Award-winning historian Antonia Fraser brilliantly portrays a courageous and compassionate woman who refused to be curbed by the personal and political constraints of her time. Caroline Norton dazzled nineteenth-century society with her vivacity, her intelligence, her poetry, and in her role as an artist's muse. After her marriage in 1828 to the MP George Norton, she continued to attract friends and admirers to her salon in Westminster, which included the young Disraeli. Most prominent among her admirers was the widowed Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Racked with jealousy, George Norton took the Prime Minister to court, suing him for damages on account of his 'Criminal Conversation' (adultery) with Caroline. A dramatic trial followed. Despite the unexpected and sensational resultâacquittalâNorton was still able to legally denyCaroline access to her three children, all under seven. He also claimed her income as an author for himself, since the copyrights of a married woman belonged to her husband. Yet Caroline refused to despair. Beset by the personal cruelties perpetrated by her husband and a society whose rules were set against her, she chose to fight, not surrender. She channeled her energies in an area of much-needed reform: the rights of a married woman and specifically those of a mother. Over the next few years she campaigned tirelessly, achieving her first landmark victory with the Infant Custody Act of 1839. Provisions which are now taken for granted, such as the right of a mother to have access to her own children, owe much to Caroline, who was determined to secure justice for women at all levels of society from the privileged to the dispossessed.
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âThis is not a child I would care to meet in a dark wood!â
Richard Brinsley Sheridan on his granddaughter Caroline, 1811
THE STORY OF Caroline Norton begins, appropriately, in an atmosphere of romance. This romance was provided by the elopement of her parents to Gretna Green in order to get married in 1805.
There was also, as it happens, an element of scandal. Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan was born on 22 March 1808. Her father Tom Sheridan was involved in a legal case of âCriminal Conversationâ, or Crim. Con. (in other words, adultery) at the time of her conception and during the months of Mrs Sheridanâs pregnancy. Finally, Tom Sheridan was found guilty and condemned to pay damages to the husband for his affair with a married woman three years earlier, before he himself was married.
Returning to the atmosphere of romance, everything about the Sheridan family was romantic â unless a stern line was taken about Irish blood, that is. There was no doubt that Irish blood frequently got a bad press during this period, and continued to do so throughout Caroline Sheridanâs lifetime.
If the Irish themselves were commonly described as âbarbarousâ or barbarian, from the Latin word barbarus for stranger (although it was actually the English who were the strangers in the land), Irish blood merited a more sophisticated judgement. A great deal of charm was involved â the writer Bulwer Lytton called it âthe Irish cordiality of mannerâ â and an element of frivolity was there too. On one occasion, apologizing for her own light-heartedness at some dire moment, Caroline turned aside criticism: âForgive my jesting⌠I feel sincerely anxious for your anxiety⌠but Irish blood will dance.â1
On the other hand, the light could be suffused with dark: Caroline was well aware of the tragic history of Erin, as the land of her ancestors was sometimes known. One of her own poems, âA Dream of Erinâ, concerned a âcreature seen in thin airâ:
âTwas Erinâs genius â well her voice I know
Half wail â half music â sad but tender too
England, I call thee from a land of slaves!
Hear, tyrant sister!
Fortunately, the dream ends less tragically with the tyrant sister transformed: âEngland and Erin mingling hearts and hands.â2
Certainly, where the blood of Sheridans of Carolineâs generation was concerned, England and Ireland were mingled. An early biographer of Carolineâs celebrated grandfather, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, speculated whether âthat singular compound of brilliancy, mercurial temper, carelessness, and solid and enduring hard workâ was not due to the mixture of English and Irish blood.3 Carolineâs grandmother, his lovely actress wife Elizabeth Ann Linley, was English. And significantly, as we will see, Carolineâs own mother â the wife of Tom Sheridan, the former Henrietta Callander â was actually Scottish. Despite being born in Dublin, she was brought up in Scotland among her relations, part of a Lowland Scottish family.
