1 
The Thomas family arrived in Florence in the type of commercial coach called a diligence on the last leg of a series of dusty and bone-shaking misadventures that dogged them all the way across Europe from Boulogne. They were set down outside the Hôtel du Nord in a state of complete exhaustion after a transit lasting nearly three weeks. Every flea-ridden inn, every insolent customs post, had provoked a quarrel. The diligence seated as many as fifteen passengers, inside and out, none of them worthy of Morgan’s attention and on the contrary sweaty, vulgar, and for the most part disgustingly foreign. No concession was made to the sun—the Thomases arrived wearing much the same kind of clothing they had worn in England, Georgina in a crushed and dusty miniature of her mother’s crinoline, the newly born infant, Morgan Dalrymple, swathed in flannel and half dead with heat.
They knew no one in the city. Those who watched them enter the lobby of the hotel saw they had little luggage and no servants. Though Florence was much more easygoing and welcoming than Rome, the Thomases made no great impression, either at first glance or on later acquaintance. It was not in their nature to be friendly—Morgan could hardly force himself to be civil—and they brought no news of any consequence. As for the little girl running about the lobby of the hotel, though she was plump as a pigeon, she evidently gave her parents no pleasure. The days passed, the family had still not visited the Uffizi, the father continued his supercilious silence over dinner: at last they were dismissed as dull. They were Kickleburys.
Morgan came to Florence for a very good reason. It was far from the scenes of his electoral nightmares, but much more to the point, the city was one of the cheapest places to live in Europe. A man with a high sense of his own importance but no money could hardly have chosen better. We can get some idea of the attractions from the affairs of another expatriate in much the same boat, Captain Fleetwood Wilson of the 8th Hussars. He happened to be there on a yearlong honeymoon when news reached him that he had been utterly ruined by his older brother, to whom he had lent all his money. The Wilsons were in a fix: they already had one child and another was on the way. Abused, betrayed, the gallant captain (considered by his generation one of the greatest horsemen in England) was at his wit’s end. Then he found the Villa Strozzino. Built by a Strozzi three hundred years earlier, the villa sat on a hill with an elaborate arcaded front and two floors above. Fine trees decorated its lawns and gardens, and cypresses swayed ecstatically in the background. The internal arrangements were such that fifty years later Victoria herself occupied it on her visit to Florence. As Captain Wilson swiftly discovered, penury in Tuscany was a relative affair.
Morgan Thomas, the secretive and unclubbable newcomer, likewise chose his accommodation well. He rented the Villa Capponi, a short carriage drive from the city on its southern side. At one stroke, he entered into the kind of life so emphatically denied him in England. Like Strozzi, Capponi was a famous name in the history of the republic. Indeed, when Morgan rode into the city through the Porta S. Giorgio, he could see the proud boast set up by Niccolo Capponi above the portals of the Town Hall in 1528: JESVS CHRISTVS REX FLORENTINI POPULI S P DECRETO ELECTVS. Christ might have been the only king the Florentines could accept—the inscription had been a jibe at the departing Charles V—but things were somewhat different now. The Austrians were in occupation, and the greatest man in Florence was not a Medici, but the Russian millionaire Anatoly Demidov, who maintained his new bride, Bonaparte’s niece, in the sumptuously appointed San Donato palace. The nominal ruler of the city and all the lands round about was the Grand Duke of Tuscany, cheerfully dismissed by his subjects as the Grand Ass. At the lower levels of society, the city was festering with every kind of adventurer and charlatan to be found in Europe. Morgan had been put in the unusual position—for him—of being monarch of all he surveyed, but what he saw he did not like very much.
The youthful Lady Dorothy Orford, a member of the Walpole family, which had deep roots in Florence, had recently made a much more dashing entrance to the expatriate community, having ridden the son of the 1835 Derby winner, a seventeen-hand horse called Testina, all the way from Antwerp. This was more to the taste of the locals. She later commented, “At that time, society in Florence was somewhat mixed: indeed, there were a great many people of shady character, in addition to others of none at all—so much so was this the case that the town had come to be designated ‘le paradis des femmes galantes.’”
