June 25, 2025 • 41 mins
Once Rosina Bulwer-Lytton and her husband Edward separated, his life seemed to become more and more successful while she struggled with finances. The estranged couple then spent years battling very publicly until Edward had Rosina committed.
Research:
- “A Scene at the Hertfordshire Election.” The Tiverton Gazette. 6/29/1858. https://www.newspapers.com/image/803824054/
- Blain, Virginia. “Rosina Bulwer Lytton and the Rage of the Unheard.” Huntington Library Quarterly , Summer, 1990, Vol. 53, No. 3. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3817439
- Brown, Andrew. "Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer [formerly Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer], first Baron Lytton (1803–1873), writer and politician." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. September 23, 2004. Oxford University Press. Date of access 4 Jun. 2025, https://www-oxforddnb-com.proxy.bostonathenaeum.org/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-17314
- Bulwer-Lytton, Rosina. “Lady Bulwer Lytton's Appeal to the Justice and Charity of the English Public.” By and For the Author. 1857.
- Devey, Louisa, editor. “Letters of the late Edward Bulwer, lord Lytton, to his wife.” New York : G. W. Dillingham. 1889.
- Devey, Louisa. “Life of Rosina, Lady Lytton: With Numerous Extracts from Her Ms. Autobiography and Other Original Documents.” London, Swan Sonnschein, Lowery & Co. 1887.
- Flynn, Michael J. “Dickens, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and the ‘Guilt’ of Literature and Art.” Dickens Quarterly, March 2012, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 2012). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45292582
- King, Cornelia. “Getting Even: The Mighty Pen of Lady Bulwer Lytton.” The Library Company of Philadelphia. 5/10/2022. https://librarycompany.org/2022/05/10/getting-even/
- Latané, D.E. “Edward Bulwer Lytton’s committal of his wife Rosina to a private mental asylum in 1858.” Victorian Web. https://victorianweb.org/authors/bulwer/latane.html
- McFadden, Margaret. “Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785-1848): Philosopher, Socialist, Feminist.” Hypatia, vol. 4, no. 1, 1989, pp. 91–101. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3809936. Accessed 3 June 2025.
- Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. "Fame, notoriety and madness: Edward Bulwer-Lytton paying the price of greatness." Critical Survey, vol. 13, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 115+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A80191856/LitRC?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=2669a158. Accessed 27 May 2025.
- Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. "Lytton, Rosina Anne Doyle Bulwer [née Rosina Anne Doyle Wheeler], Lady Lytton (1802–1882), novelist." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. October 08, 2009. Oxford University Press. Date of access 28 May. 2025, https://www-oxforddnb-com.proxy.bostonathenaeum.org/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-17316
- Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. “‘The Very Worst Woman I Ever Heard of’: Rosina Bulwer Lytton and Biography as Vindication.” Women's Writing, 25:2, 253-267, DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2017.1387338
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy H.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of
our episode on Rosina Bulwert Lytton, wife of Edward Bulwert Lytton,
(00:23):
although where we're picking up on this story, he was
still known as Edward Lytton Bulwer. This is also an
episode about their marriage and separation. Last time, we talked
about Rosina's early life and the early years of her
relationship with Edward and the infidelity and abuse that led
to their separation in eighteen thirty six. By that point,
(00:46):
Edward had become a best selling novelist. That is, something
that he had turned to in order to make up
for losing a generous allowance from his mother because he
married Rosina, and then after their separation, Rosina would try
to do basically the same thing. She tried to write
books to make up for a gap in her income.
(01:07):
We talked about Edward's physical abuse of Rosina during part one.
While the separation got her away from that, it did
not in any way free her from him. In the
words of her biographer and literary executor Louisa de Vay
quote great as were the troubles of missus Bullward's married life,
(01:29):
and bitter the sufferings she underwent while living under her
husband's roof, they became almost insignificant as compared with the
squalid misery, the unremitting persecution, and the mental and bodily
torture she endured after the date of her separation. That
all reached its apex in eighteen fifty eight, when Edward
(01:52):
had Rosina committed, which we of course will be getting to.
