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There was in Victorian England an enormous and apparently unquenchable interest in choral music of all kinds. A pious and churchgoing public was still in the full grip of oratoriomania, which had begun with Handel in the previous century and showed no sign of abating. The year she met Harry there was a representative newspaper account of a concert organized in Bristol: “The Harmonic Union performed the greater part of Judas Maccabeus . . . under the able direction of Mr. Philip J. Smith. The whole of the music was sung by members of the Society, both the solos and choruses, which speaks well for the continued prosperity of the Society. The body of the hall was nearly filled by the vocal and instrumental members, leaving but a limited space for visitors.”

This happy scene, in which members of the public were mere visitors or spectators, was often repeated in London and throughout the provinces. Choirs were huge. On even average occasions at Crystal Palace or provincial festivals the audience could count on an orchestra and chorus of more than a thousand. The music critic Ernest Walker, who was born the year Georgina conceived her idea of opening her own school of music, described this hunger for the English form of oratorio and how it skewed the works of composers:

They set, with apparently absolute indiscrimination, well nigh every word of the Bible; and when they were not writing oratorios of their own, they were still making them out of the mangled remains of other men’s music. Operas of Handel, masses of Haydn, instrumental music of Mozart and Beethoven—all were fish to the net of this insatiable oratorio-demanding public; and most English composers devoted the greater part of their energies to satisfying it in one form or another. From the middle of the 18th century down to the renascence which is the work of men still in their prime, English music is a darkness relieved by the wandering lights of talents that in happier circumstances might have been geniuses.

It was into this darkness that Georgina wished to plunge. Two things came together to push her plans forward. The first may have been a startling act of chance, or it may have been sublime opportunism. She met Sir William Alexander, who was Attorney General to the Prince of Wales. There was a very slight family connection, for as a young man Alexander had been of great assistance to the Thomas family when Morgan’s sister and her young husband had been drowned in the Pyrenees on a honeymoon boating trip. The lawyer, who happened to be on vacation in the same region, had handled all the legal problems arising out of the accident. This was enough for Georgina to describe him as “a dear friend,” though this tragedy took place when she was nine. In fact, in another part of her Mémoires, she had to be prompted by the medium Desbarolles even to remember the death of her aunt. As Georgina discovered, Alexander, now laden with honors, was charged by the Earl Marshal with some reorganization of the College of Arms. With the artless energy for which she was famous, she asked him to make a place for Harry when one should become available. Her own interest in heraldry stood as guarantee for what must have seemed to Alexander a long shot. Captain Weldon, as he had taken to calling himself at the Garrick Club in London, was not armigerous, had little formal education, was a man who had sold his commission after only two years in the 18th Hussars, and lived more than two hundred miles from London in a terrace cottage. He had never before evinced the slightest interest in genealogy.

The Duke of Norfolk was sounded out and proved unsympathetic to Harry’s candidature. This was hardly surprising (she told her French readers the reason for this was that Harry was not a Catholic, but it is not difficult to think of other objections). Then a strange thing happened. Alexander completed the work for which he had been commissioned and, when offered a £500 fee for his services, waived it in return for the favor she had asked. After some hasty coaching from Georgina, William Henry Weldon was appointed Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, with rooms in the exquisite seventeenth-century College building below St. Paul’s. He succeeded the immensely scholarly Cockayne. The new Garter king of arms was Albert Woods, who was knighted in November 1869 and continued as Garter until his death in 1904.

This was a privileged and select club to which Harry had found himself admitted, for in addition to the grant of arms that was the bread and butter of the job, the Pursuivants and Heralds represented the sovereign at foreign investitures. During the last three years of his tenure, Cockayne had been to Portugal, Russia, and Italy, and Woods (as Lancaster Herald) to Denmark, Belgium, and Austria. The post carried a small honorarium but immense kudos: Harry was nominally a member of the court. Of the society that Morgan had so desperately wished to join, Harry was now an honored record keeper and custodian. The man whose correspondence had been answered by Morgan’s butler ten years earlier was now besought by families ten times higher in the land than a mere Treherne. Georgina’s pleasure in the appointment was focused on one point, which may have been her purpose all along. Henceforth the Weldons must live in London in accommodation suitable to their position.

The second impetus for an academy of singing originated in Beaumaris. Harry’s godmother had a friend, Mrs. Jones, a rector’s wife in the remote parish of Llangwyfan in Denbighshire. The Reverend John Owen Jones and his wife had ten children, of whom one, seventeen-year-old Gwendolyn, was in their opinion possessed of a wonderful voice. Mrs. Jones went begging for advice to Beaumaris and found to her astonishment that the answer to her prayers was right there in the town—none other than the highly connected and prestigious “musical oracle,” Mrs. Weldon. Introductions were effected and Georgina reviewed the problem with characteristic aplomb. “I knew all the singing teachers in vogue—Benedict, Deacon, Campana, Pinsutti, Vera, Randegger. They were all my devoted admirers. My word was their command, and they would have gone to any trouble to have the honour of accompanying me.”

This was astounding news for Mrs. Jones and the nervy Gwendolyn. What they brought to Beaumaris was a dream, the faintest of hopes, a cry from the very depths of obscurity. Nowhere could be more hidden away from society than Llangwyfan, and yet now, suddenly, they found their lives bathed in light. One did not have to know too much about London music circles not to know that between them the men Georgina mentioned so casually were at the heart of public music education and had as their private clients some of the greatest names in opera. And could they really help Gwendolyn? Georgina left them in no doubt. Something could be easily arranged if the trembling ingenue could be brought up to scratch. She set the young singer a regime, of practicing only a few notes over and over, while she herself set off for a spa trip to the Rhine. When they met again, Georgina remarked loftily, “I had gained a great deal. She had become aware of her own defects.” The rectory at Llangwyfan was further convulsed when Mrs. Weldon began to muse that she herself might be persuaded to take up one or two more of the Jones girls, if suitable premises could be found in London.

The illustrious Alberto Randegger and his colleagues were soon enough dropped from the discussions: what was envisaged was an academy of which Mrs. Weldon would be the principal. The methods of voice production and training were to be of a revolutionary character, and the object was to produce concert artists of international caliber. The pupils would live within the academy and pay board. Drawn from the very best families (which should have sent a warning shot across Mrs. Jones’s bows), they would sing at the best of amateur concerts; but the intention was to send them out into the world as recitalists and opera stars. This was a process that might take five years. There was a final dramatic flourish to the plans: did the Joneses know that Captain and Mrs. Weldon had taken up a lease on Dickens’s old house in Tavistock Square?