Caroline Norton: beauty and wit, poet, pamphleteer and blue stocking. Married to a boorish minor aristocrat at 19, who accused her, for his own political ends, of an affair, 'Criminal Conversation', with Lord Melbourne which ended in the 'Trial of the Century'. Pilloried by society, cut off and bankrupted by her family she went on to be the most important figure in establishing womens' rights in marriage. This is the startling story of how one woman changed marriage and revolutionised women's rights.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a wife was a chattel of her husband: her children were not her own, and all her money and belongings automatically became his when they married. Before 1857 an Act of Parliament was the only way to get a divorce. Caroline Sheridan was a beautiful, clever and opinionated young woman who was manoeuvred into marrying George Norton when she was nineteen. Nearly ten years older, he was a dull, miserly, violent and controlling barrister but she would never be the traditional mousey Victorian wife. By her early twenties, and despite her husband's protestations, Caroline had become a respected poet and song-writer, clever mimic and outrageous flirt. Her beauty and wit attracted many male admirers, including the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.
When Caroline refused to promote her husband to Melbourne for a stipend job in government he publically accused her and Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister of a 'criminal conversation' (adultery) with his wife which led to an infamous trial at Westminster Hall in 1836, 'the scandal of the century'. Charles Dickens, a newspaper reporter at the trial, would later fictionalize the event as 'Bardell v Pickwick' in in "The Pickwick Papers." After a trial lasting twelve hours, the jury's not guilty verdict was immediate and unanimous. Norton was a laughing-stock: angry and humiliated, he threw Caroline out and refused to let her see their three sons, He seized her manuscripts and letters and her clothes and jewels. For the next thirty years Caroline Norton campaigned for women and battled male-dominated Victorian society, helping to write the Infant and Child Custody Act (1839), the Matrimonial Causes (Divorce) Act (1857) and the Married Women's Property Act (1870), which gave women a separate legal identity for the first time.
Diane Atkinson has spent two years researching Caroline Norton's story afresh and sheds new and intriguing light on Caroline's life and her relationship with Melbourne, and the trial verdict.