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The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon: The Life, Loves and Lawsuits of a Legendary Victorian
Born to fanatically snobbish Victorian parents, Georgina Weldon grew up to wreak havoc on almost everyone she met. She was supposed to marry well and restore the family fortune, but soon proved to have other ideas. Her scandalous affair with a married man and her defiant marriage to the less-than-prosperous young hussar officer Harry Weldon were just the first signs that she was no ordinary girl. In a plot that could have been constructed by Dickens himself, Georgina acquired a string of lovers, was stung by con artists, betrayed by her parents, and narrowly escaped being committed to a mental institution. She rose to the challenge and became one of the first Victorian women to represent herself in court and later helped to overturn England’s infamous Lunacy Laws. Like the best Victorian novels, The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon marries the adventures of an intrepid protagonist with delightfully revealing glimpses of Victorian society. A tale of sex and scandal, bravado and bravery, Mrs. Weldon’s life is wild, wicked, and totally irresistible.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
4 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Brian Thompson
119 books7 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
He read English at Cambridge. Since 1973 he has written for a living as a radio and television playwright and a documentary film maker. He is also the author of several acclaimed biographies: A Monkey Amongst Crocodiles, Imperial Vanities and The Nightmare of a Victorian Bestseller.
He read English at Cambridge. Since 1973 he has written for a living as a radio and television playwright and a documentary film maker. He is also the author of several acclaimed biographies: A Monkey Amongst Crocodiles, Imperial Vanities and The Nightmare of a Victorian Bestseller.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 3, 2015
After 100 pages or so, I don't feel like reading this book anymore. It's a pity, really, the subject was generous but the author is so biased in his opinions of Georgina Weldon, so misplacedly ironic that, instead of hating the heroine, I've grown to dislike his style and point of view. I've got nothing against unreliable narrators, au contraire, I like them better than reliable ones, but in works of fiction. A biographer who doesn't keep his distance is a poor one. In my humble opinion, obviously.
March 4, 2014
Maybe I've been reading too much mindless crap recently but this DID NOT hold my interest in the least. I didn't make it to page 81. MIND NUMBING!!!
The writing seemed superfluous. It reminded of my paper writing days when I didn't have enough info to meet the minimum required word count. 'Nuf said.
P.S. I tried to foist this off on my mom b/c she is a)very appreciative of biographies, b)a MUCH more sophisticated reader & c)dialed into a broader vocabulary than me. (She does freakin' crossword puzzles in pen!!) She said the same thing...dry, circuitous & superfluous.
I'm sure others have appreciated this work. It just wasn't for us.
The writing seemed superfluous. It reminded of my paper writing days when I didn't have enough info to meet the minimum required word count. 'Nuf said.
P.S. I tried to foist this off on my mom b/c she is a)very appreciative of biographies, b)a MUCH more sophisticated reader & c)dialed into a broader vocabulary than me. (She does freakin' crossword puzzles in pen!!) She said the same thing...dry, circuitous & superfluous.
I'm sure others have appreciated this work. It just wasn't for us.
August 1, 2013
Most biographies tend to focus of people who were successful. That this one focuses on one who was a walking disaster does make it stand out.
Mrs. Weldon was nuts, but not in the way she was accused of being. Narcissistic and somewhat delusional, she still didn't necessarily deserve to be institutionalized in the way that Britain dealt with the insane in Victorian times. So her rather remarkable escape from the doctors coming for her and then use of the legal system to turn the tables on her persecutors (which included her equally problematic but still long suffering family and husband) makes you want to declare her a hero. Which folks do.
But people don't fit neatly in boxes, and she never did particularly well as a folk hero. Because, well, nuts. Her fairly unintended abuse of both composer Gounod and a whole heap of hapless orphans does kill some of the sympathy. As does her ridiculous association with a pair of con men.
But it's an interesting look at a woman in a very weird social place in Victorian society.
Mrs. Weldon was nuts, but not in the way she was accused of being. Narcissistic and somewhat delusional, she still didn't necessarily deserve to be institutionalized in the way that Britain dealt with the insane in Victorian times. So her rather remarkable escape from the doctors coming for her and then use of the legal system to turn the tables on her persecutors (which included her equally problematic but still long suffering family and husband) makes you want to declare her a hero. Which folks do.
But people don't fit neatly in boxes, and she never did particularly well as a folk hero. Because, well, nuts. Her fairly unintended abuse of both composer Gounod and a whole heap of hapless orphans does kill some of the sympathy. As does her ridiculous association with a pair of con men.
But it's an interesting look at a woman in a very weird social place in Victorian society.
