Born Caroline Sheridan. Later Lady Stirling Maxwell. Poet and novelist. Reasonably well educated. Began writing as young girl; during much of her life forced to earn her living by her pen. Industriously edited annuals, contributed to periodicals—New Monthly, Morning Chronicle, Macmillan's, and others. Published The Undying One, The Dream, The Lady of La Garaye, and other poems. Had high contemporary reputation as a poet; called by the Quarterly Review, September 1840 "the Byron of our modern poetesses"; in Horne's New Spirit of the Age, 1844, shared chapter with Elizabeth Barrett. Among her works of fiction, Stuart of Dunleath, 1851, praised by the Examiner, May 3, as shining "pre-eminent and peerless" among the new novels of the year.
Was prominently before the public not only as writer, but as figure in the court proceedings and related scandals in which her unfortunate marriage involved her. Most notorious was her husband's criminal conversation action, 1836, brought against Lord Melbourne; Melbourne triumphantly acquitted. Separated from her husband; custody of children a matter of dispute. In 1853 brought suit against her husband for his failure to pay her allowance and for his claiming proceeds of her literary work. Her unhappy marital experience motivated her pamphlets urging reform in infant custody, marriage, and divorce laws. Meanwhile had become subject of unpleasant publicity on the rumour that she had, in 1845, revealed a cabinet secret to the Times; the unfounded slander revived by Meredith, seven years after her death, in his using her as model for heroine of Diana of the Crossways. In 1877, two years after death of her first husband, married Sir William Stirling-Maxwell.
Dickens reported for the Morning Chronicle the Norton-Melbourne trial; he obviously had it in mind in writing the BardeIl-Pickwick trial scene. He was not at the time acquainted with Mrs. Norton; he later met her and became her friend; like his contemporaries, he admired her striking beauty. Mrs. Norton, in the English Bijou Almanac for 1842, published a verse tribute to Dickens, praising him for the influence for good in his writings. In The Child of the Islands, 1845, she singled out A Christmas Carol for praise. However little it resembled a solemn discourse on the duties of rich and poor, she wrote, the Carol would "stand its ground as one of the best sermons on charity".
Two H.W. articles dealt with Mrs. Norton and her efforts to bring about reform in infant custody, marriage, and divorce laws. In "One of Our Legal Fictions", Miss Lynn, without mentioning Mrs. Norton by name, related the history of Mrs. Norton's marriage to illustrate the gross injustices to which women were subject under laws that deprived a wife of a legal existence, made her the husband's chattel, and denied her, if separated from her husband, access to her children. The infant custody law had been in one respect changed, wrote Miss Lynn, "mainly, because this sufferer [i.e., Mrs. Norton] laboured hard to show its cruelty". Miss Lynn's article was based on Mrs. Norton's pamphlet English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century, 1854. An article by Wills, "A Legal Fiction" was based on Mrs. Norton's Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill, 1855. Wills praised Mrs. Norton's energy in working for reform and remarked on the eloquence of her protests. Her "spirited" Letter to the Queen, he wrote "ought to give such a stimulus to public opinion and sense of right, as will hasten the slow operations of law-making". The pamphlet Remarks upon the Law of Marriage and Divorce; Suggested by the Hon. Mrs. Norton's Letter to the Queen formed the subject of a third H.W. article—Miss Lynn's "Marriage Gaolers". Merely citing from the pamphlet various instances of gross injustice to wives, Miss Lynn had no occasion to mention Mrs. Norton or the hardships inflicted on her by her "marriage gaoler".
Flourishing at the same time as Caroline Norton was another "Hon. Mrs. Norton"—the Hon. Mrs. Erskine Norton, likewise a writer of verse and prose, a contributor to periodicals (Metropolitan, Bentley's Miscellany), and author of books (The Martyr: A Tragedy, 1848; The Gossip, 1852). The H.W. contributor, however, is clearly the famous, rather than the obscure, Hon. Mrs. Norton. It is reasonable to assume that Wills, in his Office Book entries, would have indicated the Christian name of the contributor had she been another than the Hon. Mrs. Norton. What seems clearly to be the autobiographical nature of "The Invalid's Mother" also points to Caroline Norton as the H.W. contributor. The poem presents a mother praying "To the Sun, at Lisbon", for the restoration of her child's health. Caroline Norton had spent some weeks in Lisbon in 1848-1849, nursing back to health her son Fletcher.
Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