A paradise for whores was superimposed on, and undoubtedly drew some of its custom from, the well-established British colony. Many before Morgan had the same idea as he, some of them much more romantically motivated. Dante made the city a place of literary pilgrimage, and the Brownings were by no means alone in wishing to live and write there. There were many painters and sculptors in residence and a long tradition of amateur theatricals. All the same, the atmosphere inclined to the raffish. Thomas Trollope, brother to Anthony, settled in Florence in 1843 and has left a snapshot of how the Grand Duke’s hospitality was abused at the Pitti Palace. At balls the English would “seize the plates of bonbons and empty the contents bodily into their coat pockets. The ladies would do the same with their pocket handkerchiefs.” The Italian guests went further, wrapping up hams, chickens, and portions of fish in newspapers. Trollope saw an Italian countess smuggle a jelly into her purse.
Behind the walls of the Villa Capponi, where he could direct a household with more servants in it than he had ever dreamed possible, Morgan Thomas played out his fantasies of being a rich and indolent aristocrat. He was living in rooms with high ceilings. The trouble was elsewhere. When he looked farther abroad—when he looked outside his gates, in fact—it was Florence itself that he reprehended: not any bit of it, but all of it. Though the British colony was various, it contained more scribblers and painters than he was accustomed to meet and was headed by a man he quickly learned to fear and detest.
Her Majesty’s minister plenipotentiary for Tuscany was Henry Edward Fox, soon to be fourth Baron Holland. Fox’s wife was the attractive and flirtatious Augusta—“decidedly under three feet,” the diarist Thomas Creevey once reported, “and the very nicest little doll or plaything I ever saw.” It would be difficult to invent two people less likely to entrance the prickly and suspicious Morgan, who knew very well that Fox had learned of him and his political disasters through Ellice.
The author and socialite Lady Blessington drew a brief sketch of Fox as he was in those days: “Mr. Henry Fox possesses the talent for society in an eminent degree. He is intelligent, lively, and très-spirituel; seizes the point of ridicule in all whom he encounters at a glance and draws them out with a tact that is very amusing to the lookers on.”
At any such meeting, Morgan was much more likely to be the butt of the conversation than an amused onlooker. Though he wore his hair in a dandified center parting and clung loyally to the blue and yellow favored by the Regency period, he was too short, too pugnacious, and far too provincial to be of any interest to such great men as Fox. Lady Blessington, who was really rather a good journalist, had noticed some years earlier the fascination the British had for the Florentine portrait sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini:
Every Lord and Commoner who has passed through Florence during the last few years has left here a memorial of his visit; and every lady who has ever heard that she had a good profile (and Heaven knows how seldom the assertion was true) has left a model of it on the dusty shelves of Bartolini . . . Elderly gentlemen with double chins resembling the breast of the pelican, requiring a double portion of marble in their representation . . . portly matrons too are ranged in rows with busts as exuberant as those that Rubens loved to lavish on his canvas . . . young ladies with compressed waists and drooping ringlets, looking all like sisters . . . and young gentlemen with formal faces and straight hair confront one at every step.
Bartolini stored these effigies on shelves in his studios, and they were inspected in much the same way as the work of Michelangelo. They were on the tourist list. Mr. Thomas and his wife belonged much more to that world of nameless and dusty nonentities than anything suggested by the glamour of the great palaces. Georgina later wrote of the Florence years:
My father disliked Society—he loved his home; my mother on the contrary liked Society. My father did not like women to wear low necked dresses; my mother on the contrary wished to be like other people. My father’s opinion was that eleven o’clock at night was a respectable hour for leaving parties; this was the hour at which parties began. He obliged my mother to come home just at the time when she was beginning to amuse herself. My father would not call on this lady or that lady, or visit Madame A because she had a lover, or Madame B because she received Madame A. He would not even set foot at the English Embassy while Lord Holland was Ambassador, because gossip was afloat concerning Lady Holland. He seemed possessed with a passion for virtue, and he had been nicknamed at Florence “the policeman of Society.”
