Inconvenient People (37 page)

When Lady Lytton returned to England in 1847 she tried repeatedly to get her allowance increased, or at the very least paid on time, and to have the debts she had run up paid off. Lord Lytton would not comply. Lady Lytton had not seen her children for nine years. She understood that Emily lived with her father at Knebworth as his literary handmaiden, and she claimed that Emily spent her days exhausting herself in translating German works, since Lord Lytton wasn’t bright enough to learn the language. Though her father was immensely wealthy, Emily owned one day dress and one evening dress, and constantly had to patch up her gloves and shoes. Little Boots was nineteen years old, and her wretched life was drawing to a wretched close. In 1848 her father placed her in a down-at-heel boarding house in Pelham Terrace in the London village of Brompton when she was dying from typhoid, with an elderly hired nurse as sole carer. No explanation was ever forthcoming for why her father had sent her
away from Knebworth to die in these surroundings; his mind was strange and superstitious enough to give credence to the idea that he may have seen a good omen in the choice of Pelham Terrace, as his novel
Pelham
had marked the change in his own fortunes.

When Lady Lytton learned of Emily’s whereabouts, she moved into the boarding house, together with maid Rosetta Byrne, renting the room above her daughter’s. The nurse – acting on the orders of Lord Lytton and Dr Marshall Hall, the physician he had hired to treat Emily – told Lady Lytton that she must not make herself known to her daughter, arguing that the shock of seeing her mother after all these years would instantly kill the delirious girl. But Lady Lytton bribed the nurse and the landlady to allow her to look in at Emily during one of her spells of unconsciousness. She saw that the shabby room was so small that the bedstead filled it; even the nightdress Emily was dying in had had to be borrowed from the nurse. Lady Lytton sat outside the room on the staircase all night, listening to her daughter’s fevered moaning. Lord Lytton had been told of his wife’s presence in Pelham Terrace and had instructed his son Robert to accompany Dr Hall to the house and to throw Lady Lytton out into the street. When they turned up to do his bidding, they found Lady Lytton still sitting on the stairs. At some point during the row that ensued, Emily died.

Each parent used this tragedy as ammunition against the other: Lord Lytton said his wife’s appearance in the sickroom had finished the girl off. Lady Lytton claimed that her husband had killed the girl by hiring a disreputable quack who had ‘murdered’ Emily with his incompetence and neglect. She wrote to Dr Marshall Hall: ‘The actual cause of her death was your gross ignorance, only to be equalled by the coarse and inhuman brutality of your manner. I shall ever look upon you and proclaim you as her murderer.’ When the apothecary Dr Rouse, who had been assisting Dr Hall in caring for Emily, cut his own throat and died a fortnight later, Lady Lytton claimed that he had done so in recognition of the fatal effects brought about by the bleeding and the starvation of her daughter that Hall had recommended and which Rouse had obediently carried out.

With Emily’s death, Lady Lytton’s rage grew ever more intense. She began a campaign of bombarding her husband and his friends and associates with obscene and libellous letters – the obscenities often
scrawled across the envelope to give extra publicity to the allegations within. Sadly, very few of these envelopes appear to have survived to show whether Lady Lytton used good old Anglo-Saxon or the more high-flown filth of the letters’ contents. One that has survived reads: ‘To be forwarded to the Reptile Sir Liar Coward Bulwer Lytton Fenton’s Hotel St James’s London’. The letters contained allegations about mistresses, illegitimate children, and in the case of William Loaden – Charles Dickens’s lawyer and an associate of Lord Lytton – the accusation that he was intimate with his own sister in order to spare the expense of a mistress. Her grandson would write in 1913 that reading the correspondence years after her death had been like ‘opening a drawer full of dead wasps. Their venom is now powerless to hurt, but they still produce a shudder and feeling of disgust.’

