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Three years on, Georgina published at her own expense The Story of My Orphanage, a rambling and sometimes incoherent background to the Gounod years. The house is suddenly peopled with minor characters like the brazen orphan Rosie Strube, whom she seems to have picked up in the street when she was eight, and the four children of the Rawlings family, who had been fathered by a blind man from over the river in Lambeth. He formed them into a bell-ringing act and then sent them to live with Georgina with his best wishes. The number of actual orphans in the house from day to day, week to week, is difficult to establish, and Georgina herself ducks the issue. To the question of exactly how old the youngest children were, she answers blithely that when a child loses its first teeth, one can form an approximate idea of its age. In one case, she is more certain. Katie, for whom she had a special affection, could read when she was two and a little later “converse with people in three languages.”

The children ran about in bare feet. The idea for this had come originally from orphan Tommie, who asked her politely if he could take off his shoes and a day or so later whether he could also dispense with socks. Soon everybody followed suit. She saw some advantages in this and commends the children for using their discarded shoes as toys, pushing them about the lawns and filling them with mud. Bare feet made the house quieter and saved work for the maid, who would otherwise have to dress the younger children. Orphan Dagobert, who wore a brace made for him by Pratt’s of Oxford Street, was an exception to the shoeless regime, but brought home from Mr. Pratt the welcome advice that there was no harm in the other children going without footwear.

The children addressed her by command as “Grannie.” Every morning, prayers were conducted, including an orison from the Dominican rule, something very scandalous to those Protestants who heard it. It was followed by a quarter of an hour’s organized yelling, to get the naughtiness out of their systems. There was little formal instruction in anything other than music, though when she was away from the house, Georgina did demand of those who could write that they send her a daily letter, to which she invariably replied. Every child, no matter how young, was part of the Monday evening concerts she arranged for them at the Langham. They were transported to and from these engagements by a typical piece of Georgina improvisation. For £25 she bought and had converted a milk float, painted it brown, and with the words “Mrs. Weldon’s Orphanage” emblazoned down the side, sent it out into the teeming streets. On Mondays it took the children to their performances, heaving through the fog like a toy omnibus. The concerts, and the name “Weldon,” were also advertised daily by sandwich men patrolling in Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. The point of performing in public, their patroness insisted, was not to exhibit the children like freaks, but to raise money. This happened seldom, and the orphanage ran at a considerable loss, even under the austere management Georgina employed for it. Nevertheless, it was an accusation made by some who went to the Langham that the children were in effect participating in organized beggary. The whole enterprise was poised between laughter and tears.

Alfred has been very ill these two days he has a very bad stomachach and todays dinner was lovely only the meat was salt and Ernest liked the opera very much indeed and Willie has his too ears bad Ernest has his heel so bad and his big toe His bad and Margret’s finger is much better it broke last night and all the matter came out but she cannot use it well yet the children are playing in the dining room Willie is playing at clappers and Johnnie with the top of the House-Maid’s box and Ernest and Willie is playing at dinners now they are pretending to cry and Ernest is crying because he has a nock on the nose and Katie is taking the books from the bookcase I remain yours affectionate pupil Rose Strube.

The adults who came to the house to participate in the Gounod Choir were understandably surprised to find, as well as the master, this tribe of orphans scattered about, yelling and banging, chasing the dogs, and kicking up mischief. An intelligent and willing young girl named Marian Westmacott was a sort of liaison between the orphans and the choir, the grumpier members of which were quick to relay the shocking things they encountered. They had plenty to complain about, for it was a music school like no other in London. Each member of the adult choir paid two guineas for a seasonal subscription for the honor of being conducted by M. Gounod, but did not always see him, except at performance. When they did, they discovered he reserved his cooing, affectionate side for more distinguished company. On one occasion he stormed into a rehearsal in the new music room to insist they were singing out of tune and the noise was driving him mad. Georgina calmly handed him the baton, returning only when his exasperation had reached combustion point and all his English was dissipated.