As we said in Part one, Rosina and edward deed
of separation specified that she would receive four hundred pounds
per year, plus an additional fifty pounds for each of
her children, as long as they lived with her, and
initially they did live with her, but that changed in
(02:14):
eighteen thirty eight, when her daughter Emilie Elizabeth was ten
and her son Edward Robert was seven. The details on
this are a little bit fuzzy, but Edward had the
children removed from Rosina's care and placed with a woman
known as Miss Green. At first, Rosina was allowed to
see them briefly about once a month, always with Miss
(02:36):
Green's supervision, but eventually even that stopped and she was
separated from her children entirely. Rosina framed this as a
continual source of heartbreak. Edward claimed that she did not care,
and in a lot of ways, both children were used
as pawns in their parents' attacks on one another. Rosina
(02:58):
had no legal stand to change this custody arrangement. Women's
status after marriage in the UK was known as coverture.
Married couples were essentially merged as one legal entity under
the man's identity. The man held all economic property and
(03:18):
legal rights for his wife and for any children that
they might have. Married women could not own their own property,
or sign their own contracts, or file suit on their
own behalf in court. After being separated from her children,
Rosina went to Bath. That year, Edward was knighted and
named Baronet of Nebworth, a newly created baronetcy. Allegedly, after this,
(03:43):
someone congratulated Rosina on becoming a lady, and she said
she wished it had made Edward a gentleman. So Rosina
was now separated from her children, and she was seeing
her husband ascend in exactly the way that they had
been planning earlier. On in their marriage. On top of that,
(04:04):
she was having financial problems. There is really not a
great way to convert the four hundred pounds that she
was given annually into something comparable intoday's currency, like the
Bank of England's inflation calculator puts that at roughly forty
thousand pounds. But ways of living and social expectations were
(04:26):
radically different in the eighteen thirties as compared to today.
The most approachable comparisons are usually about things like Jane
Austen novels, which are set just a little earlier than
this was happening. But just generally speaking, an income of
four hundred pounds a year might be enough for somebody
(04:48):
of Rosina's class to afford a home and their basic
needs and a couple of servants, maybe a cook and
a lady's maid, But their money would still have to
be very carefully managed for that to work, and it
wouldn't have been a lifestyle that was considered luxurious, especially
for somebody whose husband was a best selling writer and
(05:09):
a member of parliament and a baronet. That four hundred
pounds a year was less than the six hundred pounds
her husband had said he would give her during their
initial informal separation, and less than the five hundred pounds
she would have been entitled to if she still had
the children. It did not really allow for the various
initial expenses that were involved in getting established in a
(05:32):
household of her own, or for anything unexpected to happen.
It also doesn't seem like she made this transition to
a life on her own very easily, Like early on
in her time of living without her husband and children,
there's an account of her staying with a family that's
full of what sounds like modern day roommates, squabbling over
(05:52):
who spent how much and who owed how much, with
everyone accusing everyone else of spending too much money. On
top of that, according to Rosina, Edward's payments to her
were often late and sometimes very late. Yeah, this is like,
this is way more money than a laborer had every year,
(06:14):
or like a farm worker, or you know someone that
was in a more working class, But for someone who
was of Rosina's class married to a baronet, like it
does not seem like it was allowing her to meet
the expectations of her socially, or just to live a
life that didn't feel like it was full of scramping
(06:36):
and saving, so she started trying to supplement her income
by writing, and Edward, of course heard about this. He
had a diary entry in eighteen thirty eight in which
he wrote, quote, I tremble every day lest my domestic
sores should be dragged still more into light than all
that is most sacred in men's hearts and homes, exposed
(07:00):
to all that is more galling in public gossip. Later on,
Rosina wrote a letter to artist A. E. Chalon said,
in part, quote exposure is the only thing that complex
monster dreads, and consequently the only check I have upon him.
Rosina's first novel was Chevy or the Man of Honor,
(07:23):
published in eighteen thirty nine. One of its characters is
Lord de Clifford, who seduces and then abandons the daughter
of one of his tenants. She is driven insane by
his treatment, and Lord de Clifford winds up in court.
He also winds up being publicly denounced, and not long
after he dies after a fall from his horse. Lord
(07:45):
de Clifford is a thinly disguised version of Edward and
his extramarital affairs, and that fatal fall really reads like
wish fulfillment. Edward, unsurprisingly did not want this book to
be published in Apparently he tried to put a stop
to it, including going to Rosina's publisher, Edward Bull and
(08:05):
telling him that Rosina's trustee Francis Doyle had forbidden this.
