Caroline Sheridan Norton

Artist Info

Caroline Sheridan NortonLondon, 1808 - 1877, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50081515

Norton [née Sheridan], Caroline Elizabeth Sarah [other married name Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Stirling Maxwell, Lady Stirling Maxwell] (1808–1877), author and law reform campaigner, was born in London on 22 March 1808, the second of the three daughters of Thomas Sheridan (1775–1817), colonial official, and his wife, Caroline Henrietta Callender (1779–1851) [see Sheridan, Caroline Henrietta], novelist. She had four brothers. The Sheridan inheritance was a flamboyant one: her paternal grandparents were the dramatist, politician, and sometime friend of the prince regent Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his first wife, the celebrated singer Elizabeth Linley. But the family finances were perilous, especially after the destruction by fire in 1809 of the Drury Lane theatre, which R. B. Sheridan owned, and in 1813 Caroline's parents and her eldest sister, Helen [see Hay, Helen Selina], went to the Cape of Good Hope, where her father was colonial treasurer. He died at the Cape, of consumption, and the rest of the family was reunited in England. Mrs Sheridan's small pension was enhanced by the royal gift of a grace-and-favour apartment in Hampton Court Palace, but the overwhelming sense of poverty narrowly averted, together with the need to keep up an aristocratic lifestyle on a tiny income, was, along with a clannish sense of family loyalty, the defining characteristic of Caroline's childhood.

A ‘passionate and self-willed child’ (Acland, 22), Caroline Sheridan was considered plain and difficult by her mother. She displayed early literary tendencies, at the age of eleven writing and illustrating The Dandies' Rout (a pastiche on the popular series of ‘Dandy’ books), which was published by John Marshall in 1820. In 1824, finding her sixteen-year-old daughter too difficult to manage, Mrs Sheridan sent her to a boarding-school at Shalford, Surrey. Through family connection the girls at the school were invited to Wonersh Park, the seat of the local landowner, Lord Grantley. Caroline, whose early plainness had blossomed into a dark-eyed, dark-haired, southern European style of flamboyant beauty, caught the eye of Grantley's brother George Chapple Norton (1800–1875), and he informed her governess of his intention to propose marriage to her. Caroline was speedily returned to her mother.

Marriage à la mode

Caroline Sheridan was brought out into London society in 1826 with her elder sister, Helen. But though all three Sheridan sisters were popular, witty, beautiful—and slightly shocking to the staid—there were no queues of suitors waiting to marry the portionless girls, who were nicknamed the ‘Three Graces’. At the end of their first season Helen married the equally penniless Captain Price Blackwood, heir to Lord Dufferin, against his family's wishes, but Caroline remained unattached. Her second season drawing to a close without matrimonial success (and with her younger, more beautiful sister Georgiana about to make her own début), she accepted the renewed proposals of George Norton, and they were married on 30 June 1827 at St George's, Hanover Square.

The marriage was a disaster from the outset. Two less compatible individuals would have been hard to find. Norton was slow, rather dull, jealous, and obstinate; Caroline was quick-witted, vivacious, flirtatious, and egotistical. Moreover the Sheridans were convinced whigs, the Nortons tories. Soon after returning from their honeymoon Caroline found that her slower-tongued husband resorted to physical violence to end their disputes. Money was to be the cause of frequent arguments between the couple. Norton, although an MP and a barrister, lived mostly on his expectations of inheriting the family property from his childless brother, and was both indolent and mean. He was a desultory commissioner in bankruptcy under the tory administrations of the 1820s, but having lost his seat in parliament in 1830, he resigned his commissionership in the following year in the expectation that it would fall victim to the retrenchment plans of the new whig government. He then permitted his wife to solicit an appointment for him from her friends in the new ministry; in 1831 Lord Melbourne, the home secretary, made him a stipendiary magistrate, with a salary of £1000 a year. To supplement the family budget Caroline sought a publisher for The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829), a lengthy narrative poem about the tragic downfall of a seduced and abandoned woman, written some years earlier; it was highly praised in Blackwood's Magazine (vol. 48, April 1830) and the profits met the expenses incurred by the births of her first son, Fletcher, in 1829. Two further sons, (Thomas) Brinsley and William, were born in 1831 and 1833, respectively. Caroline began to write in earnest, but though Norton was willing to accept his wife's income he resented the imputation that he could not provide for his family, disliked the social prominence that her literary work gave to his wife, and came to loathe her Sheridan family connections. Caroline in turn, bored by her husband, frustrated by their financial limitations, disliking and disliked by his family, threw herself into literary society.

