A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Disastrous Life of Mrs Georgina Weldon, an eccentric Victorian Book

Georgina Weldon, née Thomas, was born to "manically snobbish parents" in 1837, the year Victoria took the throne. Possessed of a pretty, if unexceptional, voice, she sought the attention denied her by her parents through publicly singing for her supper. Married to Harry Weldon, a weak clubbable sort, she disastrously invested her manic energy in firstly a singing academy, then an orphanage, from a dilapidated house in Tavistock Square stuffed with children, dogs and her pet monkey. A peculiar menage à trois with the equally semi-detached French composer Gounod ensued, before she involved herself with another Frenchman, Menier, and a prostitute, Angele, who became her lover and companion. After surviving an attempt by Harry (now living with his concubine and son) to commit her, she longed to soar on the wings of fame but instead twice wound up a jailbird. Her day came with the 1882 Married Woman's Property Act, which allowed women to bring civil actions in their own name. No name was writ as large as Georgina's--at least, in her eyes--and she launched 25 lawsuits in the next year. Eventually she settled in a French nunnery to write her six-volume, 1,500-page Mémoires, which she published herself in 1901, to resounding indifference. In that obscurity she would have remained but for Brian Thompson discovering the volumes in 1996. The filter he brings to her muddled French fashions the hysterical ramblings into a splendidly boisterous tale, bursting with as many gulls and tricksters as a Ben Jonson play. Amanda Foreman gives an appropriate endorsement to Thompson's achievement, and as with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire or Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne, another captivating figure has been plucked from the margins of conventional historiography. Thompson peers genially over his glasses on the inside cover, and it is with this air of bemused indulgence that he tackles so formidable a protagonist. It is the right approach. Although pausing little for historical or psychological context (such as her inability to bear children), this rollicking portrait, brimful of exuberance, finally gives this outrageous, litigious Victorian eccentric the memorial she at least always knew she deserved. --David VincentRead More