Bull published the book anyway, and it sold well. It
went through three editions in its first year, and Bull
also agreed to publish another book for her based on
that success. Someone also published a response to this book
in the form of a satirical pamphlet written in forty
(08:28):
seven pages of verse, titled Lady Cheveley or the Woman
of Honor. It was printed anonymously, but literary historian Marie
Moldy Roberts, who has written on Rosina Bullwer written and
edited modern reprintings of her letters and other writings, suggests
that it may have been written by Edward buller Lytton.
(08:48):
Four years after this, Rosina and Edward each wrote novels
that had some running themes. Rosina's were also full of
dastardly philandering men who were clearly based on her opinions
of Edward and her relationship with him, and a number
of Edward's novels featured mad Women, There was one in
(09:10):
which the couple's relationship deteriorated to the point that the
wife went mad and poisoned him. People didn't necessarily know
about Rosina's allegations of Edward's physical abuse, but they absolutely
knew about the separation and estrangement. In eighteen thirty nine,
(09:30):
Rosina visited Paris, and by then her situation had become
notorious enough that she wound up in the gossip columns.
At least two publications, The Morning Post and the Court Journal,
reported that Rosina had been at a soiree hosted by
Lady Amler and had run into Edward's brother, Henry, who
was in Paris working as a diplomat. The Morning Post
(09:53):
said that Rosina had made quote certain wry faces, the
meaning of which could not be mistaken, and the Court
Journal contended that she had gone to the party specifically
to run into Henry and to humiliate him. Apparently, none
of this was true, and Henry was not even there.
That night. Rosina wrote a letter to The Morning Post
(10:13):
asking for an apology and a retraction, saying that she
had never met Henry in Paris at all. The Morning
Post complied with this with Edward's permission, Rosina also filed
suit against the Court Journal and was awarded fifty pounds.
While Edward did give permission for her to file this suit,
it was also around this time that Rosina started to
(10:35):
believe that he was spying on her. She got a
letter from a friend dated October fourth, eighteen thirty nine,
relating a strange incident in which a man had approached
Missus Stockman in Bath, who ran a lodging house there,
and that man had asked all kinds of questions about Rosina,
about her rooms when she'd stayed there, who her acquaintances were,
(10:58):
and whether a mister H had ever taken rooms there
as well. These questions all seemed to suggest that the
man asking them was trying to figure out if Rosina
and this mister H had been involved with one another.
And this man also seemed to know every detail of
Rosina's life and habits, and he had also apparently been
asking questions around Ireland and France as well. In this
(11:22):
friend's words, quote, when Missus Stockman said Sir ELB was
living with miss Deacon, the man's face flushed and he
looked savage. Not long after this, Rosina tried to file
another suit in Paris, this one against an attorney named
Thackeray and his clerk named Lawson. She alleged that they
(11:44):
had fraudulently tried to seize her personal papers, according to
Rosina's letters, which is the one source I had on this,
although this had taken place in France and her suit
was in a French court. After some deliberation, it was
decided that because she was married under English law, the
requirement for her husband's consent still applied. She did not
(12:07):
have that consent, so this suit did not go anywhere,
and she was required to pay for the cost of
the proceedings, which was money she just did not have.
Tensions between Rosina and Edward escalated beyond their already high
point in the eighteen forties, and we're gonna get to that.
After a sponsor break in eighteen forty one, Edward lost
(12:37):
his seat in Parliament, and in eighteen forty three his
mother died. He inherited money and property from her side
of the family, and this is also when he started
going by Bulwer Lytton rather than Lytton Bulwer. This made
his full name Edward George Earl Lytton Bulwer Lytton. Part
(12:58):
of Edward's inheritance was no Ebworth House, where he had
already been living. This had been the Lytton family residence
since the late fifteenth century, and this is a mansion.
It served as a stand in for an assortment of
rich people's homes and palaces in movies and television, including
Wayne Manor in the nineteen eighty nine version of Batman
(13:19):
and Thornfield Hall in the nineteen ninety seven adaptation of
Jane Eyre. It was also the virtually impregnable Mallory Gallery
in The Great Muppet Caper, the best of the three
in my opinion. Edward continued refurbishment work that his mother
had started on the house, including adding lots of tudored
Gothic elements to its exterior and putting in a formal
(13:41):
Italian garden. By this point, Rosina had spent a few
years in France and Italy, believing that she was being
spied on by Edward and that someone was opening her
mail looking for some kind of evidence of adultery so
that Edward could divorce her. He also seemed to be
using his life literary connections to keep her books from
(14:02):
getting published or to minimize their impact when she did
manage to find a publisher. Her books during this period
included Bianca Cappello, unhistorical romance, published in eighteen forty three.
