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On May 24, 1880, on the morning of her forty-third birthday, Sir Thomas Chambers sentenced Georgina to four months’ imprisonment as a common felon. She was taken from the court past suddenly indifferent defense counsel and driven by closed van to Newgate. That afternoon Neal, the solicitor, went to Tavistock House and evicted the hysterical Angele, after a four-hour siege.

Georgina served thirty-seven days of her sentence. The women warders liked her, the governor was polite but unfeeling. The medical examination she underwent was perfunctory and of course insulting. She reserved her biggest contempt for the chaplain. Prison life was ruled by regulation, some of it pettifogging in the extreme, so that she was forbidden, for example, writing materials. She worked in the sewing room, at night sang in her cell and recited poetry. She resisted the chaplain’s attempts to make her see the error of her ways—the poor man did not grasp that she was above the law, as it was represented by English justice. Nor did she find the higher truths he might have to offer attractive.

She passed her time in Newgate without the slightest remorse and seemed not to be in any way fazed by imprisonment—it was another form of theater, in which she, by her own lights, acted out the principal role. She wore the prison uniform with pride. Many prisoners of conscience had preceded her at Newgate, and in that sense she was in noble company. She had the knack not every first offender has of seeing out her time in quiet dignity, and though a woman was hung during her stay, that was a secondary event, played off stage. This image of an exemplary prisoner was illusory, however: by now her head was crammed with dates and facts, a small encyclopedia of grudges. There were plenty of others in prison like her, who could recite in excruciating detail times and places, lost witnesses and false affidavits, maddening bad luck. For the first time she was solely in the company of the unjustly accused, and the idea pleased her. “I wonder women can endure men,” she commented, after listening to their stories.

Newgate was the experience of asylum without the accompanying terror—everyone would leave one day. In her own case she knew that on the outside Angele was running distractedly from office to office, petitioning the Home Office and writing to the Speaker of the House of Commons. James Salsbury, an elderly member of the choir, was another ally. He kept a health food shop and vegetarian restaurant (probably the first in London) at 23 Oxford Street and, more useful still, was the proprietor of a newspaper called the Herald of Health. Never a door closed without another opening.

Georgina was released at the end of June, to be greeted by a welcoming crowd outside the gates. She estimated it to be twenty thousand strong. Two versions exist of her release. In one, Angele arrived to collect her in a closed carriage, and the governor had her bundled away before a demonstration could commence. The details are entertaining:

My solicitor, who was a first class idiot and had been brainwashed by the opposing side, and who doubted the coup I was meditating [of causing a quasi-political demonstration] which would have been so easy to accomplish, hired a coach, did the Good Samaritan and got la Menier to accompany him with the little Duprat children. Once in front of the gates, seeing the crowd, she wanted to get out and greet me. The old fox stopped her. The Governor had told her that if she left the coach he wouldn’t release me at all. She believed him: or did she believe him? God knows . . . I was released, I was flabbergasted, there was cheering: where were Blackie and the kids? There? In the coach! I threw myself forward to embrace them; someone pushed me in by my backside, the door slammed, the coachman whipped up his horses at a great gallop and I was left shouting stop! stop! I’ve been tricked . . .

In the second version of events, which she reserved for the platform of lunacy law reform meetings and rallies, the crowd embraced her, she was pelted with flowers and fruit, dragged in her carriage to the Old Bailey, where speeches were made in her honor, and then driven to Hyde Park, where she addressed the cheering multitudes at Speaker’s Corner. She certainly went to see her mother at Stratford Street later that day. Louisa Treherne, at last stirred to be where the action was, counseled her yet again to seek a reconciliation with Harry. Or, if they could not live together, to accept what terms he might offer for a legal separation.

Money was not the immediate issue, though it may have seemed so to her mother. Georgina had lost Tavistock House forever. Her personal effects, including her musical scores and the chronofile she was building of her life, along with some furniture that was hers and not Harry’s, had gone into storage at Shoolbred’s in Tottenham Court Road. The house itself was bolted and barred—she learned it was being put on the market at £1,700. This had grave implications for the future of the orphanage, though just where everyone was was difficult to establish from Angele’s wobbly narrative of what had happened after she left France.

