s Reward (1835), The Coquette (1835), A Voice from the Factories (1836), A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor (1839), The Dream  (1840), The Child of the Islands (1845), Aunt Carry’s Ballads (1847), Letters to the Mob (1848), Tales & Sketches (1850), Stuart of Dunleath (1851), A Letter to the Queen (1855), The Lady of La Garaye (1862), Lost and Saved (1863), Old Sir Douglas (1868) and The Rose of Jericho (1870).  There are also collections of her prose and poetry from the Court  Magazine and The English Annual.

We are grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Cambridge University Library for permission to film volumes for this publication.

Useful Web Sites to consult include:

A Celebration of Women Writers at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmbt/women

(includes a biography and bibliography of Norton and links to a number of texts.)

Victorian Web Sites at http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Victorian.html

(the most comprehensive list of web sites on Victorian literature.)

Victorian Women Writers Project

at http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/vwwp-collection.html (a substantial site with many html texts.)

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