This is as good a portrait of Morgan as can be found, but Georgina added another very telling sentence: “I had inherited to the full his mania to keep his reputation inviolate. I bristled with virtue.”
When she was six years old, she had an early opportunity to support her father’s reproach of local morals. In 1843 a penniless young artist named George Frederick Watts arrived in the city. Quite by chance on the boat from Marseilles, he had met Edward Ellice’s brother, who at once effected an introduction to the Hollands. The policeman of society and his little sausage-curled lieutenant soon learned that Watts was the son of a man who had fallen so low as to be a piano tuner. To their complete amazement, Morgan and Georgina saw Watts being taken up by the Hollands, commissioned to paint portraits by the fabulously rich Demidovs, and the darling of all who met him.
While this may have secretly impressed Georgina as a striking example of how fame worked, Morgan had not come to Florence to have anything to do with art. The adoration of Watts, who was not only thin but unutterably gloomy and to many outsiders effete in the extreme, left him speechless. Augusta Holland commissioned a portrait by the artist in which she wore a chapeau de paille—“some lady having in a joke put one of the country hats on her head,” as a smitten Edward Ellice reported to Lady Holland in London. On New Year’s Day, 1844, Augusta presented the gangly Watts with a gold watch, specially commissioned from Geneva, murmuring, as she placed the chain around his neck, “We not only bind you to us, we chain you.” It was immediately interpreted as the sign of a liaison. Morgan fingered his own Warwickshire timepiece from Messrs. Vale and Rotherham and reflected bitterly on the levels to which society had sunk.
The reason her father gave for fleeing London—his wife’s ill health—was a common euphemism for poverty. If Georgina was ever worried about her mother, events were soon to calm her mind. At the Villa Capponi Louisa had another three children in quick succession: Emily, Florence, and the baby of the family, Apsley. Though the heat did not suit her and she never adapted successfully to having such a quiverful of children, she was as healthy as a horse. She lived to be eighty-three and was on this earth longer than her husband and her eldest daughter.
More sociable than Morgan in her timid, haphazard way, Louisa made the best she could of Florence. When Georgina was old enough, she took the child with her to the Cascine Gardens, where every day the bon ton gathered to gossip while the more gallant and amorous gentlemen threaded through the mass of carriages bearing messages and making their salutes. This morning concourse was, Georgina learned, to be compared favorably to Rotten Row or the Bois du Boulogne. When the weather was hospitable enough for walking, Louisa might descend from her carriage and stroll with her daughter under the trees by the banks of the Arno. There she would point out, not without envious longing, the roofs of the great houses on the opposite bank.
From May onward the town would be refreshed by new faces, birds of passage making the grand tour. They were eagerly welcomed by the expatriates. What was happening in London? Was it true that rain and a hundred thousand special constables had turned back the revolutionary Chartist mob—and was Mr. Gladstone truly one of those who was sworn in? Was it also true that railway speeds now regularly touched forty miles an hour, without hurt to the internal organs of the passengers? And plum—was that really a color a lady of fashion might adopt? Sometimes the tedium of the daily corso would be broken by the distant sighting of some scandalous liaison in its early stages, or whispered news of ruination in some other form, like gambling. These intrigues Georgina dutifully reported to her father. She showed an aptitude for similar detective work all her life—not much given to self-analysis, she was a master of the dossier method of investigating others. It was exciting and she was seldom short of material.
