A Monkey Among Crocodiles: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of Mrs Georgina Weldon – a disastrous Victorian [Text only]

His participation in the age was to be more or less confined to such disastrous outings. When the entail on her father’s estate was settled, Louisa’s inheritance would give her husband that small portion of England – a few acres of East Sussex – sufficient to allow him to describe himself as a landed proprietor. Wanting to be the Member for Coventry was a personal and not a political goal: he wanted it because it had been denied to him. His Toryism was of the old-fashioned and reactive kind. What he saw of what was happening around him he did not like and would not join. Yet, behind the hauteur and exasperated bad temper was another more small-minded calculation – for all his disappointments, this was a world in which he did not absolutely have to compete. He was – but only just – a private gentleman. He could not fall; he need not rise. Even as early as 1837, there was a kind of redundancy about his position. He had no friends, the fashionable world outraged him and in his own family he had been made to look a fool, not once but several times.

The search for a place in England appropriate to his idea of himself was too much for him to contemplate. In 1840, he took himself and his wife off to Florence, along with Georgina and a new child, a solemn boy called Morgan Dalrymple. The ostensible reason for their flight was the state of Louisa’s health. In fact, they stayed off and on in Florence for twelve years, and the consequences to Georgina were to be enormous. Nothing blossomed in Florence: a dangerously narrow man took his bitterness with him and, as his children grew up, inflicted it upon them.

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