Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (3 page)

On the whole Sellon seems to have taken pleasure in almost all his Indian experiences—even his duel with a fellow-Englishman, inevitably, over a woman, does not seem to have caused him undue distress—and it is in every way understandable that, when he came home to England on leave in 1843, he was surprised and annoyed to find that his mother had not only selected a suitable prospective bride for him but had more or less arranged the marriage. He seems to have had a healthy Victorian respect for money, however, and cheered up when he discovered that his mother’s choice was not only good looking but the heiress to a fortune, resigned his commission
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and got married.

The first few months of married life were spent in Paris, and seem to have gone well enough, but on the couple’s return to England early in 1845 Sellon was shocked to discover that his wife had very little capital of her own and, still worse, that his parents-in-law were only prepared to make an allowance of a beggarly £400 a year! Feeling thoroughly cheated Sellon abandoned his wife and returned to live with, and no doubt on, his mother at her home in Bruton Street, London. The separation lasted two years, but Sellon kept himself fully occupied by keeping a mistress at “a little suburban villa” and by seducing his mother’s fourteen year old parlour-maid, “a sweet pretty creature” who had “received a pretty good education, and was not at all like a servant, either in manners or appearance”.

After their reconciliation Sellon and his wife continued to live with his mother but soon began to have violent disagreements. The worst of these, which led to Sellon being confined to bed for a month, was precipitated by the young Mrs. Sellon’s discovery of the affair between her husband and Emma, the previously mentioned “sweet pretty creature”. On this occasion it seems to have been Mrs. Sellon who first took refuge in violence, for she gave her husband, as he himself said, “such a tremendous and violent box on my right ear as nearly to knock me out of my chair”. Sellon goes on to record his reactions:

“I very calmly flung the remainder of my cigar under the grate, and seizing both her wrists with a grasp of iron, forced her into an armchair. ‘Now you little devil,’ said I, ‘you sit down there, and I give you my honour, I will hold you thus, till you abjectly and most humbly beg for mercy, and ask my pardon for the gross insult you have inflicted on me.’

“ ‘Insult! think of the insult you have put upon me, you vile wretch, to demean yourself with a little low bred slut like that!’ and struggling violently, she bit the backs of my hands until they were covered with blood, and kicked my shins till she barked them.

“ ‘I say, my dear,’ said I, ‘did you ever see Shakespeare’s play of Taming the Shrew.’

“No answer.

“ ‘Well, my angel, I’m going to tame you.’ She renewed her bites and kicks, and called me all the miscreants and vile scoundrels under the sun. I continued to hold her in a vice of iron. Thus we continued till six o’clock.

“ ‘If it is your will and pleasure to expose yourself to the servants,’ said I, ‘pray do, I have no sort of objection, but I will just observe that John will come in presently to clear away the luncheon and lay the cloth for dinner.’ A torrent of abuse was the only answer.

“ ‘You brute,’ she said, ‘you have bruised my wrists black and blue.’

“ ‘Look at my hands, my precious angel, and my shins are in still worse condition.’

“By and by there was a rap at the door, ‘Come in,’ said I. John appeared—‘Take no notice of us, John, but attend to your business.’

“John cleared away the luncheon and laid the cloth for dinner. Exit John.

“ ‘Oh, Edward, you do hurt my wrists so.’

“ ‘My ear and face are still burning with the blow you gave me, my hands are torn to pieces with your tiger teeth, and will not be fit to be seen for a month, and as to my shins, my drawers are saturated with blood,’ said I.

“ ‘Let me go! let me go directly, wretch!’ and again she bit, kicked and struggled.

“ ‘Listen to me,’ said I, ‘there are 365 days in the year, but by God! if there were 3,605, I hold you till you apologise in the manner and way I told you, and even then, I shall punish you likewise for the
infamous way you have behaved.’ She sulked for another half hour, but did not bite or kick anymore. I never relaxed my grasp, or the sternness of my countenance. My hands were streaming with blood, some of the veins were opened, her lap was full of blood, it was a frightful scene.

“At length she said, ‘Edward, I humbly ask your pardon for the shameful way I have treated you, I apologise for the blow I gave you, I forgive you for any injury you have done me, I promise to be docile and humble in future, and I beg—I beg,’ she sobbed, ‘your forgiveness.’

“I released her hands, pulled the bell violently, told John to run immediately for Dr. Monson (the family physician), and fell fainting on the floor. I had lost nearly a pint of blood from the wounds inflicted by the panther. When I recovered my senses, I was lying on the sofa, my hands enveloped in strapping plaister and bandages, as were also my shins. Emma and my wife knelt at my feet crying, while Monson kept pouring port wine down my throat. ‘Could you eat a little,’ said he kindly.

“ ‘Gad, yes,’ said I, ‘I’m awfully hungry, bring dinner, John.’

“They all stared, it was ten o’clock; however, dinner was served, though sadly overdone, having been put back three hours. John had only laid covers for two, presuming my wife and I would dine tête-à-tête. I told him to bring two more. Monson and my wife raised their eyebrows—‘Doctor, stay and dine with us, call it supper if you like; Emma, I desire you to seat yourself.’ She made towards the door. ‘Augusta,’ said I, addressing my wife, ‘persuade Emma to dine with us, I will it.’

“ ‘You had better stay,’ said my wife, with a sweet smile. Emma hesitated a moment, and then came and sat beside me.”