To a small girl groomed by her father to find outrage in everything, there was the additional frisson of the Austrian occupation. One afternoon an Italian lawyer absentmindedly spat on the ground while a patrol passed. The Austrian officer at once dismounted and, having the culprit pinned to the wall, ordered his troopers to line up and one by one spit in the unfortunate man’s face. In 1851 there was an even more shocking case. Two young brothers named Mather were following an Austrian military band and darted across the road between it and the accompanying troop of horses. Two officers spurred their mounts and cut one of the brothers to the ground.
This was the sort of story to set Morgan bristling with indignation. Yet there was a diminishing return in feeding her father such tidbits. She gradually understood what it meant to be part of his police force. The fate of Charles Mather raised disgust and indignation all the way back to the floor of the House of Commons. However, Morgan’s contempt for other people was quite unspecific—he was not minded to like the unfortunate Mather any more than the man who had struck him. In his eyes the whole world was out of step. When Georgina was very young, her father’s vanity reinforced her own childish sense of superiority. To be a Thomas was to be a thing apart, not different from but better than all the rest. As she grew up, the unwelcoming house and the lack of invitations from others gradually began to cast doubt in her. The possibility existed that there was something seriously wrong with them all.
She was given tutors—a long roll call of them, not one of whom made any great impression or sowed the seeds of inspiration. Georgina learned to play the piano and completed a conventional and undemanding schooling in reading and writing. She once remarked, “I am sure if I had but studied Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing I should have made a great artist.” There is not the slightest nod here to the treasure house of art Florence was. She was intelligent but unlearned. The one gift she did possess she had been born with—a quite remarkably clear soprano voice.
It was said in later life that her mother took special interest in her singing. This may have indicated to some that Louisa herself was musical, but this was not the case. Every girl child of that time was taught to sing, in the same way she was taught to brush her hair, or show deference to her elders, or any of a hundred other little things. Singing was a way of moving from the schoolroom to the drawing room, and a young girl’s voice was merely a further expression of the taste exhibited in the family’s choice of furniture, its display of pictures and china. The role a good-mannered girl had in a family was almost too obvious to mention. A boy might, within reason, do as he liked and go where he would. No one expected much sense from a boy. For that he was sent away to school. His sister was domesticated as soon as was practicable. Singing was an outward demonstration of her complicity in the affairs of the family. She was in that sense her mother’s child, an expression of her mother’s taste and sensibility.
What is striking about Georgina’s childhood is its extraordinary tedium. Pleasures a young girl of her class might take for granted in an English setting simply did not exist for her—like picnics, visits to relatives, parties, river excursions, or a trip to the seaside. She had some idiosyncrasies that stayed with her all her life. From her youngest days she exhibited a mild mania for collecting. She cut out armorial bearings from magazines and pasted them into books. She was among the earliest collectors of stamps. She made lists of Important Things. She kept a diary and recorded the uninspiring events of her day in scrupulous detail. This suggests a secretive and lonely child, but it is more likely that the Villa Capponi days were simply very long. We know from more famous Florence residents—from the Brownings, for example—that in the three summer months that began in June, the heat became enervating and a torpor settled over everything. Even a shaded garden became too hot to endure, and those families who could afford it moved up into the hills for air and the chance of a breeze. Once there, improving sight-seeing and visits to hilltop monasteries were scheduled for five in the morning. So, to be a child in the stiflingly hot summers, even with siblings, became a little like being the inmate of a prison.
Morgan had nothing to say to any of his children—they in turn were terrified to open their mouths in his presence. The rooms of the villa were extensive, there were servants in plenty, but there was nothing much to do. The only outdoor pleasure Georgina shared with her father was his passion for gardening, which he undertook in the winter months. She showed early on a very un-Latin enthusiasm for pets, especially dogs, treating them as little people, more loyal and certainly more loving than the two-legged inhabitants of the villa. Late in life she put this feeling into a letter: “I feel a horror for exaggerated love or friendship. It’s just too well demonstrated to me that when the moment comes that one asks for something, or has need of something, the response is not worth a biscuit.”