DISASTROUS MRS. WELDON, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Born to fanatically snobbish Victorian parents, Georgina
Weldon grew up to wreak havoc on almost everyone she met. She was
supposed to marry well and restore the family fortune, but soon
proved to have other ideas. Her scandalous affair with a married
man and her defiant marriage to the less-than-prosperous young
hussar officer Harry Weldon were just the first signs that she was
no ordinary girl. In a plot that could have been constructed by
Dickens himself, Georgina acquired a string of lovers, was stung by
con artists, betrayed by her parents, and narrowly escaped being
committed to a mental institution. She rose to the challenge and
became one of the first Victorian women to represent herself in
court and later helped to overturn England’s infamous Lunacy Laws.
Like the best Victorian novels, The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon marries
the adventures of an intrepid protagonist with delightfully
revealing glimpses of Victorian society. A tale of sex and scandal,
bravado and bravery, Mrs. Weldon’s life is wild, wicked, and
totally irresistible.

　　Brian Thompson has written for the stage,
radio, television, and is the author of four novels. He divides his
time between Oxford, England, and the South of France.

　　[Mrs. Weldons] story is so fantastically melodramatic that it
might have been penned by one of the sensationalist novelists so
popular among her Victorian contemporaries. Publishers Weekly
　　Elegant in style, at once sensational and substantial in content,
this book is a surprise and a delight.
Lucy Hughes-Hallet, London Sunday Times
　　If it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Mrs. Weldons
disastrous career, it is impossible not to admire the splendor of
her ambitions and the sheer hubris of a woman who could bring
twenty-five cases to court in a single year and represent herself
in twenty-two of them.
Miranda Seymour, London Times Literary Supplement
— Review

　　1
　　Georgina Weldon was never quite the performer and entertainer nor
the grand lady or talked-about social lioness she so fondly
invented for her readers. Her story starts with parents and a
childhood of such a cranky nature they must be examined with the
care she gave to later episodes of her life. Her troubles started
the day she was born, when she was presented with a mask fashioned
for her by parents who were the kind that could not distinguish
easily between the truth and a lie.
　　She came into the world on May 24, 1837. All day long the London
streets were filled with people, running to see the Life Guards
pass by or hanging on the Hyde Park railings to gawp or jeer at the
rich. The greatest aristocratic houses in England were represented
by the comings and goings of their lumbering and oversprung
coaches, issuing from the squares about Mayfair and Belgravia. In
the tens of thousands that milled about on foot there was that
strange unvoiced sense of the exceptional that sometimes
characterizes how mobs behave. Londoners normally turned out in
such numbers only to riot or exhibit their feral curiosity–a
fortnight earlier, for example, twenty thousand had gathered at
Newgate to watch the murderer Greenacre hanged. Today the mood was
different. The word “sightseer” was a brand-new coinage and exactly
suited the occasion. Placid and orderly citizens of all classes
wandered down the Mall to inspect the newly completed but
untenanted Buckingham Palace, where it was said few of the thousand
windows would open and many of the doors were jammed in their
frames by green timber and shoddy workmanship. Directly in front of
the palace squatted the enormous and foreign-looking Marble Arch,
on top of which was to have stood an equestrian statue of George
IV, a piece of triumphalism only averted by his death and the
colossal overspend on the whole project.
　　There were many such examples of the new and the bold to gaze on.
London, in its West End, was being almost entirely remodeled.
Ancient lanes and houses had been pulled down and green fields
obliterated. Behind Buckingham Palace the ingenious Mr. Cubitt was
bringing soil from his excavation of St. Katherine’s Dock at Tower
Bridge along a canal that cut up from the Thames to the site of the
present Victoria station. His purpose was to fill the marshy land
round about and complete the building of Belgravia for his client,
Lord Grosvenor. It was the showpiece of property development in the
entire city. Filling marshes and leveling huge tracts were becoming
commonplace in that part of London. Thomas Cubitt’s plans for
neighboring Pimlico involved the wholesale tearing up of ancient
market gardens: farms, even rivers, were not to stand in his way.
Though it was true the speculation in property was running into
something of a slump, the check was only temporary. The scale of
new building in the capital was greater than anything seen before.
For a brief moment this sunny Wednesday, London stood still and
took stock of itself.
　　For the nobility it was an important working day, and most of
those who peered from their coaches were in court dress. They were
summoned in celebration of Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday,
which began with the formalities of an audience in the Drawing Room
at Kensington Palace. It was an occasion of the greatest
significance, for under the constitutional arrangements made for
her the Princess at last burst free from the clutches of her
mother, the regent. Those people of rank who attended the young
Victoria that morning witnessed a telling little piece of theater.