The Byron of our modern poetesses

Caroline followed up the success of The Sorrows of Rosalie with another lengthy narrative poem, based on the legend of the wandering Jew, The Undying One and Other Poems (1830), which also was favourably received. Her The Dream and Other Poems (1840) was in a similar, high-Romantic vein, and in reviewing it H. N. Coleridge described her as ‘the Byron of our modern poetesses. She has very much of that intense personal passion ... She also has Byron's beautiful intervals of tenderness, his strong practical thought, and his forceful expression’ (Quarterly Review, 66, June 1840, 374–418).

A Voice from the Factories (1836) and The Child of the Islands (1845) showed Norton writing a very different type of poetry, in the condition-of-England genre. In obvious reference to her own difficulties these volumes focused on the plight of working-class children, whose desperate lives were portrayed in realistic detail and contrasted with the callous greed of the factory owners and upper classes. The later narrative poem (almost a verse-novel) The Lady of La Garaye (1862) continues the strategy of comparison and contrast: a fine lady, injured in an accident, devotes herself to philanthropy and finds joy in relieving the sufferings of others.

Norton published her first novels in 1835, as her marriage was deteriorating. The Wife and Woman's Reward were issued together anonymously. Both were autobiographical and address the themes of women's powerlessness in marriage and men's abuse of domestic power. The narrator of the latter, observing that the heroine's eventual consolations may seem insufficient to the reader, remarks despondently: ‘I do not recollect any instances of poetical justice in real life’ (vol. 3, p. 213). Norton's poetry and prose were well received, but she derived most of her income from contributions to magazines and periodicals (including Fraser's Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, and Macmillan's Magazine), and from editing several annuals, beginning with La Belle Assemblée and Court Magazine (1832–7) and including The Keepsake (1836) and Fisher's Drawing Room Scrapbook (1846–9). She wrote prolifically, and her output included children's fiction, short stories, song adaptations, and a play, The Gypsy Father, produced at Covent Garden in May 1831. Her financial need was pressing, and if quality was sacrificed to quantity there can be no doubting the seriousness of her labours. Hers was, she wrote, ‘a life of incessant occupation: I have written day after day, and night after night, without intermission; I provided for myself by means of my literary engagements; I provided for my children by means of my literary engagements’ (Acland, 99).

It was not all work, however. Norton's literary and artistic circle included Benjamin Disraeli, who based the character of Berengaria Montford in Endymion on her; Fanny Kemble, the actress, whose later marital difficulties resembled Caroline's; and Charles Dickens, whose Pickwick Papers contains references in its trial scene to the more ludicrous episodes of George Norton's subsequent legal action against Lord Melbourne. A frequent house guest of the poet Samuel Rogers and a regular correspondent of Mary Shelley, Caroline Norton was also the reputed literary model for Alfred Tennyson's Princess Ida in The Princess (1847) and for several of William Thackeray's heroines. Thomas Moore's poem ‘Summer Fete’ (1831) was dedicated to her.

Lord Melbourne and criminal conversation

Caroline Norton was too flamboyant to integrate fully into aristocratic society: her background was too eccentric, her personality too dramatic, her literary activities too unusual for women of her class. Women in particular were suspicious of her, and she never escaped the damning charge of vulgarity, of deliberately seeking to shock, ‘affecting to be so much more wicked than there is the slightest call for’ (Mitchell, 221). But she entranced men, among them Lord Melbourne, whom she had first approached at the behest of her husband in his quest for a patronage appointment. With the acquiescence of Norton, Melbourne—prime minister from 1834—became a regular visitor at their house in Storey's Gate. The public humiliations of Melbourne's marriage with Lady Caroline Lamb had ended with her death in 1828, but he was left with a dubious reputation where women were concerned. By 1834 Caroline's own reputation was thoroughly compromised, while her husband was regarded by society as complaisant towards her affairs provided that her lovers were in a position to advance his own interests. Her friendship with Melbourne was probably platonic but it was certainly unwise: Norton's brother and his tory associates were keen to make political capital out of it, and Norton himself came to see it as a potential source of income. The relationship between the Nortons had deteriorated rapidly; in 1835 Caroline was refused access to their house and her children were sent away. A private separation was discussed but Norton insisted on custody of the children and refused to make a financial settlement with his wife. Over the next few years he regularly offered access to the children in exchange for reducing or removing his financial liabilities towards Caroline. In June 1836 Norton brought a case for criminal conversation between Melbourne and his wife to the courts, suing Melbourne for £10,000 in damages for adultery. (Such a case was a necessary preliminary for a successful action for divorce.) The case, which naturally generated great interest, was dismissed in a matter of hours; the jury, asked to put the worst possible construction on the most innocent of written communications from the prime minister, found that Norton's witnesses were unreliable. Melbourne was not called to give evidence; as a married woman Caroline was legally disbarred from doing so, even in her own defence. The trial over, Melbourne offered Caroline financial support but disengaged himself from the friendship as quickly and as completely as possible. Without the protection of husband or lover she found herself in a precarious position—childless and penniless. Only the kindness of Harriet, duchess of Sutherland, who took her for a drive in her carriage in London in a public display of support, prevented her from being completely ostracized by respectable society.