May 11, 2013
If this book were truly as "irresistible" as it proclaims itself on the back panel, then it wouldn't have taken me so long to finish it, I am sure. The story of Mrs. Georgina Weldon is an interesting one, but it too much resembles one long, drawn-out soap opera which makes for a very dull read. Perhaps if it actually had been a made for TV series, it would have been far more entertaining. As a non-fiction, it never captured my interest - not even as an historian of Victorian England - and I only finished it out of my own perseverance.
The author, Brian Thompson, appears to have done research enough, but it seems to me that his sources were too few to make as many sweeping generalizations and assumptions as he did. His primary source was the autobiography of Mrs. Weldon herself with a few scattered secondary sources which referred to her in the context of her many legal or musical proceedings. I can't seem to find any further information about the author online (his name being too generic doesn't help), but the his snippit on the book says that he is English and primarily a stage and fiction writer which is perhaps why he took so much liberty with this piece.
Without giving much of the plot away, the story of Mrs. Weldon goes a little something like this:
Born to an elitist family with no real power or prestige, Georgina grows up thinking she is far more important in society than she actually is. Her father was a certified nutcase, by modern standards, who raised her and her siblings quite poorly. Her mother hardly had an existence outside of her husband and few thoughts of her own. Georgina, thinking herself superior yet also very alluring by nature, has some good and bad social interactions which makes her essentially unmarriable in society - so she elopes with a man she hardly knows. They have a bad marriage, discover that she cannot have children, and grow apart in a setting where Georgina's huge and unrealistic dreams as well as her many social mishaps make her a bit of a loser. Once her husband leaves, she embarks on a journey where multiple non-sexual but twisted male relationships develop, one sexual and twisted relationship with a fellow married woman endures, and the livelihood of many small children are irrevocably compromised. Many lawsuits follow, some successful and others not, ensue thanks to an act of parliament allowing married women to represent themselves in court - Georgina is, therefore, systematically able to confront everyone she believes has wronged her in her lifetime including a crew of doctors who try to send her to an asylum working under the wishes of her husband.
As a character, Georgina Weldon is indeed best described as disastrous, if not also inflammatory, ignorant, highly erratic and emotional, or even vexing. Her character was so out of place for Victorian women that perhaps she does deserve this work dedicated to her - she would have thought so, to be sure, though she would have viciously disagreed with Thompson's analysis that she lacked any realistic sense of the world or herself. She is not a dynamic character who ever learned from her mistakes or acknowledged her own faults, constantly feeling herself to be righteous and absolutely above all others which made her very predictable. In a satirical sense, she would be a very easy woman to poke fun at in a stage production which, I think, would have been a much better use of the author's time.
I think my biggest issue with this book is simply that I cannot imagine Thompson's purpose for writing it other than that he found Mrs. Weldon to be an interesting person. I agree, she led a very unique life for someone of her time. But, I learned only a little more about Victorian society than I had already known and the impact that Mrs. Weldon had on it seems to be simply that of an eccentric woman with big dreams. She did have some impact on reforming the lunacy laws in England as well as a bit of a role on married women's rights. However, each of these aspects are only realized at the end of the book and there is such little importance attached to them in regards to the author's thesis that I simply cannot find a thesis at all.
The author, Brian Thompson, appears to have done research enough, but it seems to me that his sources were too few to make as many sweeping generalizations and assumptions as he did. His primary source was the autobiography of Mrs. Weldon herself with a few scattered secondary sources which referred to her in the context of her many legal or musical proceedings. I can't seem to find any further information about the author online (his name being too generic doesn't help), but the his snippit on the book says that he is English and primarily a stage and fiction writer which is perhaps why he took so much liberty with this piece.
Without giving much of the plot away, the story of Mrs. Weldon goes a little something like this:
Born to an elitist family with no real power or prestige, Georgina grows up thinking she is far more important in society than she actually is. Her father was a certified nutcase, by modern standards, who raised her and her siblings quite poorly. Her mother hardly had an existence outside of her husband and few thoughts of her own. Georgina, thinking herself superior yet also very alluring by nature, has some good and bad social interactions which makes her essentially unmarriable in society - so she elopes with a man she hardly knows. They have a bad marriage, discover that she cannot have children, and grow apart in a setting where Georgina's huge and unrealistic dreams as well as her many social mishaps make her a bit of a loser. Once her husband leaves, she embarks on a journey where multiple non-sexual but twisted male relationships develop, one sexual and twisted relationship with a fellow married woman endures, and the livelihood of many small children are irrevocably compromised. Many lawsuits follow, some successful and others not, ensue thanks to an act of parliament allowing married women to represent themselves in court - Georgina is, therefore, systematically able to confront everyone she believes has wronged her in her lifetime including a crew of doctors who try to send her to an asylum working under the wishes of her husband.