One of the many visitors she received was the Lord Chamberlain, who
had ridden from Windsor with a letter from the King. The Duchess of
Kent held out her hand to receive it on behalf of her daughter.
Lord Conyngsby ignored the gesture and very pointedly gave the
letter direct to the Princess. What was long promised had now
become fact: the next monarch would be this almost unknown,
unmarried young woman. As everyone understood, her accession was
not far off. George IV had been fifty-eight when at last he became
King, and his brother William IV succeeded him at age sixty-five.
The taint of madness and scandal hung over both reigns. If God
should spare Victoria, Britain could anticipate a profoundly
different future.
　　As soon as she was old enough to understand, Georgina’s father
harped on the connection between these great events and her own
birth. There was nothing particularly teasing about it either. Both
parents made so much of the coincidence that she confessed later,
“it filled my childish fancy with a vague idea of superiority and
relationship with the Royal Family.” Such ideas, which are normally
no more than a harmless family joke, are supposed to wane with the
passing of time; unfortunately, this one stuck. Georgina was to
live her whole life with the unquantifiable feeling of superiority
derived from that day. Encouraged by her manically snobbish
parents, she was, she believed, blessed by greatness in some way:
at the very least born to a rank in society that furnished its own
recommendations and needed no apology or explanation. She was a
full part of the old aristocratic supremacy, and the same gentle
zephyrs that blew on Victoria’s reign would also fill her sails.
When things turned out rather differently–and it would be hard to
imagine two less compatible Victorian histories than those of the
monarch and her subject–then the fault lay not in her, but in
other people.
　　It was certainly a wonderful day on which to be born. All England
was en fate. The King lay at Windsor, unloved and unregarded, while
at Kensington Palace his niece received twenty-two loyal addresses
delivered by hand from every part of the country. In the evening
hundreds of noble guests attended a state ball, where there was
much quizzing of the short and excitable Victoria, who showed her
gums rather a lot when she laughed. Once again, the King was
conspicuous by his absence. Wellington had attended George IV in
his last days and with his usual brutal candor let it be known
around the room that the brother was in even worse plight. Lit by
hundreds of candles, the noblest in the land gossiped on the white
and gilt chairs set for their comfort. The sole topic of
conversation was the future Queen.
　　Morgan Thomas and his heavily pregnant wife, Louisa, rode around
London in their carriage that balmy May day, soaking up the
atmosphere. Far from being at the center of things, they had no
part to play and were not invited indoors to any great house: they
were faces in the crowd. True, Morgan had a stare that could
shatter glass and a coat in the old-fashioned color described as
“King’s blue.” His wife wore a bonnet in which a plume danced as
proudly as any other lady’s, but their carriage would have given
them away. There was a useful phrase in vogue to describe the
aristocratic predominance: men and women of rank spoke of
themselves as the Upper Ten Thousand. Morgan and his wife liked to
believe they, too, were in that number–not angling to be admitted
but already there and secure in their tenure. It was the deepest
and most cherished of their fantasies. As evening approached, they
crossed the river and rattled home to rural Clapham, where Georgina
was born at a quarter to ten in the last of the summer light. For a
few days and weeks there was anxiety in the nursery, for the
Thomases already had a child, the sickly infant Cordelia. She died
thirteen weeks later and was buried in Clapham Parish.
　　Georgina was destined to bear three surnames, but the first of
these, Thomas, under which she was registered, is tied to a
childhood that resolutely failed to budge from its anchorage in
less progressive times. Her father was a William IV man, a Tory of
the old stripe. At the time of her birth, Morgan Thomas was
thirty-five years old and as reactionary as any man in England. His
wife was a hapless woman who liked to protest she was not made for
children and the family hearth. They were a strange couple, she by
temperament as indecisive as her husband was truculent and
hotheaded.
　　Morgan’s position in society was a commonplace of the times: he
was a lawyer never intending to practive law. His gentlemanly
status had been expressed to his own satisfaction in a book
published in 1834 by a writer named Medwin. “Judges of the
Exchequer were designated thus: one as a gentleman and a lawyer;
another as a lawyer and no gentleman.” Morgan was always ready to
insist he was of the first kind. He had found and married his
rather plain wife in Naples three years earlier, and if the venue
was romantic, the circumstances were not. Both bride and groom were
in their thirties, and whatever hand life had dealt them, it did
not include friends and confidants. One unhappy and solitary human
being was joined with another. Much later, at the time of his
death, Morgan’s younger brother, George, wrote an enigmatic letter
to Louisa: “I ignore for the moment that I have treated you and
yours with the greatest kindness, without mentioning the way I
plugged the gap when you got married, without which it would not
have taken place. I have always come to your aid when the means
permitted and it was only after Morgan’s gross and insulting
letters that I broke off relations, necessarily.”