Life in the choir was not all Exeter Hall either. For one engagement Georgina laid out £50 in publicity and got back £2.50 in receipts. Sometimes they found themselves engaged to sing out of town, but without rail tickets to get there. Georgina explains frankly that she was running both the choir and the orphanage from 1870 to 1874 on the £100 sent to her by her mother for clothes and makeup. Gounod had no money of his own other than royalties and for a long time paid nothing toward his upkeep. Harry had yet to formalize any agreement with his wife about the use of the premises. As a business venture, Tavistock House was a mess. What hurt most of all was that part of the bad publicity she received came from those very people she intended to benefit. What was worse—to have a child wet herself onstage, or to have it broadcast to the world by an indignant Gounodist who really could not care less what the Evangelist was instructing Mrs. Weldon to do with some very disagreeable children?

In the pamphlet she published about the orphanage, Georgina says little about her charitable purpose. Nor does she explain how she acquired the children, though it is possible that some at least found their way there by their own efforts and others were left on the doorstep or abandoned in the overgrown gardens. There is the hint that one or more were sold to her, not as orphans, but as the bastards of rich people evading a scandal in the family. Nobody came to inspect what was going on; contrariwise, none of the staff of the house rebelled enough to go to the police. Harry was once again the pivotal figure. The master of the house was indirectly a member of the Queen’s Court and by day went off to trace the genealogy of the greatest in the land. If at night he came home and could tolerate the presence of ten or so squalling brats, who were they to raise a voice against them? Georgina found no problem with the children either; she claimed she raised them much as she would have done her own. For the servants it was more entertaining to speculate about her relationship to the gloomy French gentleman. Quite in keeping with her personality, Georgina did not feel the need to justify to servants what to her was a perfectly ordinary state of affairs. One of the people one would like to talk to across the grave is the Tavistock cook.

My Orphanage has nothing to say about the children in any detail. They are not the story. Instead, Georgina first puts into words her disillusion with the world she had left behind and the difficulties she has in understanding the music business she had joined. She advises her readers to grasp the concept that the music press is not objective, but led by a desire for profit and tied to the fortunes of a very few artists and performers, whose fame it has helped create. She admits that she had never before considered things in this way, any more than she has asked the very pertinent question of why her former society friends never patronized the popular concerts, which were now the battleground for her own exertions. Taken all together, she has blundered into a dark room without knowing the exact position of any of the furniture. She invents some characteristic reasons for having got into this situation. She is incurably shy, enough to blight a professional career as a solo vocalist, and that has driven her back into choirs, where there is safety in numbers. In this way, her light is always hidden under a bushel. Her husband is too concerned about his social position to be of any real help to her. Gounod’s ill health and lack of business sense force her to give up her own voice. And so on.

The question arises: who would read such a book and with what result? Georgina’s sense of justice sprang directly from her perception of what had befallen her as monstrous examples of ingratitude and vindictiveness. The jury in the case—the ideal reader of My Orphanage—was someone she had never met and probably did not exist. Nowadays we would call the work a green ink effusion: addressed blind, filled with excruciating and obsessive detail, deaf to humor, lacking in self-reproach, and grindingly self-justifying. It is a view of the world where only the writer is marching in step. The tone wobbles badly.

Certainly it is my opinion, which I have never hidden—Mr. Weldon should have been made to horsewhip M. Gounod. My feelings as to what honour is are perhaps exaggerated, but I believe I would deserve to be calumnified and despised if I lived with a man who was not anxious to protect his wife and himself against the most atrocious public gossip; and that, if I had abandoned my School, I would have given the right to those who said (M. Gounod himself said it) that Mr. Weldon closed his eyes to my dishonour in the hope of getting rid of me and receiving large damages from M. Gounod as co-respondent. M. Gounod, counting on my despair, has hurried to say on every occasion that this Englishwoman lured him into her net under the guise of charity; that her orphans were myths; her School a swindle and the children (of whom he has spoken in his own published letters) were no more than three little pug dogs who made messes everywhere in the house.

