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Dr. Semple christened his child Georgina Angele. Forbes Winslow wrote her a comic song and offered to appear onstage with her to perform it. At Peckham Rye one day a spontaneously generated crowd estimated in thousands threatened to overturn her carriage with their fervor. Leslie Ward—the cartoonist “Spy”—added her to his famous caricature gallery of legal personalities. She toured the provinces for a year with a play called Not Alone—a bad play, an awful play, but one that gave people who knew her only through newspaper reports a chance to see her in the flesh. (Some of her stoutest supporters had been provincial press editors only too pleased to belabor the London establishment with such a handy stick.) She trod the boards of the music halls, dressed as Buzfuz and singing extracts from Biondina. There was not a radical platform at which she was not an honored guest and principal speaker. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry sent her tickets to the theater. She was invited to debates in the House of Lords. In 1887, when the Queen astonished her subjects by hurling herself into the Jubilee celebrations with a vivacity and energy they had not seen for years, every London omnibus carried a portrait of Mrs. Weldon with this legend: “Though I am 50 I have the complexion of a girl of 17—thanks to Pears Soap.”

Georgina Weldon had the fame she so much desired as a child and for which Victoria’s accession had been the guiding star. In one way she had finally triumphed over the oppressions of her lunatic father, just as Victoria had overcome, with an almost girlish surprise at the consequences, the long years of seclusion following Albert’s death. Eighteen years separated them in age, but here they were—Victoria’s image on the postage stamps, Georgina’s on the buses.

The Queen was about to enter her most serene decade. More and more great-grandchildren were given to her, until the total numbered thirty-seven. Her popularity was established beyond all doubt. During her reign, seven attempts had been made on her life, but henceforth it was unthinkable that anyone should wish to hurt or harm her. As with Georgina, the newspapers printed the legend, and Victoria became a kind of public property. Benign old age suited her. She was no more enamored of London than she had ever been, but then London had changed, enough to assert a sovereignty of its own. The great houses, the preeminence of a few families, all the aristocratic privilege of Victoria’s youth, had declined and was on the verge of disappearing altogether. One of the duties of the Jubilee that the Queen accepted with pleasure was to drive to Mile End Road and open the People’s Palace. It has its symbolism, that journey to the East End. As well as the new People’s Palace, both General Booth and Dr. Barnardo had premises in Mile End Road.

Georgina was older than either of these two philanthropists, but in the heyday of her popularity her name was far better known, measured by column inches in the papers. There were a dozen things she might have done to capitalize on it. She might have developed her orphanage ideas in a more practical setting. She had enough connections to radical and philanthropic groups to follow Victoria down to Stepney, where she met General Booth. In fact, she had the honor of sharing with him a shower of mud and stones and horse droppings flung by people who could not care less about social salvation. Booth was personally kind and encouraging, but she was put off by the hymns he sang. She dismissed them as “comic music-hall religious songs” and seriously misjudged her man. About the citizens of Stepney she said, “If they want to throw mud and stones, let them throw at the Judges, the Magistrates, the M.P.s, the Ministers.” That had a fine radical ring to it, but Georgina was no more the revolutionary than she was a salvationist.

She seems never to have met Barnardo, whose duty of care to orphans was so much more sophisticated than her own, resembling more the clearheadedness of the Gisors sisters than her own confused fantasies. Another avenue open to her was to have taken a role in more general law reform. She campaigned in a small way for the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh in his effort to take his seat in the House of Commons. Her personal life had, she discovered, much in common with Annie Besant’s. But Mrs. Besant’s mind was sharper and clearer by far, and as a plaintiff in person (in the famous obscenity trial of 1877) she had shown a grasp of legal argument beyond anything Georgina accomplished. Writing in the National Reformer in 1887, Annie Besant observed: “The closest of human ties may be the noblest or the basest of relationships; fully and graciously given, it crowns friendship with its last perfection. Life has nothing fairer for its favourites than friendship kissed into the passion of love.” This was language Georgina could not match. No one can be taken to task for what they cannot do: they cannot be taller, or younger. The question is whether she could have done more with the opportunities dropped in her lap by an adoring press and public.

Experience swiftly taught her she was no playwright, and the entertainment she gave at the North London Colosseum or Shoreditch Music Hall was offered in defiant ignorance of what was popular in the halls. As a novelty act she had a short career, if an uproarious one. Working-class audiences soon enough gave her the bird. She had a few engagements to sing elsewhere, but the Rivière case had slammed the door forever on music as a profession. No impresario of any note would touch her, and in any case she was fifty. The wave she rode after her release from Holloway curled, broke, and was dissipated. Little by little, week by week, the frenzy of interest ebbed away. Now the headlines in bold—What is Mrs. Weldon up to?—become ironic. She had peaked. When everything is interesting, nothing gets done. She wanted fame more than anything else in the world, and when for a few short seasons she had it, she let it fall from her hands.

The orphanage had shrunk to the two youngest children, of whom Sapho-Katie was the last to leave. Angele was tired of living in Brixton and persuaded Georgina to give the house in Loughborough Road back to Salsbury and take up the lease on a more imposing property at 58 Gower Street. She represented the move as being a more economical way of using the allowance that Harry was required by law to pay Georgina. At the last minute, Angele suggested that the lease be in her name, the better to protect it against distraint if things went wrong in the courts. Georgina agreed to this with only half her mind on the subject. She was busy preparing to tour her play when the move from Brixton was made, and she was staggered to find on her return that neither Sapho-Katie nor Pauline, the other orphanage veteran, had survived it. Pauline had been packed off to an aunt and Sapho-Katie sent to Canada “to be the companion of another little girl of the same age.” In their place, Angele had adopted the two girls of her brother-in-law, Jean Helluy. “One thing after another,” Georgina complained. “I don’t know how my brains could endure so many sorrows [chagrins], so many deceptions and disappointments.” With this single absentminded farewell, Sapho-Katie, the girl who had always been her favorite among the orphans, the child “who could converse in three languages” when she was two, was dismissed from the story.

In Gower Street Angele maintained a household more than sufficient for the task and lived better than she had ever dreamed possible. With the children gone, the need for Eugénie Morand would seem to have ended also. She stayed on. In addition, Angele kept up three servants. What was ineradicable in her was the kind of avarice that sometimes besets the poor. Hunger becomes greed, greed becomes theft. She simply could not let the opportunity pass of taking what was there to take. Once, in the beginning, the two women had quarreled over the price of a pair of gloves. Now Angele bought furniture, amassed her bibelots, dressed in the height of fashion, abused the financial trust Georgina had placed in her. Left alone for days and weeks on end while Georgina deviled in Red Lion Court or rushed from hearing to hearing, what was there for her to do except to be the householder, the long-suffering wife? From the point of view of the greengrocer, the coalman, and all the rest of the tradesmen, she was the fixed point and Georgina the occasional visitor.

There was a homemaker at the heart of Angele, a gift Georgina discounted too readily and of which she might have made much better use. It was true the Frenchwoman drank too much, flew into hysterical rages too often, pretended to romance a solicitor’s clerk she met (using the same wiles on him as Georgina always found successful, the helpless wight who turns out to be a witch). The psychological balance shifted, and the emotional dependency on her lover that Angele started out with finally came to an end. Ten years with Georgina had robbed them both of their youth and in Angele’s case her dreams and illusions. She, who so loved Georgina, despite the chasm of difference between them, of language as well as class and life experience, was drawn insensibly into becoming the last great enemy.