Attorney-General Alexander Cockburn (with whom Lord Lytton had been close friends at Cambridge) and politician, lawyer and thrice Lord Chancellor Lord Lyndhurst (‘a superannuated adulterer’) were among the recipients of her abuse. A letter to her own son was addressed ‘To that white-livered little reptile Robert Lytton’. But her favourite target among her husband’s cronies was ‘that Dunghill divinity’, that ‘Pothouse Plutarch’, ‘that patent humbug, Mr Charles Dickens’. She detested what she saw as Dickens’s sham philanthropy and concern for orphans, cripples, chimney sweeps. crossing-sweepers and any other representatives of the picturesquely downtrodden, which served to build him up as a champion of the oppressed at very little personal cost. In the age of cant, Lady Lytton regarded the ‘popularity hunters’ as particularly sickening. She believed that a hard little heart beat within Boz. What is also likely to have rankled was Dickens’s immense success while his ‘clique’ had done all it could to exclude her from the world of letters, along with anyone else they chose to snub; the acclaim for Lord Lytton’s novel
The Caxtons
, published in the year after Emily’s death, cannot have helped her mood: ‘After twenty-five years’ bitter experience, [I know] that wherever the literary element enters, there camaraderie, expediency, claptrap, treachery, moral cowardice and concrete meanness are sure to follow.’ She believed that Dickens and her own husband had both had to cultivate plentiful facial hair in order that their features could no longer betray to the observant the villainy expressed in their physiognomies. Regarding the hirsuteness of Victorian gentlemen, Lady
Lytton stated that beards, moustaches and sideburns hid terrible things about a man’s soul. ‘One has only to look at his [Lord Lytton’s] hideous face and that of that other brute Dickens to see that every bad passion has left the impress of its cloven hoof upon their fiendish lineaments.’

She took snobbish delight in pointing out Dickens’s humble start in life, and his early career as a legal and parliamentary shorthand reporter. In the first week of May 1851 she wrote to him to point out his ‘vulgar parvenu extravagance’ and reminding him that he had been hitherto a ‘penny-a-liner’. When Lady Lytton learned that there was to be a performance of her husband’s play,
Not So Bad As We Seem
, with Queen Victoria as guest of honour and the Duke of Devonshire as master of ceremonies, she wrote to Dickens that she intended to be there too, to pelt the Queen with rotten eggs and the players with rotten fruit: ‘Sir, As it is my intention to attend the Fooleries at Devonshire House on the 16th to disseminate not indeed Bills of the Play, but a True Bill, of its Ruffianly and Blackguardly Author, and also to suggest that in consideration of the disreputable set who are to act it, the title of this farce be changed to “We’re even worse! than we seem!, or the real side of our character . . .”’ She told Dickens it was outrageous that he was putting on such an entertainment, ‘considering that your father and one of your children have not been a month buried!! I should have thought that common decency (for common feeling I know you don’t possess) would have made you abstain from making an ass of yourself on this occasion . . .’ As for Victoria: ‘Shame on the little sensual, selfish Pigheaded Queen.’ Dickens arranged for his favourite pet policeman, Detective Inspector Field (‘who is used in all sorts of delicate matters, and is quite devoted to me,’) to be at Devonshire House on the night of the play to thwart any attempt Lady Lytton might make to disrupt proceedings. In the event, she did not try to enter, and the evening was a bit of a damp squib all round, with some saying the performance had been ‘Not So Good As We Expected’.

In 1851 Lord Lytton joined the Conservative Party and the following year he entered parliament again, as MP for Hertford. His change of political horses had come about partly because of his close friendship with Disraeli and partly as a result of his increasing disgust at the venality and banality of the mercantile
middle classes (‘wretched money-spiders’, as he called them) who tended to support the Liberals. He had also been shocked by the revolutions on the Continent in 1848 and he coined the phrase ‘The Great Unwashed’ for the labouring classes and unemployed. Lady Lytton, by contrast to her husband, was beginning to fail to keep up appearances, living in a cottage in the Fulham Road, West London, and then, in order to live even more cheaply, heading for Llangollen in north-east Wales, before moving into a hotel in Taunton. She later alleged that two attempts were made to poison her (or at least to introduce a soporific into her soup) at Llangollen by emissaries of her husband; and that when she became too suspicious for anything to be put into her food or drink, they tried to entrap her into a lunatic asylum, with her various eccentricities being worked up into a tale of lunacy.