If Georgina was looking for revenge on Gounod by means of press publicity, she was disappointed. Nobody picked up in any detail on Mrs. Weldon’s story. Some of the reason for that was the perception that if there was an injured party in the affair, it was surely Harry. If there was a reputation to safeguard, it was his and not hers. The Garrick, which was patronized by many journalists and editors, was his bastion and refuge in this respect. Squire Bancroft was one of the most assiduous and popular Garrick members of the period, an actor manager with a genius for social networking. It could be said of Bancroft that he only ever met the right people. He was put up for membership by the editor of Punch and counted as one of his earliest friends in the club the Marquis of Anglesey. In his memoirs Bancroft had no hesitation in describing Harry as his wife’s dearest and closest friend. In Bancroft’s hail-fellow-well-met view of the world, a man who could have his French chum Gounod elected to membership of the Royal Yacht Club, which Harry had done, was hardly likely to be a bad egg. (Harry’s own membership is a curious and intriguing detail in his biography, until we learn where his illicit second home was. For more than twenty years he kept Annie Lowe on a moored houseboat on the Thames at Windsor.)

All this in a house once owned by Dickens. Whirled about the rooms, even after Gounod had fled, was the undigested content of a satirical novel, plot and character jumbled together, but a book, were it ever to be written, now sadly out of fashion. It was a picture composed in broad strokes, lacking shape and focus. Trollope, who to some extent had inherited the mantle of Dickens and Thackeray, was far too fastidious an ironist to portray anyone like Georgina. Tavistock House was unkempt, disorderly, lacking in comforts. There was dust in every corner and an overpowering smell of dog. People who came there were shocked by Georgina’s careless attitude to the normal duties of a wife and homemaker. She dressed erratically and had begun to interest herself in vegetarianism, a sure sign of eccentricity. After the vision she received in the bedroom at Blackheath, spiritualism also occupied her attentions. She was disappointed to find she was not herself a conduit for spirit messages and would never make a medium. She was merely a person of importance to whom the dead wished to speak.

Many of her former devotees in the choir began to panic. The Ballin family, who had girls under Georgina’s care, actually went to Paris to interview Gounod under the guise of offering him a testimonial and when they came back, tried to hold a secret meeting with other choir parents. Georgina immediately threatened a lawsuit. But the rot had set in. “Some people called Hinton prevented their daughter from belonging to my choir because of rumours concerning me and Gounod. As a consequence I lost not only Miss Hinton but her fiancé, Mr. Johnstone. Mr. Maskelyne made some publicity for his business and scandal for me by putting about the fact that I was a spiritualist. As a consequence the Alexandra Palace turned me down!!!”

The Maskelyne she mentions was John Nevil Maskelyne, a professional stage magician and illusionist who was also an unmasker of mediums. It is a shame he of all people did her in because they had much in common. Like Georgina, Maskelyne had appeared at St. James’s Hall. He had made his name by exposing two fraudulent mediums called the Davenport Brothers. With his partner Cooke he ran a magic and stage illusion show at a venue called the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. With only a little alteration, and without the curse laid on her of an aristocratic background, Georgina might have done very well as a showman. She had the unquenchable self-belief but lacked the common touch. Father Rawlings, who foisted his scruffy and impudent bell-ringing sons on her, had a better instinct than she for what the general public wanted.

It was now twenty years since she had made her play for fame at Little Holland House. So much had changed, and not just in her own life. Someone who knew Dickens and Tavistock House was Thackeray’s eldest daughter, Anne. She had been invited to the little theater in the garden to attend the first night of Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep, a play based on the last expedition to look for Sir John Franklin, the arctic explorer. As a much younger child she had seen her father and Dickens at their very liveliest at Christmas dinners in which the children were passed boisterously from hand to hand like little squealing parcels.

Born within weeks of Georgina, Anne Thackeray had grown up much more in the mainstream of Victorian life. The day Thackeray caught Georgina buying her wedding ring in Cockspur Street, his daughter had just published her first novel. Of course it helped to have a father like Thackeray, not because he was famous, but for the benefits of his teasing, affectionate nature and bearlike possessiveness. Thackeray loved his two children, and though their upbringing was highly unconventional and at times painfully lonely, he taught them the true shape of the world. Georgina, who could claim to know or to have met many of the people Anne Thackeray had met, might as well have been on another planet altogether now. For all the trademark pandemonium of Tavistock House, it was a lonely and unpopulated place.