For the present, Georgina had more notoriety than ever before and just after her release made a triumphant appearance at the Central Hall, Bishopsgate, dressed in her prison uniform. But the audience for this sort of thing was narrow and generally confined to what were called “progressive” elements of society. Mr. Salsbury of the vegetarian restaurant, who pleaded with her to let him help, was a self-styled utopian. She was falling among strangers here. Louisa Lowe was the model social reformer from the progressive ranks—cautious, diligent, and possessed of a patience Georgina soon found grating. It was not her job and in no way her style to campaign for others. The only instance of social injustice she recognized was her own. It might irritate the Lunacy Law Reform Society and The People’s Cross to realize this, but she was being honest with them. It had been her head in the lion’s mouth and not theirs.

Everyone interested in social reform found out sooner or later in their dealings with Georgina that she made an impassioned and reckless captain but a very bad foot soldier. Those who ate at Salsbury’s restaurant did so under this banner:

The Novelty of the Nineteenth Century!
The ALPHA, First London Food Reform Restaurant &
Vegetarian Dining Rooms—No Fish! No Flesh! No Fowl!
No Intoxicants! No Tobacco!

As diners practiced their virtue, there were to hand pamphlets on almost every aspect of “rational being.” They might, for example, browse the writings of a Mr. Nicholls and his wife, who between them had written a hundred works on “sanitary and social science,” all published from the same address as where they sat. Some of the women patrons were members of the Rational Dress Society and wore simple straight skirts and plain blouses. Their figures were uncorseted, leading them to be mocked in the street but respected in the Alpha as harbingers of a new and more right-thinking age. Others, though they were not spiritualists, could find much to commend in the systematic investigations of the psychic world by such men as Sir William Crookes, the distinguished chemist, or F. W. H. Myers, an eminently respectable school inspector. Vegetarians ate Salsbury’s lettuce and raw cabbage but also pored anxiously over statistics that seemed to show a correlation between industrial output and diet. In comparisons made between the French and British economies, it was often asserted that the latter’s superiority had much to do with the boiled beef and carrots of the British workingman, as well as his penchant for beer over wine. These claims needed refuting. For many freethinkers, the comfort of being in the right when so many were in the wrong was greatly enhanced by the steady tone of the arguments set forth. The appeal was to the mind.

The defense counsel in the Tichborne Claimant case, Maurice Edward Kenealy, was a habitué of the Alpha restaurant. He was fond of quoting the toast of a country gentleman: “May every lawyer shoot a parson and be hanged for it.” It was not exactly the antiestablishment sentiment with which Georgina herself entered the fray. Nor did she have any of the practical philanthropy of a man like Dr. Edmunds, who had so promptly given her a clean bill of mental health after the visit of the mad doctors. She liked to describe Edmunds, a neighbor of hers in Bloomsbury, as an atheist and thus a free spirit, without apparently knowing that he helped found the Ladies Medical Society, to enable women to qualify as midwives. Just as Georgina had never met the criminal mind before the Meniers came into her life, so now she was among strangers with the freethinking allies who rallied to her cause.

Her mother’s repeated advice was to give up fighting altogether. Georgina demurred. To do that, her life would be forever afterward the story of a woman who had defied her husband and lost. She knew very well that Harry did not want her back, yet was all that had happened to her really just the story of a bad marriage? Did her failure have something to do with being a misunderstood artiste, or was it the awful commonplace of being an inadequate wife? Her mother thought the latter and so did the insufferably priggish Dal. She did not know what Harry himself thought—he made no attempt to contact her except through the unfortunate Neal—but she believed (and she may have been right) that he was, if pushed, likely to be more generous about her than many of her critics. He had married exactly the wrong woman. Nevertheless, he had supported her ambitions for as long as he could and longer than most men of his generation would have attempted. He did not love her now, but where was the story in that? Many men did not love their wives. She supposed he must like her a little and even admire her. She had put him in the box he was in, but it could not be his intention to see her snuffed out altogether. Deep down, she knew Harry as well as he knew her. Although she was forty-three and heavy with prison food, tired and in poor voice, she was not ready to give up. Nor, much as Angele would like it, was she the kind of woman to live in semiretirement at some foreign hotel, eking out her days with whist and idle conversation. She had seen all that as a child in Florence.