This was about a real historical figure, but it still
contained a lot of material about men's bad treatment of
their wives. When Rosina learned about Edward's mother's death, she
(14:26):
thought there was really no excuse for him to continue
to allow her only four hundred pounds a year, especially
since he seemed to be intentionally undermining her efforts to
earn more money for herself. She could really only argue
for an increase in her annuity if she went back
to England, but she found herself stuck on the continent.
(14:48):
She had outstanding debts in Italy and France, including the
legal expenses from her failed lawsuit that were still unpaid.
She also did not have the money to arrange her
passage back to England, and she had gotten to the
point that she was deeply hesitant to borrow from anyone.
She had genuine fears that she would never actually be
able to pay it back. Sometimes she did find ways
(15:11):
to get smaller amounts of money, though, after a friend
told her that her daughter, Emily, was living on minimal
support from her father and only had two pairs of stockings.
Rosina sold a bracelet and sent her friend the proceeds,
but her friend returned to that money several months later,
saying that she had not been able to figure out
an appropriate way to pass the money on to Emily.
(15:35):
Rosina also bought a watch and a chain and sent
it to her son Robert, and that was returned as
well with a message not to send any more packages. Finally,
a sympathetic friend gave Rosina four hundred pounds and then
tore up her letter, offering to pay it back at
five percent interest, and this was enough to settle most
(15:57):
of her debts on the continent and she arrived back
in England in May of eighteen forty seven. She did
eventually repay this money, but it took her several years.
Back in England, Rosina started writing to Edward to ask
for more money, but she did not know exactly where
he was At any point. She would send letters in
(16:18):
care of the places that she knew he frequented, like
the Atheneum Club and the Albion Hotel. When she didn't
get a response, she started addressing them along the lines
of Sir Liar Coward Bulwer Lytton, and she would also
put notes on the outside about women that she thought
he was involved with. This had the effect of infuriating
(16:38):
and embarrassing Edward and of seating rumors about him around
London via what was written on the outside of his mail.
In April of eighteen forty eight, Rosina got word that
her daughter was very ill, and she tried to see her.
She bribed a landlady at the boarding house where Emily
was staying, as well as the nurse who was caring
(16:59):
for her. They would not let Rosina actually see her daughter, though,
saying that any kind of sudden emotion might make her worse.
Rosina sat at the top of the stairs outside Emily's room,
where she could hear Emily calling for her as she
got worse. Word got back to Edward that Rosina was there,
(17:19):
and he ordered that she'd be removed from the boarding house.
Emily died on April twenty eighth, eighteen forty eight, just
a couple of months before her twentieth birthday. Some accounts
say that Rosina was able to see her daughter, but
only briefly before her death, and then other accounts say
that she did not get to see Emily at all.
(17:40):
Even the accounts of people who were actually there in
the house that night are contradictory. It's also not really
clear what Emily died of. Various sources attribute it to typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis,
and fever. Rosina and Edward both proclaimed themselves to be
beret after Emily's death, and they each used it as
(18:03):
ammunition against the other. Edward and their son Robert both
claimed that the shock of either seeing or hearing Rosina
had killed Emily, while Rosina said that Edward had worked
his daughter to death and withheld appropriate medical care in
her final days. Rosina was also furious that Edward placed
(18:23):
a death notice for Emily that made it sound as
though she had died at the Litton home of Nebworth
House rather than at a boarding house. Rosina's mother, Anna
Doyle Wheeler, also died that same year. In eighteen fifty one,
Edward staged a play called Not So Bad As We
Seem with the assistance of Charles Dickens. The two writers
(18:45):
had just founded the Guild of Literature and Art as
an organization to provide things like pensions and health insurance
to British writers. This play was to be a fundraiser
for the guild. When Rosina heard about this, she sent
a ton of letters about it to an assortment of people.
She said that this guild should be renamed The Guilt
(19:07):
of Literature and Art. She threatened to show up dressed
as a beggar in protest of Edward's perpetually late annuity payments.
