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Tavistock Square was developed in 1824 by Thomas Cubitt, who had a happy relationship with Bloomsbury’s principal landowner, the Duke of Bedford. As can be seen today, the uniform high quality of the Cubitt designs gave a character to this part of London which, though it was never fashionable in the same sense as the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia, was considered highly respectable. On the east side of Tavistock Square (which was gated until the Act of 1893) was Tavistock House, one of three large houses set in generous grounds. Tavistock House boasted particularly fine mulberry trees. When Dickens and Wilkie Collins passed the returning Thomases on the road to Florence, the greatest of all Victorians had been in occupation of this house for three years. Dickens bought the run-down property leasehold from the Bedford Estate and set about extensive renovations with his usual energetic pernicketiness. In November 1851, pacing up and down for inspiration in his new home, with the builders still at work, he began Bleak House. (An early working title was The Bleak House Academy.) But in 1855 he learned that Gadshill Place in Rochester was on the market, a house he had dreamed of owning as a child. He sold Tavistock House in 1860 at a dark time of his life. An old lady took up the leasehold, followed by the Weldons.

In many ways the house was perfect for Georgina’s purposes, for one of the many alterations Dickens had made, and which still stood, was the creation of what he used to call “the smallest theatre in London,” where he indulged his taste for amateur dramatics. Bloomsbury was famous even then for its society of artists and writers, taken together with a strong leavening of lawyers. In many ways it was an inspired purchase for the Weldons. As an address it suited Harry, and as a site for the projected academy of singing it could hardly have been bettered. Dickens himself died at Gadshill in June 1870, four weeks after the Weldons moved into Tavistock House.

The new owners came to London with Gwendolyn Jones and two of her sisters. Georgina was in a frenzy of excitement. There must be an inaugural fund-raising concert for her academy, and it must take place immediately. Nothing else would do. She wrote Clay an excruciatingly facetious note enlisting his help. He himself would perform, along with a comic singer named Arthur Blunt, but the centerpiece was to be her own debut as a professional.

Tavistock House had grown frowsty since the Dickens days, and the Weldons were strapped for furniture on the scale the house required. Georgina at last admitted that the concert could not be held there. But something must be done! After some setbacks the new Lady Dudley offered Dudley House as a location. (She was the second wife to that same Lord Ward who had been caught with Georgina in Watts’s studio twelve years earlier.) The date was set for July 5. Another society acquaintance, Sim Egerton, was given the task of publicizing the event. In the end he rounded up 250 people, including a bemused Ferdinand de Lesseps, engineer of the Suez Canal. Twelve years later Georgina confessed that she expected £3,000 in donations and subscriptions from this one concert: this was the chance for her society friends, as she perceived them, to pay their dues. She could not command their respect, but she believed she had earned it. They would do the right thing.

She drove away that night with the distraught Jones girls and total receipts of £199. The concert had been a complete fiasco. She had been betrayed by overexcitement and a lack of planning. But much more than an artistic and financial fiasco, it was a social rebuff. The Welsh girls might wail that they had been made to look fools, had sung badly, worn the wrong dresses, but Georgina knew that something even more disastrous had taken place. She had suffered the kind of snub from which there was no way back. Nothing had been said, but what she considered her own class had spoken. It was Little Holland House all over again. The favor she had asked of Lord Ward, now the Earl of Dudley, had not helped her, but ruined her. The 250 invitees had not even contributed a guinea a head. Many had given nothing at all. Worse than that, in the way that these things worked, within the week theirs would be the only opinion that mattered in London. The all-powerful engine of society gossip had doomed her. She wrote:

Entering the profession is the most disagreeable and humiliating thing you can possibly imagine, but it is no more humiliating in my opinion than the way people fight to get to one party or another in Society and the way Dukes and Duchesses are run after for no reason or object in life that I can see. I always hated Society and its mean ways and never have I asked to go to a party in my life. Whatever I go through now is for a purpose, and in my opinion as well as many other good persons, a good one . . .

Not given to reflection and often unable to distinguish between what she would like to happen and what was going to happen, Georgina crossed over on that one disastrous evening from fantasy into brutal fact. Turning herself into a professional musician required far more planning and much greater talent than she possessed. She had the support of Benedict and Clay—though not for much longer. She did not have Sullivan, whom she suspected of having set people against her. But even if he were innocent of any malice, she knew in her heart that something had happened for which there was no remedy. It was not that people did not know her: they knew her all too well. All the gaffes and little pieces of spite she had so liberally strewn in conversation, all the reckless flirtations, had been remembered. The truth was that society, which she pretended to reprehend, had already made a judgment, long before she stepped before her audience at Dudley House. The world, which she so freely judged, had now judged her. By the weekend, when she had a chance to find out by cautious inquiry what the full reaction had been, she realized she was not even a notoriety. She was a nothing.