The result was that Caroline would grow up with a particular love of Scotland, which she came to know early on in her life. (Her first visit to Ireland came much later.) Over the years, she began to associate Scotland with tranquillity. As she wrote of Pitlochry in the Highlands late in life, after driving there in âsweet chequered moonlightâ, there was still peace âsomewhere in the worldâ. Yet Caroline still considered herself, like all the Sheridans, to be Irish, âan Irish disembodied spiritâ, as she put it to an intimate friend at a low point in her dramatic story, when she confessed herself as feeling at a distance from her life, caring about nothing.4
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal among other plays, manager and owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, Whig MP from 1780 onwards, friend of Charles James Fox and bon viveur beloved in the dissolute circle around the Prince of Wales, was born in Dublin in 1751. Although his last years had been harassed by debts once he lost his protective parliamentary seat, when he died in London in 1816 he was buried in Poetsâ Corner, Westminster Abbey â a measure of his celebrity.
Despite this fame, the strong dramatic connection meant that his descendants had a whiff of the stage about them, along with an impressive reputation for brilliance: âthe transmission of talent from generation to generation in the Sheridan family is really wonderful,â wrote William Maginn, the editor of Fraserâs Magazine, who was not always so complimentary about others.5 But the connection to the stage at this period was not considered to be totally respectable: George Canning, for example, the Tory politician who became Prime Minister in 1827, was sneered at for having an actress mother.
Richard Brinsley Sheridanâs own marriage to Elizabeth Linley began with an elopement when he was twenty-one (which would turn out to be something of a Sheridan habit). Tom Sheridan, the father of Caroline, was their son. He fully shared the charm and talent to amuse for which the great playwright was famous in society. Disraeliâs father, having known both Sheridans, told Carolineâs sister Helen in 1833 that while her grandpapa was certainly a very amusing old gentleman, it was her father Tom that âI have not forgottenâ; his gaiety, like a fountain, was at the same time âsparkling and ceaselessâ.6
Richard Brinsley Sheridan also had a son, Charles, by a subsequent marriage following the death of Elizabeth Linley â Carolineâs half-uncle. A man of great charm and a diplomat who was âan enchanting companionâ, Charles Sheridan had a house in Mayfair and was thus able to help her at a vital moment in her life.
Another important aspect of Carolineâs family was its writing tradition, which included the women as well as the celebrated playwright himself. Women writers were part of the literary landscape at this time: the bestselling writers of the period were in fact women such as Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot. The most famous example today, Jane Austen, published four novels in the first years of Carolineâs life, including Pride and Prejudice in 1813, when Caroline would have been five. Richard Brinsley Sheridanâs mother had been a writer. Her own mother, Mrs Sheridan, wrote poetry and several novels including Carwell (1830) and Oonagh Lynch (1833). Early on in her life it was natural for Caroline, in turn, to believe that she was a writer.
The younger Sheridans already had a two-year-old son, Brinsley, to whom the Prince of Wales was godfather, when Caroline was born. There would be two further boys, Frank and Charlie, born in 1815 and 1817 respectively, who lived to adulthood, Charlie being described by the actress Fanny Kemble admiringly in a general encomium on the Sheridan family as âa sort of younger brother of Apollo Belvedereâ.7 Another brother, Tommy, died as a young midshipman in the Navy at the age of fifteen, inspiring lines in Carolineâs later poems:8
He hath fallen asleep â that beautiful boyâŚ
Blow, ye loud winds! roll on, thou restless main!
For he we loved will never sail again!
It was, however, Carolineâs two sisters who were the vital elements in her family story, not only as a child but for the rest of her life. The closeness began with their births: all three girls were born within three years: Helen on 18 January 1807 and Georgiana, known as Georgia, on 5 November 1809, with Caroline, on 22 March 1808, in the middle.