There were no independent witnesses to these events, and it is tempting to see the allegation as a wild attack on her husband. However, there is documentary evidence which confirms that Lord Lytton arranged surveillance on his wife. As early as 1839, John Forster, a close friend of Dickens and Lord Lytton, and later to become a Commissioner in Lunacy, was sent to Bath by Lord Lytton to gather information about Rosina, who was living there at that time and had just published
Cheveley
. Forster wrote to her husband on 4 September 1839, stating that he had been very cautious in his investigation, ‘for it would have been highly indiscreet in me to have made formal inquiries, even of [their mutual friend, Walter Savage] Landor’. Forster didn’t appear to have come up with anything dramatic that could be used against Rosina, except for her careless spending habits and her friendship with the married man from Dublin. Thomas Carlyle thought that he detected a rapid cooling in Forster’s affection for Lord Lytton in the early 1840s, and it is possible, though not provable, that Forster was beginning to resent being asked to undertake such underhand tasks. The coolness didn’t last long, though, and Lord Lytton came to lean heavily on Forster for the latter’s training as a lawyer, asking Forster to double-check the legal possibilities or likelihoods of some of the plot devices for plays he had in mind. He needed to know about the mid-nineteenth-century bureaucratic realities of such matters as marriage licences, birth certification and probate processes, in order to create a storyline or to muddy up a mystery. Lady Lytton
detested John Forster, nicknaming him Jackal Fudgster. He, in turn, had reasons for loathing her; Forster had been engaged to the poet Letitia Landon in 1838 and believed that Rosina had spread rumours about an intrigue that Landon may have enjoyed with another man. When Forster confronted his fiancée, Landon broke off the engagement.

In a separate incident, in 1839, Lord Lytton’s solicitor wrote to his client, presumably in reply to a request for advice, to state that if Rosina did begin to behave outrageously through drink, ‘it may be both wise and merciful to place her under personal restraint’. Unsoundness of mind caused by dipsomania would indeed have made Rosina eligible for at least a short stay in an asylum. Alas for the conspirators, Rosina did not drink to excess on a regular basis. They would have to bide their time.

By 1853, Lady Lytton was living at the Giles Castle Hotel in Taunton (incidentally the same hotel in which eight years earlier the Agapemonite triple marriage had been decided upon). The hotel’s owner, Mrs Clarke, remained devoted to her despite the arrears that Lady Lytton was building up; Mrs Clarke accepted that the debt was caused by the sporadic and inadequate payments by Lord Lytton. Private detective Henry Trenchard had been commissioned by Lord Lytton to spy on his wife; alas, Trenchard’s reports stated that she led a very secluded life and was of regular habits, and that all her visitors were unremarkable. Although she was said to have a temper, ‘her general behaviour in the hotel does not of itself justify’ any assertion that she was of unsound mind. Trenchard had followed her around Taunton but all he could note was that she ‘very much disfigures her face with paint’.

In May 1858, Lady Lytton heard that her husband was to be made Secretary of State for the Colonies. As he rose and rose, she was continuing to dwindle. She decided to take action, as she later wrote:

With the help of Mrs Clarke, Lady Lytton had posters printed, which read: ‘Lady Bulwer Lytton requests the Electors of Herts to meet her at the Corn Exchange this day, Wednesday June 8, 1858, before going to the Hustings.’ Armed with these, she and Mrs Clarke made a long and complicated journey, involving post-horses and the railway, to Hertford (‘a dirty little mean town’), arriving at five in the morning: ‘My head was burning and I had the cold shivers.’ They booked themselves into the Dinsdale Arms and before getting some rest, Lady Lytton paid the inn’s shoeblack (‘the boots’) a sovereign to plaster the town with the placards before full daylight, which, she reported, he did wonderfully well. She then took a bath and dozed until 11.30 a.m.

It was a scorching, windless day, and Lord Lytton’s hustings were set up in a rural spot on the edge of town, but very close to Cowbridge House, the home of Stephen Austin, the supportive editor of the
Hertford Mercury
. Lord Lytton was on the platform with friends and associates, including his son, Robert. The reporter from the hostile
Daily Telegraph
wrote of the ‘pretty ladies’ in the crowd – ‘a few open carriages full of enthusiasm and crinoline’. As Lord Lytton was approaching the end of a very long speech, one of the men on the hustings saw in the middle distance an alarming figure advancing across the grass. It walked determinedly, and as it came into focus he saw that it was a woman wearing a deep yellow dress – the colour of the Liberals – and carrying a yellow parasol and a green fan; her hair appeared to be dyed yellow and her face heavily rouged. ‘Your wife is here!’ one of his associates cried to Lord Lytton, whose deafness meant that this had to be said three times; in fact, he thought he was being told that his sister-in-law, Lady Bulwer, had turned up, and was answering ‘How very kind of Georgina to come!’ when Robert screamed in his ear, ‘My mother is here!’ Lord Lytton turned white and appeared to stagger backwards. The crowd parted to let the extraordinary yellow figure pass, and she stalked to the foot of the ladder, mounted the platform and declared, ‘Fiend, villain, monster, cowardly wretch, outcast! How can the people of England submit to have such a man at the head of the colonies, who ought to have been in the colonies as a transport long ago?’