As a character, Georgina Weldon is indeed best described as disastrous, if not also inflammatory, ignorant, highly erratic and emotional, or even vexing. Her character was so out of place for Victorian women that perhaps she does deserve this work dedicated to her - she would have thought so, to be sure, though she would have viciously disagreed with Thompson's analysis that she lacked any realistic sense of the world or herself. She is not a dynamic character who ever learned from her mistakes or acknowledged her own faults, constantly feeling herself to be righteous and absolutely above all others which made her very predictable. In a satirical sense, she would be a very easy woman to poke fun at in a stage production which, I think, would have been a much better use of the author's time.
I think my biggest issue with this book is simply that I cannot imagine Thompson's purpose for writing it other than that he found Mrs. Weldon to be an interesting person. I agree, she led a very unique life for someone of her time. But, I learned only a little more about Victorian society than I had already known and the impact that Mrs. Weldon had on it seems to be simply that of an eccentric woman with big dreams. She did have some impact on reforming the lunacy laws in England as well as a bit of a role on married women's rights. However, each of these aspects are only realized at the end of the book and there is such little importance attached to them in regards to the author's thesis that I simply cannot find a thesis at all.
January 10, 2013
It's books like this that make me stare at people with awe when they admit to finding history dull. It's honestly hard to imagine a woman like Georgina Weldon existing outside of a novel, preferably by Dickens at his sensationalist best, & yet she was very real - & quite infamous in her lifetime, if almost completely forgotten by history. It's a development that would truly cause her intense dismay, but this book, & its fond & ultimately sympathetic handling of her tempestuous life & many excesses & outrageous doings, would surely please her. Far from forgetting her, Brian Thompson has brought Georgina back to life with a delicacy that indicates he, for one, finds her incredibly wrong-headed attitude toward so many things in life quite endearing in a way.
Georgina Thomas Treherne was born in 1837, the year of Victoria's accession to the throne. She, like her parents, no doubt saw this as a sign of sorts, proving her to have been born for a life of greatness. Yet, in spite of a background not as awe-inspiring as she wished (in fact, admittedly on the pedestrian side), Georgina's absolutely unshakeable belief in herself as someone of unusual power & talent, meant for a life of fame & extraordinariness, caused a certain amount of self-fulfilling prophecy. At any rate, her life was certainly neither ordinary nor dull.
From a disastrous runaway marriage, to a strange on-again, off-again musical career, to the things that made her most famous in her day: a bizarre, almost bullying affair with the universally-feted French composer Gounod & a serious habit for litigation (she represented herself in twenty-three of twenty-five lawsuits she filed against her "enemies" - & that was just the opening salvo), Georgina Weldon managed to be the recipient of the fame she spent her whole life expecting, if not the universal acclimation. Luckily for her, it appears that Mrs. Weldon didn't necessarily realize the two weren't the same thing. I defy anyone to read this book & find it boring - you can't possibly guess what on earth Georgina is going to do next. By the end of the book, all disbelief is simply exhausted - as, no doubt, one would be by spending any time with this amazingly energetic woman. Kudos to Thompson for reading her monstrous six-volume memoirs, recognizing just what he had found, & saving the disastrous Mrs. Weldon for historical posterity. This is a life story it would have been a tragedy to have consigned to permanent historical obscurity.
Georgina Thomas Treherne was born in 1837, the year of Victoria's accession to the throne. She, like her parents, no doubt saw this as a sign of sorts, proving her to have been born for a life of greatness. Yet, in spite of a background not as awe-inspiring as she wished (in fact, admittedly on the pedestrian side), Georgina's absolutely unshakeable belief in herself as someone of unusual power & talent, meant for a life of fame & extraordinariness, caused a certain amount of self-fulfilling prophecy. At any rate, her life was certainly neither ordinary nor dull.
From a disastrous runaway marriage, to a strange on-again, off-again musical career, to the things that made her most famous in her day: a bizarre, almost bullying affair with the universally-feted French composer Gounod & a serious habit for litigation (she represented herself in twenty-three of twenty-five lawsuits she filed against her "enemies" - & that was just the opening salvo), Georgina Weldon managed to be the recipient of the fame she spent her whole life expecting, if not the universal acclimation. Luckily for her, it appears that Mrs. Weldon didn't necessarily realize the two weren't the same thing. I defy anyone to read this book & find it boring - you can't possibly guess what on earth Georgina is going to do next. By the end of the book, all disbelief is simply exhausted - as, no doubt, one would be by spending any time with this amazingly energetic woman. Kudos to Thompson for reading her monstrous six-volume memoirs, recognizing just what he had found, & saving the disastrous Mrs. Weldon for historical posterity. This is a life story it would have been a tragedy to have consigned to permanent historical obscurity.
