Friday 11 May 2012

Why I wrote ...
The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

A few years ago I was panning for gold – looking for a biographical subject. I read the last will and testament of a possible nugget who had got caught in my pan and discovered that the person in question had bequeathed ‘Caroline Norton’s desk, or Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet,’ to her niece in 1954. Distant memories stirred when
I read those two names, of a vivid and messy chapter of Caroline and William’s lives which stretched from one end of the 1830s to the other. Their romantic and ultimately disastrous relationship would have been written up on, sobbed over, and seeped into that piece of Regency furniture. I felt a bit light-headed with a jumble of disjointed and distant recollections of Caroline Norton: her appearance as the conceptual author of the 1839 Infant Custody Act, the first piece of English feminist legislation. And I remembered the louche old roué of a Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, he swam from the bottom of my memory pond to the surface. I discarded my first nugget and went in hot but fruitless pursuit of that memory-soaked desk, but I found biographical gold in the vivid and moving journey that ‘Norty Mrs Norton’ took me on.   
 
We have a great deal to be thankful to Caroline Norton for. In 1839, for the first time, mothers with ‘unblemished characters’ were legally entitled to have access to and custody of their children if they were separated from their husbands. Caroline did not stop there but carried on raising awareness about wives’ invisibility before the law, the extraordinary fact they had no separate legal identity. When a woman married her identity was subsumed into that of her husband: wives did not exist in the eyes of the law. In 1855 Caroline Norton took her fight to Queen Victoria in the shape of a thirty-thousand word pamphlet, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor’s Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill, reminding Victoria of some shocking facts, not least that unless a woman’s family were wealthy enough to set up a trust to protect her property, she lost everything she owned on her wedding day, all her possessions became the property of her husband. A wife could not keep her own earnings, make a will, sign a contract, or inherit money and Caroline Norton pointed out the contradiction that this was the law in a country and empire ruled by a woman who was also a mother and a wife. Caroline’s writings influenced the 1857 Matrimonial Causes (Divorce) Act, and the Married Women’s Property Act (1870) which for the first time allowed a wife to keep some of her earnings.   

Where Caroline Norton is concerned I have to admit to being a heroine addict. To write this biography I read more than fifteen hundred of the letters she wrote to her family and friends and strangers and there is not one in which she does not impress me with her passion and poise, honesty and generosity of spirit and purse, humanity and humour and hilarious self-deprecation. She performed many unsolicited acts of kindness to people she had never met. Caroline’s letters are scattered all over the world, their recipients read and re-read them, treasured them and donated them to archives and libraries so others could enjoy them too. Almost a hundred and fifty years after she last picked up her pen, Caroline Norton’s letters feel very modern: the legal battles she waged to see her children and leave her wretched marriage feel contemporary; hers is a universal story. I hope Fathers For Justice read this book. Mrs Norton is a nineteenth-century heroine for the twenty-first century, an inspiration to every woman who has had a problem being married to a man; she turned herself from victim to victor. The child custody laws we enjoy today derive from Caroline Norton’s wretched marriage, and her love for her three boys to whom she was lost for six years and then found again. Mothers, single or married, now owe their status as parents of their own children to Caroline Norton, for taking that first step which put them within the law and changed the rules of patriarchy for ever.

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