3  

Georgina had been told several times just before her marriage that she should put her singing voice to advantage and turn professional. The advice came originally from Frederick Clay, an amateur composer who held a clerk’s post in the Treasury. Clay was a year or so younger than she and not much better trained as a musician, but he was a considerable melodist and an ambitious young man. He had been charmed by her and remained her friend through thick and thin. “The Sands of Dee,” a Clay ballad which for forty years every young woman in England offered when music was called for, was dedicated to her. It may have been that he knew enough about her to make this idea of singing professionally a subtly practical suggestion, as a way out of the disgrace she had brought down on herself at Little Holland House. It was a delicate matter to broach, for young ladies of good family did not take this route very often. Lords might marry opera singers, but their daughters hardly clamored to go on the stage. Fredling, as she called him, may have been trying to help, but it was not completely welcome advice. His own hold on the musical scene came from two little operettas he had written. He was much better known as James Clay’s son and the man who first introduced Gilbert to Sullivan.

The composer and conductor Julius Benedict gave Georgina the same encouragement to turn professional. This was a much more weighty endorsement of her talents. Benedict had the unmistakable air of the maestro about him (he had been a pupil of Weber’s and was surely the only man Georgina ever met who had shaken hands with Beethoven). It was Benedict who brought Jenny Lind to England to sing in oratorio and he who shepherded the singer on her triumphant tour of America. His admiration for Georgina’s voice seems to have been unqualified. Benedict understood very well that the Upper Ten Thousand knew little about music they did not make for themselves. They went to the Italian Opera as a form of social snobbery. Otherwise, they were taught by poor devils who came to the house as servants or by their mothers. Their accomplishments were consequently very modest.

Benedict—and there were increasing numbers of others like him—saw that musical patronage was passing from the aristocracy to the middle classes. The Royal Academy of Music was a striking example. It was founded in 1822 and given its charter in 1830, but its fortunes had until recently been mixed. The original patron was Lord Westmorland, a soldier and diplomat, and an amateur composer and fiddle player. The committee that formed around him was entirely aristocratic. It took as its principal duty the management of a modest fund and a property off Hanover Square. The question of music education hardly came into it. The institution lurched from one disaster to another. When Westmorland died in 1859, the Board of Professors tried for ten years to increase their role from being merely advisory to the directors, to a share in the running of affairs. The committee’s response was simple and direct. If the profession of music led to unseemly wrangles of this kind with titled gentlemen, they would rather have nothing to do with it. They voted to resign the Royal Charter. The professors took legal opinion, and it was only by their energies that the Royal Academy of Music was saved.

Georgina’s own interest in music was purely amateur. As her experience of Little Holland House had shown, it was much easier to meet a poet or a painter on more or less equal terms than it was to discover a composer, especially an English composer. The division that existed in the Royal Academy of Music ran right through society. The gifted amateur from her own rank in society and the professional music maker hardly ever mixed. There is a telling anecdote in Fenimore Cooper’s account of his visit to England, as early as 1828: “Respectable artists such as would be gladly received in our orchestras walk the streets and play the music of Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Meyerbeer, Weber, &tc., beneath your windows,” he reported. The poverty they dwelled in astonished him quite as much as the quality of their playing. He even found a man who pushed a grand piano about on a cart and gave recitals “quite equal to what one finds in society.” In forty years much had changed, but the underlying point of the story remained the same. Music professionals were doubtless very worthy, but they were not exactly cherishable.

Benedict was one of the men who changed all this. At the time he first met Georgina he was conductor of the Italian Opera. If he thought she could turn professional, it was advice not to be dismissed lightly. In the long winter of 1860 she must have thought about this many times. If she had truly compromised her social position by a runaway marriage—as it must have seemed with the wind whistling through the cottage door and snow blanking out the view of Baron Hill, behind whose walls Lady Bulkely gave court to the even more illustrious Pagets—maybe a professional career as a singer was the only way out. Harry had no opinion one way or the other. He knew none of the people she knew and had no particular wish to make their acquaintance. Georgina could, if she wished, ride bareback in a circus. It was all the same to him.

She did not in the end respond to Benedict. Every life has opportunities that are not taken up—in this case fatefully. Benedict was a pleasant old man, but he was after all merely a German. To do what he proposed was to admit defeat, not only to people who had known her in London but, more important, to her parents and brothers and sisters. The composer could not know how important it was for her to be counted among the elite. Fame of the kind given to Malibran or Jenny Lind was not what she was after. She had already touched the hem of what she wanted—to be in the same company as the Duchess of Cambridge or Lord Clarendon and his adorable daughter. To be irresistible in a room filled with duchesses, simply because she was beautiful and in some small way dangerous to know—that was her real stage.

Perhaps it was through Benedict’s good offices that she received an offer to join an amateur choir giving concerts to the British volunteers who had gone to support the North in the American Civil War. This was more appropriate to her idea of herself. She went very willingly and after her duties in Canada (where she was, she says, feted as “the Napoleon of Song”) made a visit to Washington, flirted her way into the British Legation, and did what she did best, which was to entrance older men.

The head of legation was Lord Lyons, a bachelor diplomat in his forties who had been in Florence at the end of Georgina’s stay there. William Russell, the Times correspondent made famous by his reporting of the Crimea, was also a guest. The whole of the North was baying for his blood after dispatches he sent from the Battle of Bull Run, seeming to suggest Yankee cowardice. At the same time, his reports were so vehemently antislavery they upset the South and contradicted the generally favorable line his own editor took with the Confederates. As a consequence Russell was more or less in hiding, both from his public and from his employer. Georgina’s visit occurred at an electric moment. There was talk of war between America and Britain for insults received and slights offered. Lyons was to say later that had there existed an Atlantic telegraph cable at that time, war would have been inevitable. Though Georgina knew nothing of it, there were contingency plans already laid to evacuate him and his staff to Canada.

The Washington episode throws light on her incurable naïveté. To have wangled her way to the center of an international crisis as well as a civil war took some doing. It was soon clear that most of what was being talked about in the Federal capital went straight over her head. She was not there to learn, but to be seen and swooned over. Russell met the challenge. He got up a parlor game in which those in the legation formed a secret society, the members of which were named Bully—Bully Warre, Bully Anderson, and so on—with himself as the Bold Buccaneer. Georgina was inducted as Sister Sal. The young men of the legation staff took a shine to Harry and his rather brash but flirtatious wife. One of the Bullys—Frederick Warre—became a lifelong friend of Harry’s. As for Georgina, she was loud and reckless. Her opinions of Anglesey society were quite scandalous, and though she pressed on Lord Lyons her claims to know Florence well, he was not impressed. Nor did William Russell entirely recognize her descriptions of literary London. What could not be denied was her colossal and childlike enthusiasm. Like life lived as a child, every day was a completely new beginning, and what had gone wrong the day before was sunk without trace. She could be spiteful and vindictive, but these were moments that passed as quickly as clouds.