The custody of infants

The Nortons' marriage was effectively ended in 1835 but, the action for criminal conversation having failed, there was no possibility of a divorce. George Norton, activated less by interest in his children's welfare than by a desire to cause his wife pain and to secure the least onerous financial settlement, took full advantage of the law, which vested custody of children in their father, and took his three sons away to Yorkshire. Enraged and distraught, Caroline began a campaign to change the law, using the political contacts that she had made in the preceding decade. She published a pamphlet, Observations on the natural claim of the mother to the custody of her infant children: as affected by the common law rights of the father (1837), and Sergeant (Thomas Noon) Talfourd was persuaded to introduce a child custody bill in the House of Commons. The bill failed but Caroline kept up her lobbying (three further pamphlets on the subject are attributed to her pen), and in 1839 the Infant Custody Act was passed, with the support of Talfourd in the Commons and Lord Lyndhurst in the Lords. This act gave custody of children under seven to the mother (provided she had not been proven in court to have committed adultery) and established the right of the non-custodial parent to access to the child. The act was the first piece of legislation to undermine the patriarchal structures of English law and has subsequently been hailed as the first success of British feminism in gaining equal rights for women. But Caroline Norton was no feminist: in 1838 she wrote to The Times that ‘The natural position of woman is inferiority to man ... I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality’ (Stone, 363). She did not seek ‘women's rights’ but rather to redress a grievous wrong: ‘in proportion to the inferiority and helplessness of their [women's] position towards men, should be the generosity and forbearance exercised towards them by men’ (The Times, 19 Aug 1838). But the change of law brought no relief for Caroline; it applied only in England and Wales, and Norton promptly removed the children to Scotland. Disputes over access to the children were only resolved in 1842, after the youngest son, William, died in Scotland, having contracted blood poisoning after a fall from a pony. Thereafter the two remaining sons, Fletcher and Brinsley, spent half the year with their mother in London.

Years of respite

The issue of custody more or less resolved, the Norton feud slipped into abeyance during the 1840s. After July 1845 Caroline lived alone, without female companionship or chaperonage, at 3 Chesterfield Street, London, where she continued to entertain guests and to wield her ready pen; this unusual arrangement kept gossip swirling about her. She had been presented at court in May 1840 by her sister Lady Seymour, which ostensibly restored her good name and position in society, but she remained a slightly dangerous person to know. Caroline had apparent freedom but her tie to Norton ultimately isolated her. It is impossible to establish the nature of her relationship with the Peelite politician Sidney Herbert between 1841 and 1845 but it seems likely at least that she was in love with him and that he was fascinated by her; gossips linked their names more closely. When in December 1845 The Times informed its readers that Sir Robert Peel's cabinet had changed its mind about the corn laws the source of the leak was widely believed to have been Caroline Norton, indiscreetly passing on information received from her lover. In fact Lord Aberdeen had been the source. This slander was famously repeated by George Meredith in Diana of the Crossways (1884), a novel that bore many resemblances to the details of Caroline's life. The affair with Herbert—if that is what it was—ended with his marriage in August 1846.

With their eldest son launched on a career in the diplomatic service Norton demanded a revision of his and Caroline's deed of separation. Once more under pressure, Caroline agreed to his terms, which were for a reduced annual allowance to her of £500 and, crucially and unenforceably, an agreement that she should be liable for her own debts for the preceding ten and all subsequent years. She spent 1849 abroad with Fletcher, who had become ill during his posting to Lisbon, and returned home in 1850 to nurse her mother. In this year she also met William Stirling of Keir (1818–1878) [see Maxwell, Sir William Stirling], a noted book collector and art historian, who in 1865 succeeded his uncle in a Scottish baronetcy. They formed a close friendship that was not interrupted by his marriage in 1865 and the births of his two sons.

