Inconvenient People (36 page)

Bulwer-Lytton’s second novel,
Pelham
, was a huge commercial and literary success and ensured that publishers paid good sums for its follow-ups. The publishers’ advances allowed him to buy 36 Hertford Street in Mayfair, within which he reconstructed a Pompeiian room. His natural extravagance re-erupted, and although he had raged at Rosina’s outlay on clothing, he bought himself such treats as a huge bronze of Apollo and two Louis XIV clocks. Restlessly he sought out, bought and sold on properties in London and the home counties. What Rosina did not know at the time was that some of these were abodes of love for his mistresses, the most significant being one Laura Deacon, with whom he had three children.

In 1831 Edward was elected MP for the rotten borough of St Ives in Huntingdonshire, in the Whig interest, and when this seat was abolished, he became the member for Lincoln until 1841, when he left parliament. Rosina would claim that he had only been able to scrape together the income of £300 a year required of a parliamentary candidate because
of the inheritance she had brought to the marriage. However, this seems unlikely, as by 1831 he had begun to earn money from his novels – and if he could bring Pompeii to Mayfair, he could surely afford a seat in Westminster. He promoted two causes very effectively in the House of Commons: the first was copyright legislation, to benefit writers and dramatists, and his speech in support of the Negro Apprenticeships Bill was said by Irish nationalist MP Daniel O’Connell to have been one of the best he had ever heard in the House. The legislation, passed on 1 August 1838, was devised to counter slave-owners’ attempts to enforce twelve-year ‘apprenticeships’ upon freed slaves – a tactic to delay the loss of free labour that abolition had caused.

At home, he was proving to be less egalitarian. When Rosina was eight months pregnant with Emily, her husband had her up and down the library stepladder to fetch and read to him volumes of
The Newgate Calendar
, as part of his background research on criminals and lowlife. She claimed that when at last she said she was too weary to help any more, he kicked her hard in the side of her torso. There were no witnesses to this incident; but one day in July 1834, in the dining room of Hertford Street and in front of Rosina’s maid, Rosetta Byrne, Bulwer-Lytton – whose hearing was poor – failed to hear his wife reply to a comment of his and shouted: ‘Why didn’t you answer me? Damn your soul, Madam! I’ll have you know that whenever I do you the honour of addressing you, it requires an answer!’ He then rushed at her with a carving knife, and when she screamed, he leapt upon her – ‘like a tiger,’ in Mrs Byrne’s words – and bit deep into her cheek. Her screams brought the menservants into the room and Cresson the cook broke rank and etiquette to pull his employer off his wife. Bulwer-Lytton fled down Piccadilly. He later wrote an extravagant apology: ‘You have been to me perfection as a wife, I have eternally disgraced myself, I shall go abroad, change a name which is odious to me, take £200 a year, and leave you all the rest.’ Rosina treasured this letter, not for its emotional content, but as proof that he had considered her to have been a good wife, and that he had admitted to the assault. He would later publicly deny both these things, and she liked to know that she had the means with which to prove him a perjurer. ‘The pen is mightier than the sword,’ Bulwer-Lytton would write in his 1839 play
Richelieu
, and Rosina enjoyed the knowledge that she could run him through one day with his own written lies.

The existence of Laura Deacon was brought to Rosina’s attention by a friend, and later she learned of various other amours of her husband’s. When she retaliated by flirting with a Neapolitan prince during a trip to the Italian city, Bulwer-Lytton slammed her face against the stone floor of their palazzo. What’s more, it is likely that in the following sentence of Rosina’s she is indicating that her husband sodomised her, when she writes of the ‘other little incidents which women cannot tell even to their lawyers; and which very young women, however disgusted they may be at them, are still not aware that they have legally a right to do so’. While rape within marriage was legal, sodomy would come under the heading of ‘cruelty’, if a wife should wish to consider divorce proceedings – also having to prove that her husband had been adulterous for her action to be successful. ‘Marriage is Saturnalia for men, and tyranny for women,’ Rosina concluded.

Her own mother could have told her that: Rosina was the estranged daughter of Anna Wheeler, an Irish socialist and early feminist, who had published her thoughts about the subjection of women. But Rosina had disliked both her parents, and after their marital separation she had not enjoyed growing up in the radical, free-thinking circles in which her mother moved. By the mid-1830s Rosina had found out for herself that the marriage laws were grossly unfair to women.

She also now felt she understood the workings of the ‘infernal machine of occult power’, as she later described the male systems of patronage. The institutions of the state – the state that made such a loud noise about liberty – were staffed, or stuffed, by men who had toadied for other men, or who were keeping their masters’ nasty secrets quiet, or who had simply proved themselves to be jolly good fellows at school, university or club. Male-controlled British public life was a ‘consecrated palladium of puffery and party’, Rosina decided. She observed that although many of these men may have felt dislike and contempt for each other in private, in public there was an understood system of homage, deference and payback for past favours and silences maintained.

