Inconvenient People (55 page)

Mrs Weldon was born Georgina Thomas in 1837, the eldest of six children of fantastically snobbish parents, whose social ambitions were for the most part to be thwarted. Her father changed the family surname to the grander-sounding, ancestral ‘Treherne’ and this may have assisted him in finally winning a Tory seat after twenty years of trying. However, social disappointment followed, and the slide into being more shabby than genteel saw the family decamp to cheaper, less competitive, Florence for twelve years, when Georgina was three years old. There, she grew up highly cultured, and fluent in French and Italian. She was wild and wilful and got through seven governesses in one year. Papa opened all the family’s letters and was a figure of terror to his wife and children. ‘We never dared open our lips in his presence, scarcely daring to breathe without his snubbing us unmercifully,’ wrote Georgina. The Trehernes’ return to England did little to tame her: Mama burned Georgina’s diaries for the years 1854 to 1859, in case they should compromise the family with their trenchant opinions and racy musings about the nature of love.

Georgina was very attractive; but there must have been something more to her than her looks. Whatever it was, it fails, for the most part, to come across when we survey the surviving images of her; camera, brush and pencil have not captured the charisma that led to so many conquests, if not carnal then at least emotional. Georgina captivated many men, and at least one woman, when she entered Society. Watts painted her and called her his ‘wild little girl’; and she told him that the key to her nature lay in the word ‘excitable’ – although, as we shall see, ‘excitable’ had an altogether different meaning for Victorian alienists.

Her beautiful voice would be remarked upon by many as one of her most alluring qualities, whether she was speaking, singing or haranguing. As professionalism would risk social ostracism, she sang in an amateur capacity, in the drawing rooms of London, which gave her access to the bourgeois-bohemian company of painters and writers (she knew and was known by the Pre-Raphaelites and by Thackeray; her relationship with Dickens was to prove more complicated).

All her life she was reckless – offending the genteel and thumbing her nose at decorum; but what she never appeared to learn about herself was that these rebellions brought her emotional and financial damage. She enjoyed flouting rules but became distressed when the easily predictable retribution for doing so arrived. It first occurred when she was in late adolescence: a promising match with a wealthy, well-connected young man was ended abruptly by his mother when Georgina was found unchaperoned in Watts’s London studio with Lord Ward, a wealthy widower. She was afterwards unwelcome in the homes of certain families, since there could be no innocent explanation of the two being alone together where they did not expect to be discovered. This type of rejection did matter to Georgina, but she acted as though it did not.

Papa had virtually imprisoned her in the family home after this incident, but on a rare night out in 1858, at a ball, she met good-looking twenty-year-old Lieutenant William Henry Weldon of the 18th Hussars (he saw no active service). He was the son of a deceased Sheffield coal merchant, and in the brutal financial sizing-up that was the norm whenever middle- and upper-class love appeared to be kindling, Harry informed the Trehernes that he would shortly be coming into a trust fund of a couple of thousand pounds a year, that he would get another £2,000 per annum when his grandmother died, and yet another annual sum of £2,000 on the death of his mother. Papa and Mama were enraged that he had jumped the gun and written so vulgarly before being invited to present his credentials; and in any case, £10,000 a year was the lowest acceptable income for anyone hoping to marry their daughter. When Harry came into a lump sum inheritance of £7,500 on his twenty-first birthday he got through it in eighteen months – an uncharacteristically energetic act for a man who would be regarded by many as one of life’s passengers. So by the time he and Georgina met again, and decided that they still had romantic feelings for each other, Harry (‘My dear old Poomps’, as she called him; she was his ‘Tatkin’) was deep in debt – and neither his grandmother nor his mother looked set to enter the next world in the near future.

The pair married in secret on 21 April 1860, Georgina having extracted a promise from Harry that he would allow her to go on the stage and earn her own living by singing. She was instantly disowned by the Trehernes: ‘The dirty old Guv cut me off within 24 hours,’ she wrote in her diary. She never saw Papa again; becoming increasingly deranged, he was confined, and died at Dr George Fielding Blandford’s lunatic asylum at Long Ditton, Surrey, where four attendants had often been required to restrain him.

Georgina became pregnant on her honeymoon but lost the child at four months. Each successive pregnancy ended in miscarriage, and for the first time her exuberance and lust for life faltered. She and Harry seemed very much in love in the first three years of their marriage, and he was always at her bedside when the loss of each pregnancy laid her physically and emotionally low. None of her family contacted her, and she heard only indirectly that her favourite sister had died in childbirth. To add to her extreme misery, she was living in humble conditions, in a small cottage in Beaumaris, Anglesey, next door to Harry’s mother, with whom she did not get on.

The only blessing was that she did not know he had a mistress – whom he kept down in Windsor on a houseboat moored on the Thames – and would not find out for another fourteen years. She was
Annie Lowe, a dressmaker, and she bore him a son. Georgina would later claim that her miscarriages were ‘owing to his horrid ways . . . He was of disgustingly sensual habits’, suggesting that he had communicated to her a venereal infection – presumably non-syphilitic, as neither went on to develop serious symptoms.

As the likelihood of becoming a mother lessened, and the love between husband and wife began to dwindle into friendly toleration, Georgina’s musical ambitions crystallised. She had continued to be a drawing-room soprano, performing in Wales and in London during the Season, and in 1868 she decided that she also had a gift for teaching singing. Her best-informed biographer believed that her theory of music education was years ahead of its time, and Georgina persuaded Harry, who had by now come into his grandmother’s money, to purchase the lease of Tavistock House, in 1871. She later claimed that the leasehold was paid for largely from her own savings and earnings from singing and teaching (which she was allowed to keep, following the passing of the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act); but Harry believed it was his inheritance that had allowed them to rent such a prestigious property as Tavistock House.