She took rooms in Burton Crescent, which overlooked Tavistock House. Her two cats were still to be seen through the railings. She conceived a plan to exhume the bones of the dogs buried under the mulberry tree. Even the kindly officers of Hunter Street might jib at her breaking and entering a property with the intention of digging up two dead dogs. The problem at all points was the law. She owed the solicitor who acted for her in the Rivière case £280, which she knew he had not a hope of recovering. Neal controlled Schoolbred’s, where all her letters and diaries were cached. On the sole occasion she had been permitted to inspect the depository, she found a crucifix given to her in Florence. One of Christ’s arms had broken off. This struck her as a special omen, but there were a hundred other small daily irritations. Her mother called at 54 Burton Crescent and finding her not at home, wandered away again: Georgina explained in rage that she lived at number 45. Louisa returned and left a cake and some chocolates on the doorstep. Her reason for not knocking was that she did not have a card she could send up. (Another of Louisa’s more endearing habits was to send letters she forgot to stamp, which drove Georgina into paroxysms.) Harry could not be found anywhere, and Neal refused to answer for his whereabouts.

This was a situation that could not endure. Georgina engaged a new solicitor, named Leaver, and instructed him to serve an order on Harry demanding restitution of conjugal rights. In September she quit London abruptly for Gisors, taking Angele and Bichette with her.

The nuns had done the best they could with the remnants of the orphanage. The unlucky Dagobert never reached Gisors, but many of the others did and were fostered with local families. Rosie Strube received instruction and was accepted into the Catholic Church. Beryl took her place as the nun’s blue-eyed girl. One of the boys, Georgina does not say which, received a prize, she does not say for what. M. Robine, the lay administrator, greeted her like a long-lost friend and persuaded her to relax and, if not forget her troubles, at least enjoy the peace and tranquillity of an autumnal Gisors. She played cards with him in the evenings and tried to explain the conundrum of the Tichborne Claimant. In practical terms, the problem of the orphans was being gently prized from her hands. M. Robine and his staff did not see them as the advance guard of a new system of music education, but as children. They were gradually assimilated into the community, a process already started when Georgina rejoined them.

Robine sensed she would not stay long, one indication of which was the flurry of unstamped letters that arrived from England. In November Dal wrote, an unexpected and alarming event. He had bad news. Harry had wriggled for three months before the order for restitution of conjugal rights was successfully served on him. He refused it. The refusal was a legal ploy, and the situation was now quite straightforward. Harry had used his only defense. A husband could refuse restitution of conjugal rights on one ground only, adultery on the part of his wife. Georgina was genuinely horrified to hear that her husband intended to cite Sir Henry Thompson of Wimpole Street for adultery.

At first she denied everything. Her brother wanted her to come to London and meet him. This she refused to do. Nor would she give up the name of her solicitor. Dal persisted. He had seen a letter written to the Moth in her handwriting on which learned counsel engaged by Harry had given an opinion. Though no more than a few sheets of paper already sixteen years old, the letter provided sufficient evidence for Harry to have a good chance of winning his action. In citing the distinguished surgeon for divorce, he would disgrace and humiliate one of the most gifted and interesting men in London. The only possible way out of the impasse was for Georgina to withdraw the order and accept whatever terms for a legal separation Harry imposed. It was blackmail. “I seize the opportunity to abuse you of an idea you seem to have,” Dal wrote,

that I am afraid to appear in public and that consequently I want to hush up the whole affair. I have no such fear. I have worked and I am working entirely in what I believe to be your own interest and the best for you in all circumstances. You seem to think I am in the habit of seeing Weldon. I have only seen him once when he came in company with Mr. Jevons to make known his intentions (having been advised to do so by his counsel) I being head of the family . . . I ended the conversation by saying to them what I tell you, that I consider the Restitution of Conjugal Rights, after all that has taken place, absurd, unless he were a consenting party: but that I have felt, and I feel now that you have the right to claim a judicial separation with an allowance sufficient for the present and in the future.

Harry’s response was to offer her, through Dal, an allowance of £500 during his lifetime, and it brought forth a blistering reply from Georgina:

Your common sense should have led you to show Weldon and Jevons the door as soon as they spoke with such insolence, demonstrating they took you for an innocent, making you swallow such rubbish . . . after the infamies M.W. has shown himself capable of towards a wife who has always been so devoted to him, something he himself has told you . . . I have no more patience with your lack of discernment or sense of dignity, nor am I happy at the conduct of Mr. Leaver, to whom I shall make my own observations. Nor more interventions for the love of God, except those that I myself suggest! I really do have reason to say that “the family is the enemy of what nature you are given when you come into the world.”