P E CTATRIX
Full Circle
BY ELIZABETH JENKINS OUR long-continuing insensibility to social abuses is equalled only by the vehemence with which we redress the balance once we have been roused from our apathy. Nowhere is this more striking than in the alteration of the law regarding married women. The contrast between the attitude of society towards the claims of the wife and mother a hundred years ago and its attitude today is illustrated by two matrimonial quarrels with a century between them. There was an overwhelming case for establishing the mother's right to share the control of her children with their father. Before the passing of the Custody of Infants Act in 1839 the law 'recognised the right only of the father. The latter could, if he wanted to assert himself, take the children away from their mother and prevent her from having any access to them. He could do this though she was innocent of any matrimonial offence, when it was admitted that she was a loving and trustworthy parent and that he himself proposed to put the children in the care of his mistress. This weapon in the hands of a brute was capable of causing such agony that if it had been more widely used the state of affairs must have ended before it did. Reform was blocked by the number of not unhappy marriages. It was finally achieved through the disastrous marriage of George and Caroline Norton. They were, not an amiable pair; the wife was disagreeable, the husband abominable, but if they had not been what they were, if Caroline Norton in particular had not had so much temper and such a spirit, their domestic jars would not have altered the laws of England.
Caroline was the grand-daughter of R. B. Sheridan, and had been brought up in the small, exclusive sphere of London society, going to balls at Almacks and to parties at great houses. Had she not moved in this sphere, she would not have commanded the influence she afterwards brought to bear on the Custody of Infants Act and the Act for the Reform of Marriage and Divorce Laws. She wrote successful but now forgotten poetry and novels, the money for which the law 'allowed her husband to take from her as fast as she made it. Apart from her importance in the history of the rights of married women, she is perhaps best remembered as the original of Meredith's heroine in Diana of the Crossways. She had great beauty of an. unconciliating kind. When as a new-born baby she was shown to her grandfather, Sheridan remarked that she was not a child whom he would care to meet in a dark wood. At the height of her hard and brilliant loveliness it was said that she looked as if she were made of precious stones. George Norton's many-sided quarrel with his wife was inflamed beyond control when he lost the action he brought against Lord Melbourne for criminal con- versation with her. In revenge he forcibly removed their three sons, of whom the youngest was only five, and sent them to the country house of his brother Lord Grantly. Here the children went down with measles. Their mother, frantic with anxiety, got herself into her brother-in-law's house and found her way to the nursery. She was sitting with the youngest on her lap when two men-servants rushed in with Lord Grantly's orders to take the child away. They snatched him from his mother, who let go her hold only because she was afraid that otherwise his arms and legs would be broken.
For years the hideous situation was prolonged with no possibility for Caroline Norton of any legal redress. John Bayley, one of the counsel retained by Norton in the Melbourne case, knew of Caroline as a formidable beauty and had heard that she was bold and disreputable. His astonishment and Compassion were great when at last he actually saw what he describes as " this miserable, sobbing, worn-out young woman." In August, 1853, the quarrel reached its climax. The casus belli had been the custody of the children, but Norton had used this fearful form of pressure to extort money from his wife, and the final action was over a financial dispute. Caroline brought the action in Westminster county court and lost it. Her famous comment on the verdict: " I do not ask for my rights—I have no rights. I have only wrongs," caused such a commotion that the judge ordered the court to be cleared.
One hundred years later to the very month, in August, 1953, a Mrs. Beale sued her husband in the High Court of Justice on grounds that would have made the nineteenth century stare and gasp. Mr. Beale's story appears to be an illustration cif the saying that we sometimes pay more heavily for follies than for crimes. His choice of a wife was unfortunate; he married a woman whom he afterwards divorced for adultery, and the penalty for this initial blunder is that he is deprived of his three children, the court having awarded custody of them to their mother. The two elder'girls were already with her, but the youngest, Marian, aged seven, refused to leave her father. The mother came to .fetch her; the child screamed and tore herself away, exclaiming that she loved her father and would not leave him. The father tried to make her go; it was against his wish but he did his best; he packed her ' clothes with his own hands and told her she must go to her mother, but she still refused. Short of physical force, he said, he could not part her from him. • Mrs. Beale brought the action to force her husband to hand the child over to, her, applying at the same time to have him thrown into gaol because he had not done so already. Mr. Beale implored the court to let him keep the one daughter who wanted to stay with him. The judge, however, said that the child's tantrums could not be allowed to upset a decision made for her benefit, and appointed a day on which she was to be given up to her mother's solicitors.
No rational person who has neither been trained to assess the value of evidence nor even heard the evidence in question, will criticise. a decision made by one High Court judge and upheld by another. It would be hypocritical to maintain that a woman, because she has been the guilty party in a divorce, is necessarily no longer the best person to bring up her young children. At the same time, from the husband's position, and viewed in the perspective of exactly one hundred years, the case is a startling one.
Behind the luckless Mr. Beale is the shade of another father of three daughters, of whom the youngest loved him. But Mr. Beale did not say : " He that parts us shall bring a brand from Heaven And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes ! "
He said: " It will break my heart, bul the law is the law."
Surely the angry ghost of Caroline Norton must now be laid.
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