As Mrs Weldon would write in her 1880 work,
The Ghastly Consequences of Living in Charles Dickens’ House
, Tavistock House attracted huge amounts of unwanted attention. Dickens had lived there between 1851 and 1860, and although she never said so, Mrs Weldon may have intuited that the house was a curse on matrimony. For it was here that the Dickens marriage, already in trouble, fell to pieces, with the novelist ordering that his dressing room be converted into a separate bedroom for himself, and the door between this and Catherine Dickens’s bedroom be sealed up. It was also where he wrote
Bleak House
,
Hard Times
,
A Tale of Two Cities
and
Little Dorrit
. People came from all over the world to look at the premises and sometimes, when they knocked on the door and asked to see the interior, Mrs Weldon would oblige. One day she was alarmed to see a man’s head poking in through an open window; behind him was a heavily pregnant woman and some children. He introduced himself as Cadwalladwr Waddy, a barrister and direct descendant of Edward II. This should have been warning enough, but Mrs Weldon took the Welshman and his wife, Albertine Fanny Waddy, and the little
Waddys, all over the house and the grounds, and she chatted about her own Welsh ancestry.

Mr Waddy came back alone the following afternoon, but Mrs Weldon was busy; so he returned in the evening, with a red and a white rose intertwined and a letter addressing her as ‘The Princess of Wales’ and signed by ‘The Prince of Wales’; and then every day, bearing gifts and love letters, calling her ‘My Mountain Sylph’. He continued to write to her, insisting that they elope together to India and have a large family of Welsh royalty: ‘Dye your hair bright red and your eyebrows pink,’ he wrote, imploring her to come to Madras to ‘sit by the sad sea waves of an evening’. Rather cruelly, Mrs Weldon packaged the letters up and sent them to Albertine Fanny, who replied that her husband was indeed a madman, that she had taken the children and returned to her parents, and that she expected him to be certified soon. This episode would later be used as ammunition by Harry Weldon and the mad-doctors, even though Mrs Weldon had merely been the unwitting target of a madman’s ardour – which had all been caused by the fact that she had moved into Dickens’s house.

But she couldn’t blame it all on Boz. Where the novelist had prized domestic order and a well-organised household, Mrs Weldon made a Pandemonium of his former home. Her original plans for Tavistock House, to teach just fifteen resident girl pupils for two years, became hugely (her detractors would say grandiosely) distorted in scope, and Dear Old Poomps packed his bags after four years of it. His good-natured toleration of the goings-on at the house would be pointed up by his defenders in later years, but of course Harry did have Mrs Lowe-on-Thames and his beloved Clubland (he was a member of the Garrick) to escape to when things became too chaotic at Tavistock Square.

‘Odious calumnies’, as Mrs Weldon called them, had been bandied about in certain circles when celebrated French composer Charles Gounod came to live at Tavistock House in 1872. Novelist George Moore unkindly described Gounod as ‘a base soul, who went about pouring a kind of bath water melody down the back of every woman he met’. The fifty-four-year-old creator of the operas
Faust
(1859),
Mireille
(1864) and
Roméo et Juliette
(1867) was, in part, fleeing an unhappy marriage, and he fell passionately for ‘Mimi’, as he called
Mrs Weldon. There is no evidence that this was ever a physical relationship, but the very fact of him living beneath the Weldons’ roof for two and a half years led to scurrilous rumours. Once again, Mrs Weldon had shown lack of caution. Capturing Gounod for ‘Mrs Weldon’s National Training School of Music at Tavistock House’ had been a coup, and the academy’s profile was hugely enhanced, but then the scandal began to have an impact on pupil numbers. Despite his later complaints, Gounod found that his isolation from Parisian adulation allowed him to enter a prolific phase, with Mimi as his muse: at Tavistock House he cracked out two operas, a requiem mass, an oratorio, ten psalms and anthems, twelve choruses and sixty-three songs – all the more remarkable because in the rooms below his, squalor and tumult predominated. When Gounod told Mrs Weldon of L’Orphéon de la Ville de Paris – a government-funded singing and music school for destitute orphans – she turned her academy into ‘Mrs Weldon’s Orphanage’. She now took in abandoned or extremely poor children who found themselves renamed in commemoration either of Georgina’s Welsh roots (‘Merthyr’) or Gounod’s operatic creations (‘Sapho-Katie’, ‘Sapho-Baucis’, ‘Dagobert’, ‘Mireille’). The children were allowed a quarter of an hour’s ‘yelling’ every day, to let off steam and to loosen inhibitions as well as vocal cords. They ate no meat, and they wore no socks or shoes – to cut down the laundry bill and to avoid mess and noise. But mess and noise were sufficiently provided by Mrs Weldon’s over-indulged and inadequately house-trained pugs, Dan Tucker, Whiddles, Mittie, Tity and Jarbey. The boisterousness of the household increased with the arrival of the Rawlings – a handbell-ringing act comprising the sons and a daughter of a destitute blind accordion player from Lambeth. Mrs Weldon would come to use the Rawlings brothers as spies and emissaries in her war against those whose calumny appeared to be holding back the school’s success. This would backfire.