Dinner duly took place—and a very odd dinner it must have been, for Dr. Monson, who seems to have been almost as eccentric a character as his patient, took it upon himself to lecture Mrs. Sellon on the wickedness of losing one’s temper with one’s husband. No doubt neither Mrs. Sellon nor her husband gave Dr. Monson’s discourse the full attention it deserved, for while it was being delivered Sellon was otherwise occupied; he describes himself as having:

“… one of my bandaged hands up Emma’s clothes while he was saying this, and was feeling her lovely young cunny. It was nuts to
crack for me. Dr. Monson gone, I rang the bell, ‘John, you and the servants can go to bed,’ said I. John cast an enquiring glance at Madam and Emma, bowed and retired.

“I asked Emma for my cigar-case, as for Augusta, I did not notice her. I lit a cigar, and drawing Emma on my knee, sat before the fire and smoked. ‘You can go to bed, Augusta,’ said I, as if she was the servant and Emma the wife, ‘I shall not want you any more.’ The humbled woman took her candle, and wishing us both good night, went to bed.

“ ‘Oh, Edward,’ said poor little Emma, ‘what a dreadful woman she is, she nearly killed you, you nearly bled to death! Dr. Monson said two of the great veins at the back of each hand had been opened by her teeth, and that if she had not given in when she did, you would have bled to death.’

“ ‘But here I am all alive, my sweet.’

“ ‘But you won’t have me tonight, mind.’

“ ‘Won’t I though!’

“ ‘Now, Edward! pray don’t, you are too weak!’

“ ‘Then this will give me strength,’ said I, and I drank at a draught a tumbler of Carbonell’s old Port. I made her drink another glass, and then we lay down on the couch together. I fucked her twice, and then in each other’s arms we fell asleep.

“It was six o’clock the next morning when I woke up. I aroused Emma and told her I thought she had better go to her own room, before the servants were about; my hands were very painful, so arranging with her when and where she should next meet me, I went up stairs to bed. My wife was fast asleep, I held the candle close to the bed and looked at her, she was lying on her back, her hands thrown over her head. She looked so beautiful, and her large, firm breasts rose and fell so voluptuously, that I began to be penetrated with some sentiments of remorse for my infidelities. I crept into bed and lay down beside her. I soon fell asleep. I might have slumbered some two hours, I was aroused by being kissed very lovingly. I was sensible that a pair of milky arms clasped me, and that heaving breast was pressed to mine. I soon became aware of something more than this which was going on under the bed-clothes. I opened my eyes and fixed them upon the ravisher! It was Augusta. She blushed at being caught, but did not release me. I remained passive in her arms. My hands I had lost the use of; inflamation had set in in the
night, I felt very feverish, in an hour more I was delirious; I became alarmingly ill.”
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Throughout his illness Sellon was nursed by the two women, but upon his recovery he rather ungraciously dismissed the maid and entered upon another brief period of domesticity with Augusta. This ended when, almost inevitably, yet another cast-off mistress reappeared upon the scene. Shortly afterwards Sellon’s personal circumstances became ever more difficult, for his mother’s income was sharply reduced as a consequence of the embezzlement of a large part of her capital by that standby of Victorian novelists, a defaulting solicitor. For the first time in his life Sellon became in real need of money and took a job as driver of the mail-coach that ran between London and Cambridge.
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He seems to have been surprisingly successful at his new occupation, earning about three hundred pounds a year and holding down the job until the opening of the London-Cambridge railway made mail-coach and driver alike redundant. Comparatively unworried by this setback Sellon set up as a fencing-master in London—it is clear from contemporary references to this phase of his life that he was a competent, possibly even a brilliant, swordsman.

Somehow or other Sellon’s wife traced him to his fencing-rooms—he could never discover how—and yet another reconciliation took place. Augusta seems to have decided that her husband was better removed from the temptation of London and whisked him away to “a charming cottage she had … in a remote hamlet, not a hundred miles from Winchester” where for three years the couple enjoyed a quiet rural existence. Sellon himself seems to have been puzzled as to how he endured the boredom of country life for so long, but I suspect that he did not greatly care where or how he lived as long as someone else was meeting the bills. In any case Mrs. Sellon took good care to provide for her husband’s needs, both sexual and sporting. He noted approvingly:

“Augusta would strip naked, place herself in any attitude, let me gamahuche
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her, would gamahuche in her turn, indulged all my whimsies, followed me about like a faithful dog—obtained good shooting for me in the season, and a good mount if I would hunt.”

This rustic idyll—a strange mixture of Ovid and Virgil—was brought to an end by the birth of a son. Sellon was completely devoid of normal paternal feeling and his morbid jealousy of his infant rival was comic in its fury:

“… matters became worse, everything was neglected for the young usurper. My comforts all disappeared and at length I became so disgusted, that I left her … going up to town …”

For some months Sellon enjoyed the delights of London, occupying himself with gambling and a complex series of fornications, but he was then compelled to return to his wife by an elderly relative, a wealthy nobleman, from whom he hoped one day to inherit something. Sellon’s angry description of the circumstances leading up to this forced reconciliation makes extremely amusing reading, although it was clearly not intended to do so! He wrote:

“But in six months this woman began to feel certain motions of nature, which told her there were other joys besides the pleasure of spoiling her breasts to give suck to her brat, and she wanted to see her spouse again. She was virtuous, was this woman, so ought to have been a crown to her husband … but let that pass.

“She came up to Town, and called on the Earl. She was all pathos and meekness, of course. She told her ‘sad tale’. My relative was moved, a ‘woman in tears’ is more eloquent with some people, than ‘the woman in white!’ I received from my relative a very peremptory letter from this man; it would not do to offend him; I consented to live with her again.”

In the circumstances it is, perhaps, not surprising that this, the last attempt at cohabitation did not long endure. The final rupture came when Augusta found her husband engaged in teaching some young
school-girls what he chose to call, with untypical coyness, hide-and-seek.