Edward and later his son alleged that she threatened to
show up and throw rotten eggs at the Queen. That
would have been treason. Rosina also wrote and distributed a
piece called Even Worse Than We Seem, which was framed
(19:30):
as a parody of Edward's play, although nobody outside the
production actually had a copy of the script when she
wrote this, so she didn't actually have any way of
knowing what the contents of the play were. To parody them,
she printed pamphlets that included a dramatist persona that described
Sir E Bulwer Lytton as quote a gentleman question mark
(19:54):
with a guttaperchure rental of ten thousand pounds for his acquaintance,
which conveniently shrinks to as many hundreds whenever he has
applied to give his wife enough to live on. According
to this he was cast in the role of Sir
Plagarie Puff, a philanthropic, exclamation point literary gentleman question mark
(20:14):
who has literally translated his poor young daughter into heaven
and nobly leaves his wife on public charity. This pamphlet
also described Charles Dickens as having a dead child in
one pocket and a dead father in the other. Charles
Dickens hired security for the performance, also getting Edward to
(20:37):
send someone who actually knew what Rosina looked like. It's
not entirely clear whether she disrupted the performance itself. Newspapers
were really fond of gleefully covering whatever Rosina was doing
and writing about her husband, but there's not an account
of her being there when the play was staged. Later on, though,
Rosina would try to stage a play of her own,
(20:59):
and when she had trouble getting it off the ground,
she claimed that Charles Dickens had assassinated her character. In
the British theatrical world. In eighteen fifty two, Edward Bulwer
Lytton was elected as a Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire.
A year later, Rosana was living in Wales and alleged
that someone had tried to poison her. She moved periodically,
(21:23):
and she continued to publicly lambast her estranged husband and
to try to earn money through writing. In eighteen fifty six,
she published a novel called Very Successful. One of the
characters in this novel incredulously quotes real advertising material for
Edward's novels, which said that they quote abound in illustrations
(21:44):
that teach benevolence to the rich and courage to the poor.
They glow with the love of freedom. They speak a
sympathy with all high aspirations and all manly struggles. This
character then gives a recounting of seemingly everything Rosina had
experienced and alleged about Edward at this point, physically destroying
(22:05):
one child, morally destroying another, kicking his wretched victim of
a wife a month before her first child was born
till she was nearly dead, turning that poor little murder
out of the house the moment she was born, as
he ultimately did to die, springing in one of his
rabid furies upon his wife and making his hideous horse
(22:27):
teeth meet in her cheek. Till the blood streamed down her,
and ultimately turning her and her children out of their
home to make way for one of his infamous mistresses.
Are no doubt among these high aspirations and manly struggles,
and it goes on from there. Yeah. The reason that
I did not say which character specifically says this is
(22:50):
that when I was trying to trace back through it
toy figure out who's talking here, I couldn't figure it out.
A lot of this book looks kind of like a
wall of text, and I found it difficult to peace through.
The biggest and most public blow up of their marriage
was still to come, and we will get to that
(23:11):
after a sponsor break. In eighteen fifty seven, Parliament passed
the Matrimonial Causes Act, which changed divorce law in the UK.
(23:31):
Divorces became easier to obtain, but men still had to
prove that their wives had been unfaithful, and women still
had to prove that their husbands had been unfaithful and
had also done some other kind of wrong like cruelty
or abandonment or sexual assault. We talked more about this
(23:51):
law in our two part episode on Caroline Sheridan Norton,
which came out on April third and fifth of twenty
twenty three. Her story She has some common elements with
this one, although Caroline Norton's writing was really focused on
advocating for legal reforms that would help protect the rights
of married and divorced women. While this law made it
(24:13):
possible for more people to obtain a divorce, Rosina and
Edward were still basically stuck because neither of them had
the necessary proof to get one. That same year, Rosina
Bulwer Lytton wrote Lady Bulwer Lytton's Appeal to the Justice
and Charity of the English Public. She said she intended
(24:34):
it to be included in the second edition of Very Successful,
but implied that her husband had prevented a second edition
from being published. She claimed that this suppression had even
extended to the libraries, and that if someone asks for
a copy of Very Successful, the librarian will say quote
that they have not got it as it is not
a book fit for ladies to read, followed by six
(24:57):
exclamation points. Instead, solicited subscriptions for the book for the
price of one pound eleven shilling sixpence. Much of the
pamphlet is made up of long, unbroken paragraphs that run
for pages. Recounting her allegations against Edward, She said she
was appealing for public charity because quote there are yet
(25:19):
no workhouses for the destitute wives of rich men. A
lot of Versino's writing reads as very vengeful, but in
this piece she described herself as not motivated by revenge.