Caroline Norton's main literary venture of this period was her second novel, Stuart of Dunleath: a Story of Modern Times (1851). The tribulations of its heroine, Eleanor Raymond—who marries a man she does not love to provide for herself and her mother, and suffers brutish behaviour under him that includes the deaths of her sons in an avoidable accident—owed much to incidents in Caroline's own life; in particular the heroine's refusal of the nobleman who encourages her to divorce her husband and marry him carries wistful echoes of Caroline's relationship with Sidney Herbert. It proved popular with audiences and reviewers.

Married women's property

In June 1851 Caroline's mother died. By her death George Norton became possessed of a life interest in Caroline's share of her father's small estate, while Caroline was left £480 a year by her mother. Norton immediately reduced—almost stopped—his own annual payments to Caroline, telling her that the settlement of 1848 was not binding. She had no redress but to break her own side of that agreement by referring her creditors to her husband. She was abroad in 1852 and early 1853, but on her return home she was flung once more into public warfare with him. Their children grown up, this time the source of contention was explicitly financial, and the full injustice of the laws of property as applied to married women was brought home to Caroline.

As the law stood in 1853 a married woman had no legal right to own property in her own name at all. She had no legal identity, which meant she could neither sue nor be sued. She could not make contracts. She could neither receive legacies nor make a will. She had no right to any earnings that she might acquire. The complicated law of trusts had been devised in part to allow wealthy women to retain some independent income after marriage, but trusts had to be specifically drawn up. Deeds of separation had weight in law, allowing an officially separated wife an income and relieving the separated husband from liability for his wife's debts, if they were signed by guarantors. But, as Caroline discovered in 1853, the deed of 1848 that she had agreed with Norton had not been guaranteed. As such he was entitled to her mother's legacy and indeed to the money that she had made by her writing. Caroline took legal advice and allowed her creditors to sue Norton. The case Thrupp v. Norton (in which Thrupp was suing for the costs of repairs to Caroline's carriage) was heard in Westminster court on 18 August 1853. Norton had subpoenaed all his wife's financial papers, among which he discovered that Melbourne had left her a small legacy in 1848. He made great play of this in court, bringing forward again all the old slander about Caroline's relationship with Melbourne. She defended herself vigorously, to cheers in the courtroom, but the court found for Norton on a technicality. Caroline's verdict, ‘I do not ask for my rights. I have no rights; I have only wrongs’ (Acland, 198), was greeted with renewed applause.

Incensed by the reporting of the case, which emphasized once more the Melbourne connection, Caroline wrote to The Times on 20 August to correct Norton's courtroom statements. He replied, and for some weeks the dirty linen of their marriage and financial affairs dominated the letter columns of the paper. It was an unedifying spectacle, which aroused some sympathy for Caroline, but it was a more profound embarrassment that the issues should be discussed in public at all. Caroline did not confine herself to bemoaning her lot and airing past wrongs (though she did both). She was able to see beyond her own situation to the legal position of married women in general, and began to campaign for changes in the law relating to married women's property rights. Her first salvo was a privately printed pamphlet, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854). In it she rehearsed her own grievances at exhaustive length; the public, grown weary of her tribulations, paid it little heed. Shortly after its publication Lord Cranworth brought a bill forward in the House of Lords to reform the marriage and divorce laws; Caroline responded with A Letter to the Queen on Lord Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855), which argued the case for property rights for divorced and separated women. Many of her proposals and arguments were accepted and embedded in the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), which relieved many of the wrongs to which Caroline had been subjected.

Caroline Norton was not the only campaigner for women's property rights but she had little contact with the emergent organizations that were concerned with women's rights. The predominantly middle-class campaigns of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Lydia Becker were aimed at property rights for all women, and they themselves considered Caroline's campaign a selfishly motivated distraction from the real goal of establishing property rights for all married women. They were further embarrassed by her doubtful reputation for sexual propriety, while Caroline had no time for a general assault on the relations between men and women; the distancing between them was mutual.

Lost and Saved

Alongside the anxieties induced by Caroline's battles with Norton were worries about her sons. Brinsley had inherited the Sheridan taste for excess and, having left Oxford in debt, married an Italian peasant girl whom he met on Capri. They had a son and daughter, who lived for much of the time with their grandmother, perhaps compensating her in some measure for the lost childhoods of her own sons. Fletcher, like Brinsley, had poor health, and in 1859 died in the British embassy at Paris, of consumption. Caroline continued to write, publishing the poem The Lady of La Garaye in 1862 and her third novel, Lost and Saved, in 1863. The latter, with its theme of the sexual morality—and immorality—of the upper classes, was found too frank by many reviewers at the time but by the end of the twentieth century it was generally considered Norton's best work, showing her considerable skill in portraying believable characters and a grim, satirical humour. Her last novel, Old Sir Douglas (1867), continued the semi-autobiographical line, this time concentrating her attack on the sisters and other female connections of her heroine's husband; Norton had always been fortified in his attacks on his wife by his sister Lady Menzies and his relative Margaret Vaughan.