　　The help that was given the newlyweds was almost certainly
financial but may have included moral support for an unwelcome or
overhasty union. These Thomases were turbulent and aggressive
opportunists when it came to marriage, and Morgan may have been
thought to have chosen his wife unwisely. It was a family fiction
that he had courted her for ten long years–it seems more likely
that he met her in Italy by chance. Louisa was once described by
Count d’Orsay, the supreme arbiter of London taste and fashion, as
“the offspring of Punch and Venus.” The poor woman interpreted this
as a compliment. To marry so late and in such a venue as the
British Embassy, where otherwise only naval officers spliced the
knot, might indicate to the sharp-witted or malicious observer a
sudden inheritance on the part of a parentless bride. In this at
least Morgan was his father’s child. The marriage was much more
favorable to him than to the luckless Louisa, and she was to pay a
very heavy price.
　　The belief that he was a person of importance went very deep with
this strutting, vexatious man. It was a matter of pride that his
family had some mention in Burke’s Landed Gentry, the second
edition of which was brought out in that same year of 1837, for he
was descended from those ancient Thomases who owned considerable
land near Llanelli. The Lletymawr estates had been in the
possession of his family since an honored forebear Sir Hugh
Trehearn followed the Black Prince to Poitiers. Morgan liked to
emphasize this glorious ancestry. Perhaps, as the five hundredth
anniversary of the Battle of Poitiers approached, he was inclined
to make too much of it, yet it was easy to see why. For the first
and last time in history, a French king had been taken in battle;
more to the point, the entire chivalry of France had either been
slain or surrendered. It was a huge payday for the Prince’s army.
The lowliest archer had three or four prisoners to ransom, and Sir
Hugh and his little contingent went back to Wales far richer men
than when they left. And there they languished.
　　Morgan’s great-grandfather gave the family its English
connection. In 1745 he married an heiress of the Goring family of
Frodley in Staffordshire. Through the female line, the Gorings
traced their ancestry back to Edward III, bringing Morgan to the
point where he could assure his impressionable daughter that her
family would “become entitled to the throne of England if anything
should happen to the ruling family.” She believed him.
　　The more recent past was much less romantic. At the turn of the
century, Morgan’s father, Rees Goring Thomas, married Sarah Hovel
of Cambridge. This was almost certainly an undergraduate romance,
spiked with a hardheaded opportunism, the like of which Georgina
was one day to demonstrate herself. Hovel was a name well known in
Cambridge, but not for its aristocratic connections. Thomas Hovel
was a haberdasher and his brother John a saddler. These two had by
diligence and hard work acquired property in the market area of
town, as well as a parcel of fenland on the road to London on which
the Leys School now stands. Rees Goring Thomas, of the illustrious
Welsh ancestry, made himself comfortably secure by marrying the
haberdasher’s daughter–the last parcel of Cambridge land he
acquired through marriage was sold out of the family in 1878. Rees
took his bride out of Cambridge and into Surrey, where the family
had bought the title to a small manor called Tooting Graveney, in
the middle of which was erected a property called Tooting Lodge. It
was in this house that Georgina was born.
　　There was just one small problem: the property did not belong to
Morgan. He lived there as his elder brother’s houseguest. To be a
gentleman under these circumstances was a difficult part to carry
off. There was already a nephew bounding about Tooting Lodge, a
thirteen-year-old named Rees, who was destined one day to return
the family to Wales. Worse yet: only a few months after the birth
of Georgina, Morgan’s brother, late in life, was given another boy.
This finally slammed the door in the face of any hope he himself
might have had of the Lletymawr properties and their rents. It was
true he did not have to work, but neither was he rich in the way
his heart desired. Riches were not quite the central issue–what he
longed for was preeminence. He was a man who could not bear to be
in another’s shadow. This was a feeling he gifted in full to his
daughter.
　　Georgina’s mother had an equally illustrious family history. She
was born Louisa Frances Dalrymple, of Mayfield in Sussex. The
Dalrymples were an ancient family and claimed descent from the
Earls of Stair. Her grandfather was General Sir Hew Whitefoord
Dalrymple, the soldier who had signed the Convention of Cintra in
1808, which provided for his enemy the French to evacuate Portugal
in British ships with all their impedimenta and a mountain of loot
besides. The terms of the convention were considered so scandalous
that Sir Hew never again commanded in the field. He was instead
made a baronet and died in 1830. Of his two sons, the elder, who
was also a soldier, sat in Parliament for Brighton. The younger was
John Apsley Dalrymple, colonel of the 15th Hussars and lord of the
manors of Cortesly and Hamerdon near Ticehurst in Sussex. He died
in 1833. This man was Louisa’s father. There were problems with
this lofty background too.