Georgina had no business sense and no desire to learn it either. She had rushed into a promotional concert with a poor program and little groundwork. What had let her down more than all this was basic human weakness. Her dreams were bigger than her abilities. It is cruel to add to her anguish, but it happens there was another more glorious story of singers and singing entrancing London at exactly the same time and indeed in the same place. Comparison with Georgina’s professional debut is painful but serves to show up the enormous gap she was trying to bridge.

As a young girl, the rich Bostonian Lillie Greenough had persuaded her mother to bring her to London to learn singing. She auditioned for Manuel García, who heard with a sinking feeling her party piece “Three little kittens took off their mittens to eat their Christmas pie.” García asked her how long she had been singing, and Mrs. Greenough answered for her daughter. “Since she was a little girl, monsieur.” “I thought so,” García commented. But within the year, Lillie had married the American banker Charles Moulton and gone to Paris, where she was considered one of the finest sopranos of the Second Empire. It was true that Moulton made her rich beyond the dreams of most people, but she was also dedicated. She befriended Liszt and Auber, sang for the Emperor and Eugénie, and in June 1870, on a whim, came back to London. She and her husband took rooms in Park Street and left cards. Within days they were inundated with invitations, one of which was to a matinée musicale at Dudley House. Lillie sang for her hosts only a few days before Georgina’s ill-fated concert. “The piano was in the beautiful picture gallery,” she wrote, “all full of Greuze’s pictures bought from the Vatican: it has the most wonderful acoustics and the voice sounded splendidly in it. Lady Dudley is a celebrated beauty . . .”

The engagements continued: dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, then with the Rothschilds, who pressed her to stay for Ascot week; an at-home with Lady Anglesey, an audience with the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Covent Garden diva Adelina Patti was fetched to meet her, and Sullivan followed her around like a dog, entreating her to sing in his operetta, The Prodigal Son, which he was getting up for Lady Harington. At the Ascot races she joined Delane of the Times at the open table he kept for a hundred guests, come who may. On her birthday Lady Sherbourne took off a diamond ring and gave it to her. At Twickenham she dined with the Comte de Paris and the entire Orléans family. It was not just that Mrs. Moulton was rich, nor were her hosts exhibiting a group hysteria in vying with each other to hear her sing. They were responding, as best they knew, to excellence. Georgina had never sung as an amateur to audiences such as this, nor could she begin to hope for support from them in her professional career. The two sopranos were worlds apart, not just in connections but in talent.

Lillie Moulton’s trip ended with a garden party at Chiswick, as guest of the Prince and Princess of Wales once again. The three little princesses rolled around the lawns “like three fluffy pink pincushions, covered in white muslin.” Huge Japanese sunshades had been set up to shelter the company from the sun as they strolled and chatted, or drank their sherbets at little tables set on the terrace. Lillie found herself talking to the Prince of Wales, who asked her where she had dined last. She mentioned the Comte de Paris.

“What day did you dine there?”

“On the 17th, Your Highness.”

“Are you sure it was the 17th?”

She explained that she remembered the date well, because it was the day before her birthday. The Prince of Wales asked whether it was a large dinner and nodded when told that all the Orléans family had been present.

“Did you know that they had a conseil de famille that day?”

“No. I heard nothing of it.”

“The whole family signed a petition to the Emperor Napoleon to be allowed to return to France and serve in the army.” The Prince studied her. “Can you imagine why they want to go back to France when they can live quietly here and be out of politics?”

The remark was intended to be genial, but it had its shaded side. Edward was no stranger to the lighter, dizzier character of the Second Empire, but it was as if in that one remark he consigned it and all its vanities to oblivion.

Lillie returned home to Paris and on July 17 drove to St. Cloud for dinner with the Empress. When the Moultons arrived, instead of a flurry of servants in the vestibule, there was only one distracted official. The dinner had been canceled. Then, at the last moment, Eugénie sent word they were to be admitted. Other than members of the imperial household, they were the only guests. The meal was taken in terrible silence, interrupted by a stream of telegrams. At the end of the meal, the Emperor, wracked with kidney stones and ashen white, hauled himself to his feet and almost absentmindedly bade the company good night. He had already sworn to take the field at the head of his troops but could barely mount the stairs in his own palace.

Two days later France declared war upon Prussia.