Quote it is self defense. And she gives Sir Edward
bulwer Lytton fair notice that if he continues to hunt
(25:39):
and outrage her as he has done, she will continue
steadily to expose his conduct, for she pretends no pretenses,
and unless her hypocrisy were commensurate with his own, she
could not, even from policy, affect any other feeling but
that of the sovereign contempt she entertains for him. She
(26:01):
also wrote, quote, Sir Edward bulwer Lytton has circled my
life with a snare and crowned it with a curse.
My miserable, lonely, laborious, and disinherited existence. He has made
one great agony, composed of innumerable exquisite, infinitesimal tortures, for
each and all of which, as there is but one source,
(26:23):
I have but one name, surely to the most forbearing
and least logical mind, the inference is obvious. The following year,
Edward was appointed as Secretary of State for the Colonies.
As a result, a by election was held to confirm
him as MP for Hertfordshire. He had to be an
MP to fill this role. He was running unopposed, so
(26:47):
ordinarily this would have been a pretty straightforward and one
would expect quiet election. But in the weeks leading up
to the election, Rosina repeatedly publicly denounced him, including retorically
asking why the people of England would have him as
the head of the Colonies when he should have been
transported there for his crimes years before. She also spread
(27:11):
rumors that he had only gotten this cabinet position because
he was having an affair with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Rosina worked with her Landlady Missus Clark to go to
Hertford the day before the June eighth election and put
up posters denouncing Edward and to distribute copies of her
Appeal to Justice and Charity pamphlet. They also distributed handbills
(27:35):
that read quote, Lady Bulwer Lytton urgently solicits the attendants
of the Yeomen and electors of Hertfordshire in the town
Hall of Hertford on Tuesday, the eighth of June at
twelve o'clock at noon, not indeed to solicit their votes,
but for their true interest. Edward had the help of
their son, Robert, who was now twenty six and trying
(27:57):
to clean up all of this. Robert went around town
tearing down posters and discarding pamphlets and handbills. Meanwhile, Rosina
went to the mayor and tried to secure the town
hall so that she could give her own a dress.
She also claimed that she would run against Edward in
the election, something that was not possible since women did
(28:18):
not have the right to vote or to serve in Parliament.
On election day, both Edward and Robert appeared on the Hustings,
basically a campaign event. Rosina apparently thought this was starting
at noon, but it really started at eleven am, so
she got there just as Edward was finishing his speech.
She was dressed all in white and carrying a white
(28:40):
parasol and started loudly insulting Edward to everyone around her.
Robert saw his mother in the crowd, and he got
his father's attention to warn him. In the words of
a letter from Jane Welsh Carlyle to her husband Thomas Carlyle.
When Edward realized that when Robert kept saying Lady Lytton
(29:01):
he meant Rosina, he did not mean his aunt, who
would also be called Lady Lytton, Edward quote turned us
white as a sheet, cast one wild look at his wife,
and rushed down the companion ladder of the platform steps,
near the bottom of which, by the kind foresight of somebody,
his carriage and servants stood ready. Rosina made her way
(29:25):
through the crowd, got onto the platform and spoke against
Edward for about fifteen minutes. Her exact words are not
recorded anywhere, but she was generally described as largely repeating
the content of her pamphlet. There is some speculation that
Edward and his connections tried to keep this whole disruption quiet.
(29:46):
It is mentioned in things like personal letters and eyewitness papers,
but the immediate coverage of this election in the major
newspapers doesn't mention it that changed, though after Edward try
to have Rosina committed. On June eleventh, a man named
Frederick Hale Thompson arrived at Rosina's home in Taunton, accompanied
(30:09):
by a nurse to examine her. Rosina agreed to this examination,
and after some discussion, Thompson seems to have concluded that
she was sane. He asked what it would take for
her to stop these kinds of public denouncements of her husband.
