Georgina Weldon: A Disastrous Victorian
Georgina Weldon was born in 1837 and, although almost no one will have heard of her, the only talent she really had was for self-advertisement. She is one of the great undiscovered and unsung eccentrics of the 19th-century.
Her ego was monstrous and manifested itself in the six-volume record of her life which she sold through a spiritualistic medium. Her garrulous work was composed in a convent cell in Gisors where she lived with her pet monkey. She was born to parents on the margins of aristocracy and spent her early life in Florence. After a string of liaisons which ruined her reputation, she eloped to a two-bedroom cottage in Beaumaris, with a penniless Hussar officer called Harry Weldon. She opened a singing academy in a house formerly owned by Dickens.
With her husband trying to commit her for lunacy, Georgina fled to France, only to flee back again when Harry threatened divorce. It was at this point that she discovered her metier - dragging people through courts. She published pamphlets, embraced spiritualism, had a lesbian affair with a French lady and eventually lived out her days in Gisors surrounded by 37 tea chests and many trunks filled with paper.
There was no other Victorian woman like Georgina Weldon.