November 9, 2011
Georgina Weldon lead quite the life. She flung away a wealthy suitor, eloped with a poor soldier, sought a career in singing, ran an orphanage and a school for music/choir, kept lovers (including a woman), brought well over 100 lawsuits to courte (many of which she presented herself), and brought about reform of asylum/insanity laws and marriage laws.
Of course, it all sounds romantic and idealistic when you put it like that, but Brian Thompson also makes clear than any benefits she gave to society happened more as side effects of her own manic energies and selfish and vindictive tendencies than any philanthropic efforts on her part. She was beset with delusions of grandeur, believing herself worth much more than she received, but unwilling to face the realities that might otherwise have allowed her to achieve it. She is not called disastrous here for nothing.
Of course, it all sounds romantic and idealistic when you put it like that, but Brian Thompson also makes clear than any benefits she gave to society happened more as side effects of her own manic energies and selfish and vindictive tendencies than any philanthropic efforts on her part. She was beset with delusions of grandeur, believing herself worth much more than she received, but unwilling to face the realities that might otherwise have allowed her to achieve it. She is not called disastrous here for nothing.
September 26, 2015
Georgina Weldon was a flamboyant British woman with a thirst for the spotlight (she aspired to professional singing) and a fondness for suing lots and lots of people. Despite a colorful life, she's not quite interesting enough to recommend this—or maybe it's that Thompson (as some of the other reviews note) can't seem to stop telling us what to think about Georgina rather than simply showing her in action. His writing style just didn't work for me.
February 5, 2022
Overall, The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon is an extremely interesting book about a remarkable woman. Despite being a “disaster” in her personal life, Georgina deserves to be remembered today for her role in challenging the unjust treatment of married women. Thompson has written a fascinating biography.
More here: https://kabiraltaf.wordpress.com/2022...
More here: https://kabiraltaf.wordpress.com/2022...
June 19, 2008
Georgiana Weldon is a name that most people have never heard of, but she was a fascinating woman. A rather crazy Victorian, living in a house full of animals and orphans, intrigue, scandal, music and law history - this lady's life had it all.
August 22, 2017
While reading this, I came across a facebook post asking what title you were reading and how you would describe that book in three words. It amused me to instantly have these three words come to mind. Victorian female Trump.
March 25, 2022
Giving this 2 stars because *maybe* the last 100 pages were better. Honestly thought this was going to be a book I loved. Scandalous, messy, Victorian woman is right up my alley. Probably could have been an interesting story but the writing was vague and boring - couldn't even finish it.
April 18, 2018
This book is painfully slow and boring. I couldn’t read past 200 pages. It didn’t hold my interest whatsoever.
April 19, 2023
This is probably only the second book that I've ever given up on. I did manage to get to almost halfway but then decided that life is too short to persevere with something that I was really not in tune with
I can't remember when or why I decided to read this - whether someone gave me a copy or whether I was seduced by the 'blurb' or maybe intrigued by the title I don't now remember, but it simply wasn't doing it for me. The subject [Georgina Weldon] is someone I had never encountered before but I assume this is a bona fide biography of a real person. If so then I found her singularly uninteresting as well as self-indulgent and irritating!
I had not previously registered [until the entry came up on the website just now] that the author is male - the writing style is far more that of a 19thC woman [think 'Reader, I married him!'] which, coupled with the slow pace and irritating subject was simply too much. For me the only redeeming element was an insight into the lives of the 'aspirational lower middle classes' of the period
I can't remember when or why I decided to read this - whether someone gave me a copy or whether I was seduced by the 'blurb' or maybe intrigued by the title I don't now remember, but it simply wasn't doing it for me. The subject [Georgina Weldon] is someone I had never encountered before but I assume this is a bona fide biography of a real person. If so then I found her singularly uninteresting as well as self-indulgent and irritating!
I had not previously registered [until the entry came up on the website just now] that the author is male - the writing style is far more that of a 19thC woman [think 'Reader, I married him!'] which, coupled with the slow pace and irritating subject was simply too much. For me the only redeeming element was an insight into the lives of the 'aspirational lower middle classes' of the period
October 19, 2018
A fascinating subject.
May 8, 2016
Well monkey lovers, there's not a lot about monkeys in this book. Yes, she did own a monkey in later life, and yes, every chapter in this book has a monkey dangling from the first letter. But that's it as far as monkeys go - we don't get any tales of what the monkey got up to. In fact we get to hear a lot more about her little pug dogs.
