July 1960
For those who have not read Roy Jenkins’s recent biography of Dilke and are not otherwise informed, here is a brief account of the affair. Mrs. Crawford, whose mother had had an affair with Dilke, and whose older sister married his brother, was herself married off to a Scottish lawyer twenty years older than she, whom she did not in the least love. Some time after her marriage, she began an affair with a Captain Forster, and five years after it she confessed to her husband that Sir Charles Dilke had seduced her in the most shocking circumstances. On the strength of her confession alone he brought his action and obtained divorce. Dilke, at the time, stood a very good chance of becoming next Prime Minister, and which public opinion demanded why, if Mrs. Crawford’s story was false he did not deny it, and if true, why he should be considered a fit person to govern the country; there was a second trial, but the court upheld the original verdict and Dilke was ruined. Captain Forster married someone else and Mrs. Crawford became a Catholic and devoted herself to good works until she died in 1948.
Miss Askwith has written a fascinating novel, the best feature of which is the way in which she has contrived to convey the Victorian life of this class at that time without ever seeming to strain after it. This book really does have the feeling of that overfed, padded and orderly boredom from which no doubt a number of people (women particularly) were driven to deceit and violence when physical and mental inactivity and emotional repression became too much for them. She bases her novel on the conclusion that Nia Crawford was not in fact seduced by Dilke, but describes how, at thirteen, she comes upon him making love to her mother. She also involves another lady in the plot - a Mrs. Rogerson, who was a friend of the Dilke family, a widow and who possibly had her own reasons for wanting Dilke ruined - or at least reduced. On this basis the plot is most ingeniously worked out to reach the public point of disaster which had such far-reaching effects. Miss Askwith - in her author’s note - is so honourable and exact about the distinctions between hard fact, strong likelihood and the point at which she has drawn her own conclusions and made the material to fit them, that while admiring the novel that she made, I found myself in the curious position of disagreeing with her conclusions solely on the facts of the matter which she has provided. But this only shows that she has succeeded in her intention of thoroughly engaging one’s interest in a situation which seems to have all the ingredients for a first-class contemporary opera.