She said she wanted her allowance to be increased to
five hundred pounds and for her existing debts to be cleared.
(30:32):
That amount totaled about twenty five hundred pounds. Thompson left,
and when Rosina didn't hear anything else about this for
more than a week, she went to London to his
office to follow up, and she took her landlady and
a friend of hers with her. She got there in
the morning and she was asked to return later in
the day, which she did, but she also said before
(30:54):
leaving that if this matter was not settled, she would
take incriminating letters that she'd brought with her to the magistrate.
Rosina came back to Thompson's office at five pm, as
had been requested, and there were two police officers there
along with staff from a private asylum called Brentford, which
was outside of London, and they had the necessary paperwork
(31:17):
to have her committed Edward's evidence of Rosina's purported mental
state included an assortment of her writing, including her playbill
from Even Worse Than We Seen. He also claimed that
both of her parents had been insane, and she pointed
out that if that was true, he was suggesting that
the same could also be true of their son, Robert.
(31:39):
While it seems like Edward might have kept her disruption
at the Hustings on the June eighth election day from
being widely reported in the newspapers, her confinement in the
asylum became big news, with some papers taking her side
and some taking Edwards. Several newspapers, starting with ones in
Scotland and Ireland, also started revisiting that election, and they
(32:02):
published accounts of Rosina's arrival and Edwards fleeing the scene.
One widely reprinted write up described Rosina as an extremely
handsome woman of about forty five who called him a
coward from the platform, and quote asserting her intention to
confront her husband on every possible occasion until she compelled
(32:24):
him to address her wrongs. Rosina continued to write to
her friends and to public figures from the asylum advocating
for her release, and of course criticizing her husband's actions.
This was a time in which women were disproportionately institutionalized
in Britain, often for behavior that their male relatives found
(32:45):
inconvenient or inappropriate. Rosina made it clear that she was
not being treated poorly, which was often not the case
for women who didn't have the kind of status she did.
She was allowed to move around the house and grounds
and to visit neighboring ville villages with an attendant, with
her own self advocacy from within the asylum and her
(33:05):
friends working on her behalf outside of it. She was
released on July fourteenth, after about three weeks. Rosina had
to be declared insane in order to be committed, and
that meant Edward was obligated to pay off her debts.
He also did agree to increase her allowance to the
five hundred pounds per year that she had been asking for,
(33:27):
and at this point Edward allowed Rosina to see her
son again. They spent several months together traveling in Europe
along with a female friend of Rosina's, until they apparently
had some kind of disagreement and parted ways. In eighteen
sixty six, Edward was raised to the peerage and named
Baron of Nebworth. That same year, Rosina wrote a memoir
(33:50):
of her confinement in the asylum. She did not think
it was publishable as written, and she looked for a
publisher who could help her edit and revise it, but
nothing came up this effort. She did keep writing and
publishing other books, though. Edward Bulwer Lytton died on January eighteenth,
eighteen seventy three, and Rosina went from being her husband's
(34:12):
responsibility to being her son's. Seven years later, that memoir
she had written was published under the title A Blighted Life.
This is something that she insisted happened without her knowledge
or consent. Her son, Robert, was livid about this book,
and he cut her allowance over it. She published refutation
(34:34):
of an audacious forgery of the Dowager Lady Lytton's name
to a book of the publication of which she was
totally ignorant, in an effort to clear her name. I
could not find a copy of this pamphlet anywhere, but
I would like to read it. Rosina Bulwer Lytton died
at her home in Kent on March twelfth, eighteen eighty two,
(34:57):
at the age of eighty, she was buried in an
unmarked grave in the churchyard of Saint John the Evangelist
at Shirley and Surrey. It remained unmarked until her great
great grandson, David Lytton Cobbled had a marker place there
in nineteen ninety five, following her wishes express before her death.
It bears the inscription the Lord will give thee rest
(35:19):
from thy sorrow and from thy fear, and from the
hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve. Over the
course of her life for Asena Bulwer Lytton wrote more
than fifteen novels, many of them focused on women in
unhappy and dysfunctional marriages and the negative impacts of married
women's lack of legal and political rights. The year that
(35:42):
she died, Parliament passed the Married Women's Property Act, which
addressed a lot of these issues. Afterward, married women could
own and control their own property. They also had the
right to sue and to be sued, and to enter
under contracts, rather than being considered legally inextricable from their husbands,
with their husbands being the supreme entity in that relationship.