This is a dense, detailed, perhaps occasionally a little dry biography of Georgina Weldon, a woman I had never heard of but apparently was quite well known in her time, and even appeared on adverts on buses for Pears soap. Thompson has compiled this biography, having to rely a lot of her six volumed autobiography, written in French to avoid liabel suits, which sound dreadfully dull, including all correspondence, legal papers etc that ever crossed her path, and with an amazing amount of axe grinding. Because my god, this woman could bear a grudge.
She isn't the most likeable of people. She was pompous, big headed, illusions of grandeur, and would often boast and lie to big up who she knew, what she could do and so forth. She does do charitable acts but so often it feels like whatever she's doing, it's more about her than anyone else. At one point she takes just about everyone she ever knew to court on various complaints, suits of liabel etc - as soon as the law was changed so that women would bring about cases in their own names. One positive by product of this is that it was realised there was a kind of loophole in the law to the detrement of women, and this was actually changed, so she even inadvertantly did her bit for women's lib.
She reckoned she was the greatest singer ever and set up a singing school that failed. She started an orphanage that apparently had dog turds all over the place; a child "might" have died and "might" have been buried under the mulberry bush on the property. She took the orphans to France, left them with a pair of roughtons and went off to Paris on her jollies; then the kids all got sick, some died, and the rest were shipped off to nunneries, Canada and various other places so she didn't have to deal with responsibilities. She played men, even after her marriage, and even got a French composer to leave his wife and live in her house for several years and to submit to her advice. Nuts. To give you an idea of how in love with herself she was, this is what she had to say about Gounod's (the French composer) wife - 'She was odious, I confess; but I pitied her. Why had God made me so amicable and her so disagreeable?'
Not the kind of person you'd want to know, I don't think you'd ever know where you stood with her. But then with biographies, who wants to always read about worthy and amazing people all the time? Sometimes you need to read about a deluded eccentric big head who went at everything with guns blazing.
This is a dense, detailed, perhaps occasionally a little dry biography of Georgina Weldon, a woman I had never heard of but apparently was quite well known in her time, and even appeared on adverts on buses for Pears soap. Thompson has compiled this biography, having to rely a lot of her six volumed autobiography, written in French to avoid liabel suits, which sound dreadfully dull, including all correspondence, legal papers etc that ever crossed her path, and with an amazing amount of axe grinding. Because my god, this woman could bear a grudge.
She isn't the most likeable of people. She was pompous, big headed, illusions of grandeur, and would often boast and lie to big up who she knew, what she could do and so forth. She does do charitable acts but so often it feels like whatever she's doing, it's more about her than anyone else. At one point she takes just about everyone she ever knew to court on various complaints, suits of liabel etc - as soon as the law was changed so that women would bring about cases in their own names. One positive by product of this is that it was realised there was a kind of loophole in the law to the detrement of women, and this was actually changed, so she even inadvertantly did her bit for women's lib.
She reckoned she was the greatest singer ever and set up a singing school that failed. She started an orphanage that apparently had dog turds all over the place; a child "might" have died and "might" have been buried under the mulberry bush on the property. She took the orphans to France, left them with a pair of roughtons and went off to Paris on her jollies; then the kids all got sick, some died, and the rest were shipped off to nunneries, Canada and various other places so she didn't have to deal with responsibilities. She played men, even after her marriage, and even got a French composer to leave his wife and live in her house for several years and to submit to her advice. Nuts. To give you an idea of how in love with herself she was, this is what she had to say about Gounod's (the French composer) wife - 'She was odious, I confess; but I pitied her. Why had God made me so amicable and her so disagreeable?'
Not the kind of person you'd want to know, I don't think you'd ever know where you stood with her. But then with biographies, who wants to always read about worthy and amazing people all the time? Sometimes you need to read about a deluded eccentric big head who went at everything with guns blazing.
May 16, 2015
Mrs. Sheldon was by all accounts a force to be reckoned with. This account of her life is based almost exclusively on her own writings, and those of an adoring nephew. The author found it necessary to point out the shortcomings in her self-awareness enough times to be intrusive to the story. It was difficult to get a real sense for how she fit into the bigger picture of her class and society in general since the sources are one-sided. Also, there are quite a few references to British law that further explanation could have made the impact of Mrs. Wheldon's behavior more understandable. I gleaned some new insights into Victorian life, and this remarkable woman, so I would recommend the book to Victoriaphiles who may have a better understand of the era than I do.
June 19, 2009
This was pretty good, not great. I couldn't really relate all that well to the protagonist. But I know of other very intelligent, sane friends who loved it.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews