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The primary source for this book has been the six volumes of Mémoires de Georgina Weldon: Justice (?) Anglaise, self-published as from Gisors/34 Hart St., Bloomsbury, 1902. This huge and ramshackle work includes French translations of some but not all of the other pamphlets published by Georgina. It is especially rich in letters to and by her. English-language copies of the pamphlets, as well as the shortlived newspaper Social Salvation, can be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Her contemporaries had much less to say about her than might be imagined. Her nephew, Phillip Treherne, published an affectionate and uncritical portrait of her nine years after she died in A Plaintiff in Person (Heinemann, 1923). It is from this book that the letter from Oscar Wilde is quoted.

Georgina’s only other biographer has been Edward Grierson, in his Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon (Chatto and Windus, 1959). Grierson had access to the entire Weldon chronofile, and quotations from her diaries and journal in the present work can be traced to his genial and entertaining book.

A much less successful attempt to shoehorn her into nineteenth-century feminist history can be found in City of Dreadful Night: A Narrative of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London by Judith Walkovitz (Virago, 1992).

One of the satisfactions in hunting for her ghost in the Tavistock House years has been the chance to read the wise and witty Gounod by James Harding (Allen and Unwin, 1973).

Other works that bear directly on the story are listed below:


Bancroft, Squire. The Bancrofts. Murray, 1909.

———Empty Chairs. Murray, 1925.

Bessborough, Earl of, ed. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extracts from her Journals. Murray, 1952.

Blunt, Wilfred. England’s Michelangelo. Hamish Hamilton, 1975.

De HegerMann-Lindencrone. In the Courts of Memory. Harper & Brothers, 1912.

Doggett, Maeve E. Marriage, Wifebeating and the Law in Victorian England. University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

Du Maurier, Daphne, ed. The Young George Du Maurier, Letters 1860–67. Peter Davies, 1951.

Kennedy, A. L. My Dear Duchess. Murray, 1956.

Scull, Andrew, with Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey. Masters of Bedlam. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert. The London Encyclopedia. MacMillan, 1983.

Weintraub, Stanley. Victoria. Murray, 1987.

Wilson, Guy Fleetwood. Letters to Somebody. Cassell, 1922.

Young, G. M. Victorian England, Portrait of an Age. OUP, 1936.