As wealthy and well-connected people, the Bulwer-Lyttons could have petitioned parliament for a divorce, twenty years ahead of the Matrimonial Causes Act that would make divorce a civil matter (taking place in the new Divorce Court) and less expensive, and thus available to those in (slightly) humbler circumstances. Her husband suggested such a move, but on condition that Rosina admit to infidelity (although there is no suggestion that she had ever done more than flirt with anyone) and that she would stay silent about his own adultery and his assaults upon her. (A husband could sue for divorce purely on the grounds of his wife’s adultery, but a wife had to be able to prove her husband’s adultery plus one other factor, such as extreme and repeated cruelty, desertion, incest, or sodomy with another male; this double standard was controversially left unchanged by the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act.) Rosina refused to accept the terms, and instead, a deed of separation was drawn up. Rosina requested £600 per annum, plus £100 each for Little Boots’s and Teddy’s education – a sum she felt was reasonable, given that her husband was by now immensely independently wealthy (earning an estimated £3,000–£4,000 a year) and in line to inherit Knebworth House from his mother. But Edward rejected this sum, and although he said that he would be willing to part with £500 a year, when the deed of separation was placed before Rosina on 19 April 1836 the amount had been reduced even further, to £400 a year plus £50 for each child. This was a respectable middle-class income, but it was inadequate for a fashionable lady, with appearances to keep up and a love of the flashy. What is more, Rosina felt that the sum did not reflect the financial and practical contributions she had
made to the nine-year marriage. But Rosina wanted her freedom and so she accepted, in the belief that she could supplement the £400 by wielding her own pen. She knew that she was clever and wrote well; she claimed she had contributed hugely to
Pelham
,
Paul Clifford
,
The Disowned
,
Devereux
,
Eugene Aram
and
Godolphin
– the early-career novels that had earned Bulwer-Lytton so much acclaim and cash. She was also glad that he had allowed her to keep the children at a time when many men took full advantage of the laws of the country that recognised no rights in a mother.

Rosina left England for her native Ireland, and to begin with, she lived there happily with the children and with her companion, Mary Greene. But when Bulwer-Lytton learned, in 1838 – the year in which he was created a baronet – that his wife had become romantically close to a married Dublin man, he won custody of ten-year-old Little Boots and six-year-old Teddy. He entrusted their care to Mary Greene, now estranged from Rosina, and visited them once each year for a week. His payments to Rosina now became irregular.

Rosina began her own literary career with the novel
Cheveley; Or, The Man of Honour
(1839), a satirical attack on her husband, his mother’s family and Bulwer-Lytton’s friends and supporters. Rosina’s prose (much of which is now available online) is extremely tiring to read – a hurricane of images and metaphors, subclause upon subclause, and the main thrust of her sentence often not revealed until the very end. However, within the tumble of words are to be found many gems – odd aperçus that feel fresh and unusual. For example, in her autobiographical work
A Blighted Life
, she writes:

A Blighted Life
was revelatory of the bedroom habits of the nineteenth century’s ‘respectable’ classes. It was suppressed when it first emerged, in 1867, and when it reappeared in 1880 most of the people whose peccadilloes were referenced were no longer around to protest.

Her husband hit back with the poem
Lady Cheveley; Or, The Woman of Honour
, which included the lines:

To which Rosina replied:

Moving from Dublin to Bath, to Paris, to Florence, to Geneva, Rosina continued to publish parodies of Lytton’s work and thinly veiled, near-libellous tittle-tattle about the circles in which the couple had moved. Her anger and sense of injustice was ratcheted up by Bulwer-Lytton’s increasing renown, wealth and celebrity. In 1843 Mama died and her son inherited Knebworth House. Rosina took advantage of her right to be called Lady Lytton, partly because she hoped that sharing his name and rank might help her in her battle to stay in print, and partly because she knew how much he would hate her doing so. Her husband had used his immense influence to ensure that her novels were either ignored or attacked in the periodical press; he also let it be understood that any publishing house or bookseller who dealt with her work could expect trouble. Lord Lytton would later deny in a
court of law that he had ever tried to prevent her writing; but Rosina owned another treasured note in her husband’s handwriting, written in 1839 and stating that he would ‘ruin’ her if she published any more books.

Rosina had few supporters of any influence, but it is interesting to note that three of the age’s most intellectual writers – Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and George Sand (1804–1876) – sympathised with her and disliked her husband. All, however, wisely realised that they needed to be circumspect in doing so. Landor had offered Rosina friendship and advice in 1838 as she was losing the children, but was in no doubt of the power that Bulwer-Lytton possessed within the tiny and treacherous world of letters. Landor was embarrassed to find himself the dedicatee of
Cheveley
, and asked Rosina not to identify him with her camp; surprisingly, for one so prickly, she did not take offence at this. Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane, meanwhile, tried to find a publisher for Rosina’s novels and soon discovered the pressure that had been brought to bear by Bulwer-Lytton to suppress Rosina’s books. Writing four years after the separation, Carlyle was amazed that so many people took Bulwer-Lytton at his own estimation: ‘It will be a rather tragical fate for this poor Bulwer, I think . . . He is certain before many years to be universally found out and proclaimed as a piece of pinchbeck [imitation gold].’