The spectacle of three good-looking sisters â inevitably described as Graces â has always provoked an ecstatic reaction in observers: the Sheridans were no exception to this rule. In 1833, when they were in their twenties, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon exclaimed in his Diary: âI never saw three such beautiful women, so perfectly without the airs of Beauty â unaffected, witty, aimable [sic], bewitching, wickedly mischievous, and innocently wicked.â Charles Dickens, who knew them, described the three women as âsights for the Gods, as they always have beenâ. Caroline herself was known to reflect complacently, looking round a drawing room âresplendent with the light of Sheridan beauty male and femaleâ: âYes, we are rather a good-looking family.â9
In this case, the Irish blood added a piquancy to the contemporary picture of the Graces. They quickly earned a reputation for being amusing, not always in a respectable manner. As early as 1827, when the sisters were comparatively new to society, Lady Cowper, the lover and later wife of Lord Palmerston, reported that the Sheridans were much admired; but they were âstrange girls, [who] swear and say all sorts of things to make the men laughâ. She also expressed surprise that âa woman as Mrs Sheridan should let them go on soâ. The explanation was cynical, if not Sheridan-phobic: âI suppose she cannot stop the old blood coming out.â10
What frequently followed was the rating of the individual women compared to each other. Georgia generally won on sheer looks, a judgement confirmed by a story that the Emperor of Russia asked her to sit still for two minutes so that he might just look at her: âas he should never see anything so beautiful againâ.11
Helen was generally awarded the prize for grace and gentle charm, in Haydonâs words again, âa most enchanting creature, great talent, and yet not masculineâ: a sincere compliment at that time which, as we shall see, her sister Caroline did not always receive. Yet even she was described as having âa share of egotism like all the blood of Sheridanâ. It was the young Benjamin Disraeli who was the recipient of Helenâs mock-modest description of the three sisters: âshe told me she was nothing. âYou see Georgyâs the beauty, and Carryâs the wit and I ought to be the good one and am not.ââ12
What, then, of Caroline? There was from the first something strange, mysterious even, about Caroline Sheridan long before she was transformed into Caroline Norton. How much of it was based on her undeniably exotic appearance, is impossible to quantify; yet it must have played its part, since even in infancy it aroused startled reactions: âa queer dark-looking little baby,â in the words of her own mother. As an adult, the unusual cast of her beauty would call forth admiring comments. In 1839, the distinguished American lawyer Charles Sumner wrote that there was something âtropicalâ (his italics) in her look: âit is so intensely bright and burning.â13 But the enormous, heavy-lidded dark eyes, black brows and thick lustrous dark hair, which in an adult would arouse admiring comparisons to Greek, Italian, even biblical beauty, made her a strange-looking child where she had been an odd-looking baby.
Caroline actually resembled her father Tom strongly. Richard Brinsley Sheridan had what were described as âfine eyesâ. These looks may have been inherited from his mother, Frances Chamberlaine, whose eyes were âremarkably fine and very dark, corresponding with the colour of her hair which was very blackâ. Frances would also have a âhighâ complexion in later years, a quality her great-granddaughter inherited, while there was another similarity with âthe fairness and beauty of her bust, neck and arms [which] were allowed to have seldom been rivalledâ.14
Whether he recognized the dark eyes of his own mother or not, Richard Brinsley Sheridan made a somewhat equivocal pronouncement when presented with his three-year-old granddaughter towards the end of his life: âThis is not a child I would care to meet in a dark wood!â It is to be hoped he recognized a quality of strength, as well as an unexpected threat, in the tiny girl. In the dark woods which lay ahead for the future Caroline Norton, she would certainly need strength.15
The Sheridans as a family undoubtedly had glamour. But they did not have money. That is to say, as a generalization, Sheridans did not have a lucky touch with money. Richard Brinsley Sheridanâs debts, which have been mentioned, were a feature of his colourful life. There were no great landed estates, or indeed much land at all, where rents and produce would have provided for their way of life. Tom Sheridan was also plagued by debts.
Mrs Sheridan, the former Henrietta Callander, was delightful and talented according to all reports, if somewhat more reserved than her daughters; she was still âvery young and prettyâ in her fifties, in the words of one observer, the youthful Disraeli.16 Her elopement with Tom, however, had been for love, not money. Where Tomâs daughters were concerned, this lack of substantial funding was one factor in their potential marriages. They were certainly not in that highly desirable marital category of heiresses; on the contrary, the dowries that would come with them were liable to be essentially modest. This made the other factors â beauty, grace and the unquantifiable element of sex appeal â of vital importance.
In Carolineâs childhood, the first entry into the dark wood came as a result of her fatherâs debts. His efforts to become an MP were unsuccessful. In 1806, Richard Brinsley Sheridan secured him a non-residential post connected to Ireland in the Whig ministry shortly before it fell. But the Sheridan finances tied up in the Drury Lane Theatre went from bad to worse. Tom Sheridan ...
