Caroline Sheridan Norton: badass Victorian lady
Caroline Norton was a badass Victorian lady who was instrumental in the passing of the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1867 the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, which allowed married women to inherit property in their own right and to control any money they earned.
She was born to a fairly well-connected family, and she and her two sisters were known in society as the “Three Graces.” Mary Shelley wrote of her, “Had I been a man I should certainly have fallen in love with her… I would have been spellbound, and had she taken the trouble, she might have wound me round her finger. She would guy me… in her prettiest way.”
At 19, in 1827, under pressure from her family for financial reasons, she made a disastrous marriage to George Norton. George physically and emotionally abused her, sometimes needing to be restrained by servants from permanently injuring her, while she and her family were partially responsible for Norton’s professional and financial success (such as it was). She was a renowned hostess and published poetry.
In the 1830s, Norton so badly beat Caroline while she was pregnant with their fourth child that she miscarried and left him briefly. After much begging on her husband’s part, Caroline returned to him, or “condoned” his behavior - an important legal distinction, since if a husband’s wrongs were “condoned” by the wife, they were no longer considered grounds for legal action. Her family did not forgive him, and he fought with her on these grounds. Caroline removed her children to her brother’s house. But George abducted the children and sent them to stay with his wealthy cousin, while he ordered his servants to not allow Caroline to return home.
After the abduction of the children and much correspondence with Caroline’s family, George Norton, in the guise of an “injured husband” brought an action against their mutual friend Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, accusing him of an affair with Caroline (“criminal conversation”). (This was after he had tried to blackmail Lord Melbourne for 10,000 pounds). George was helped by Melbourne’s political enemies, and stories of Caroline’s affairs that George invented and leaked to the press, but at the trial it was proved that George’s witnesses had all been paid, and the jury quickly found in favor of Melbourne. There was nonetheless a political scandal, and Caroline’s reputation was seriously harmed. Legally, she had not been allowed to defend herself or her own character.
During this time, Caroline wrote several pamphlets pleading for the rights of mothers. She was attacked in the press as a “she-devil” and “she-beast,” and when she tried to sue for libel, her lawyer informed her that she could not sue herself, since under English law she did not exist as a separate entity from her husband. Only her husband, who had libelled her in the Melbourne trial, could sue on her behalf–which of course he did not. Her campaign led to the passage of the Custody of Infants Act.
Caroline then sought a divorce, but her lawyers informed her that “cruelty” could not be her plea because she had “condoned” her husband’s treatment by returning to him. Adultery was not an option because she (or rather Melbourne) had been cleared of that charge.
George Norton then proposed that the would “forgive” her for the affair and trial and urged Caroline to meet him in an empty house, where he begged her to forget the past and return home. He sent her many letters and notes, some of which he signed “Greenacre,” the name of a man who had recently been hung for enticing a woman to his house and murdered her and cutting her into pieces. When Caroline refused to return, George took out a public “Advertisement ” in the newspaper accusing her of abandoning him. Her brothers published a counter-advertisement declaring his ad false.
Eventually they came up with a separation agreement. She agreed to let him obtain a mortgage on a trust fund that had been settled on her, and he would give her an allowance of 500 pounds per year, while she would pay the remainder of her expenses with the allowance and any money she earned in writing. But George had many financial problems, while Caroline was achieving success as a poet and and novelist.
When Caroline’s mother died, he attempted to claim the legacy left to Caroline, as well as a legacy left to her by Lord Melbourne. When she refused to give him the money, he then refused to pay the allowance they had agreed upon. The courts declared that Mr. Norton was not bound in law, only in honor, to support her. The contract was meaningless because a married woman did not exist in her own right and thus could not contract with her husband.
After her mother’s death, George Norton entirely withheld any money from her, and retained all of her property from the time of her marriage, and received interest on the property left to Caroline by her father.
Unable to pay her bills, Caroline turned the law against George and referred her creditors to him. Caroline insisted that as she was not able to contract with anyone or possess her own money, her bills must be paid by her husband. He refused to pay, and the creditor took him to court. George attempted to prove that Caroline was able to support herself and subpoenaed her publishers, bankers, and Caroline herself. As her husband, he was entitled to all her financial information and insisted that the copyrights on her work belonged to him, and that everything they paid her was legally his. During the trial, he attempted to revive the Melbourne scandal and consistently embarrassed and intimidated her. Caroline eventually addressed the court to defend herself against this slander; she was applauded. But the case was thrown out on a technicality, and Caroline was left to pay the bill.
Caroline wrote several articles and pamphlets protesting the injustice of marriage and divorce law in England.
“I cannot divorce my husband, either for adultery, desertion, or cruelty,” Caroline wrote in a public letter to the Queen, “I must remain married to his name; he has, in right of that fact (of my link to his name) a right to everything I have in the world–and I have no more claim upon him, than any one of your Majesty’s ladies in waiting, who are utter strangers to him! I never see him;–I hear of him only by attacks on my reputation:–and I do not receive a farthing of support from him…. My reputation, my property, my happiness, are irrevocably in the power of his slanderer on false grounds; this rapacious defender of his right to evade written bonds. I cannot release myself. I exist and I suffer; but the law denies my existence.
"When Mr. Norton allowed me, I say, to be publicly subpoenaed in court, to defend himself by a quibble from a just debt, and subpoenaed my publishers to meet me there, he taught me what my gift of writing was worth. Since he would not leave even that source tranquil and free in my destiny, let him have the triumph of being able at once to embitter and to turn its former current. He made me dream that it was meant for a higher and a stronger purpose,–that gift which came not from man, but from God. It was meant to enable me to rouse the hearts of others to examine into all the gross injustice of these laws,—to ask the ‘nation of gallant gentlemen,’ whose countrywoman I am, for once to hear a woman’s pleading on the subject. Not because I deserve more at their hands than other women. Well I know, on the contrary, how many hundreds, infinitely better than I,–more pious, more patient, and less rash under injury,–have watered their bread with tears! My plea to attention is, that in pleading for myself I am able to plead for all these others. Not that my sufferings or my deserts are greater than theirs; but that I combine, with the fact of having suffered wrong, the power to comment on and explain the cause of that wrong; which few women are able to do.
"For this, I believe, God gave me the power of writing. To this I devote that power. I abjure all other writing, till I see these laws altered. I care not what ridicule or abuse may be the result of that declaration. They who cannot bear ridicule and abuse, are unfit and unable to advance any cause: and once more I deny that this is my personal cause; it is the cause of all the women of England. If I could be justified and happy to-morrow, I would still strive and labour in it; and if I were to die to-morrow, it would still be a satisfaction to me that I had so striven. Meanwhile, my husband has a legal lien on the copyright of my works. Let him claim the copyright of THIS…
But let the recollection of what I write, remain with those who read; and above all, let the recollection remain with your Majesty, to whom it is addressed; the one woman in England who cannot suffer wrong; and whose royal assent will be formally necessary to any Marriage Reform Bill which the Lord Chancellor, assembled Peers, and assembled Commons, may think fit to pass, in the Parliament of this free nation; where, with a Queen on the throne, all other married women are legally "NON-EXISTENT.”
While she was instrumental in the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act and continued her career as a poet and a novelist, Caroline was not freed from her husband until his death in 1875. She remarried in 1877 but died only a few months later.
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