This was Caroline's last really creative flurry. She continued her literary hack-work, reviewing and writing for magazines and periodicals, but her energy was flagging. She had after a fashion won the long struggle against Norton, who was at last compelled by law to make her regular maintenance payments, but it had left her embittered and contentious, liable to depression, fits of rage, and constant harping on old grudges. Her beauty had lasted well, and into late middle age she retained her lustrous black hair and elegant neck: ‘I shall be handsome, even in my coffin,’ she remarked (Chedzoy, 255). The Sheridans remained faithful to her to the last: she spent much of her time travelling between the houses of her sisters, Lady Dufferin and the duchess of Somerset, and her brother Brinsley Sheridan; she visited her son and his family in Capri as often as she could; and she made an annual visit to Sir William Stirling Maxwell and his family at Keir, in Stirlingshire, Scotland.

Death continued to take its toll of her family and friends: in 1867 her sister Helen died, and in May 1875 she received word that George Norton had died at Wonersh Park. Even in death he managed to spite his wife, narrowly predeceasing his brother and thus denying her the title Lady Grantley. Grantley himself died in August, and Caroline's invalid son, Brinsley, succeeded as fourth Baron Grantley. Caroline became seriously ill and was virtually confined to a wheelchair in her home in Chesterfield Street for eighteen months. It was there that Sir William Stirling Maxwell (whose wife, Lady Anna, had died tragically in an accident in 1874) proposed to her in February 1877 and married her on 1 March 1877. The marriage was greeted with surprise in many quarters: Mrs Norton, who had spent her whole life battling against the restrictions of marriage, was willingly entering that state again. But conditions in 1877 were vastly different from those of fifty years earlier, thanks in no small part to her own efforts, while she and Maxwell had a long history of friendship as the basis of their relationship. And marriage would free Caroline from the burden of her over-famous name: as Lady Stirling Maxwell she had anonymity, a release from the past. With her new husband she made plans to visit Scotland and Capri, but in the fourth month of her marriage she was suddenly taken ill, and died at her new London home, 10 Upper Grosvenor Street, on 15 June 1877. She was buried in the Stirling Maxwell vault at Lecropt church, near Keir. She was soon joined by her husband, who died in Venice on 15 January 1878, on his way home from Capri; Brinsley Norton had died five weeks after his mother, leaving his son, John Richard Norton, to become fifth Baron Grantley.

Caroline Norton was an extraordinary woman by any account. Fascinating, beautiful, witty, intelligent, and charming, she was also temperamental and difficult to live with. As a writer her natural talent was perhaps overwhelmed by the financial pressures on her to produce quantity rather than quality. Lady Eastlake wrote ‘her talents are of the highest order, and she has carefully cultivated them ... She still has only talents; genius she has nothing of, or of the nature of genius’ (Perkins, 254). Of her copious short poetry ‘The Arab's Farewell to his Steed’ (1830), ‘Bingen on the Rhine’, and ‘I do not love thee’ (1829), among others, were consistently anthologized, and at the end of the twentieth century Norton benefited from the general flowering of interest in women writers and poets. Her public admission of the failure of her marriage and her campaigns for legal reform led to her adoption by twentieth-century feminists as one of their early forebears, a designation that she strenuously rebutted in her own lifetime: she sought to redress wrongs, not to assert rights.

K. D. Reynolds

Sources

A. Acland, Caroline Norton (1948) · J. G. Perkins, The life of Mrs Norton (1909) · A. Chedzoy, A scandalous woman: the story of Caroline Norton (1992) · J. O. Hodge and C. Olney, The letters of Caroline Norton to Lord Melbourne (1974) · L. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 (1997) · L. Stone, The road to divorce: England, 1530–1987 (1990) · L. Holcombe, Wives and property: reform of the married women's property law in nineteenth-century England (1983) · M. Poovey, Uneven developments: the ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian Britain (1988) · Blain, Clements & Grundy, Feminist comp. · P. R. Feldman, ed., British women poets of the Romantic era: an anthology (1997) · O. Banks, The biographical dictionary of British feminists, 1 (1985) · Burke, Peerage (1939) · GEC, Peerage · H. J. Spencer, ‘Norton, George Chapple’, HoP, Commons, 1820–32 [draft] · Morning Post (18 May 1840) · private information (2014) [D. Latané]