(36:08):
Robert Bulwer Lytton published a very complimentary biography of his
father in eighteen eighty three. This book made it sound
like Edward had never been particularly attached to Rosina. It
claimed that he had been in love with a girl
who had died when he was younger, and that he
had never recovered. In response to this, Rosina's friend and
(36:29):
literary executor Louisa Devi published a collection of Edward's love
letters in eighteen eighty four. Robert put an injunction on
this book in the UK, although it was still published elsewhere.
In eighteen eighty seven, DEVII published Life of Rosina Lady Lytton,
a vindication which included a lot of primary source material
(36:50):
in an effort to clear Rosina's name and offer her perspective.
In light of Robert's biography of Edward, neither Rosina nor
Edward Bulwarin Lytton are widely read today. Some sources say
that during his lifetime, Edward outsold Charles Dickens, and others
say that Dickens was the only writer that he did
not out sell. During his funeral, which was at Westminster Abbey,
(37:15):
writer Benjamin Jowett called him one of England's greatest writers
and one of the greatest men of his time. Past
podcast subject G. K. Chesterton later said of him, quote,
you could not have the Victorian Age without him. But today,
at least in the United States, he's mainly known for
phrases like it was a dark and stormy night and
(37:38):
the pen is mightier than the sword. We haven't even
talked about how some of his books, like The Last
Days of Pompeii, were an inspiration to the Theosophy movement.
But interest in his work really plummeted around World War One,
and reasons for that are largely speculative. Rosina's work also
largely faded from sight, although that's more understandable. She was
(38:01):
usually working with smaller publishers to put out work that
often read like it was written as a form of revenge.
For much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Rosina's
works weren't available at all, although that has changed thanks
to the Internet and the availability of scanned copies of
books that have entered the public domain. I'm sure we'll
(38:22):
have a lot to talk about on Friday, that's for sure.
Do you have a little bit of listener mail in
the meantime? I do. This is from Tandy. Tandy wrote
and said, dear Holly and Tracy, after you're behind the
scenes about the three autoimmune diseases, I thought I should
send you an email. My grandfather had type one diabetes.
He was diagnosed in the nineteen thirties, a little more
(38:43):
than a decade after insulin was discovered. When World War
II started, he went to sign up and made it
through the physical God accepted into the Army and was
filling out the forums and asked how they would get
his insulin to him when he was overseas. Would it
be an air drop or something like that. The Army
realized then that they had made a mistake. They still
(39:04):
weren't used to Type one diabetics living to adulthood, so
he wasn't questioned about diabetes. The Army let him go
and he worked as a civilian mechanic. He did go
blind in the nineteen sixties due to diabetes complications. I
still remember my grandfather giving him his insulin shots. It
was about one a day based on his sugar levels
(39:24):
that they tested using his urine. He passed away in
the late nineteen seventies. So OURFK Junior is completely wrong.
But we knew that type one diabetics have been around
for a long time and living full lives. My youngest
is also a type one diabetic, and the changes in
treatment from the time of my grandfather is amazing. My
youngest uses a continuous glucose monitor and omnipod and monitors
(39:46):
everything from their phone, so here is hoping they don't
get the diabetic complications that my grandfather did. For a
pet tax, here is a photo of my youngest's horse.
His name was Dancer. He passed away in February. Tandy,
we have a very lovely horse looking out from what
looks like a stall in a stable. Maybe. Thank you
(40:07):
so much, Tandy for that email. I think at this
point the folks that I know who have type one
diabetes are mostly using some kind of continuous glucose monitor
and then either using an insulin pump to automatically adjust
their insulin as necessary or doing that part more manually.
(40:28):
But yeah, world's different from when insulin was first introduced.
So thank you again for this email and for this
lovely horse picture. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcast, we're at
History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to our show on the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you'd
(40:49):
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from iHeartRadio
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy H.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of
our episode on Rosina Bulwert Lytton, wife of Edward Bulwert Lytton,
(00:23):
although where we're picking up on this story, he was
still known as Edward Lytton Bulwer. This is also an
episode about their marriage and separation. Last time, we talked
about Rosina's early life and the early years of her
relationship with Edward and the infidelity and abuse that led
to their separation in eighteen thirty six. By that point,
(00:46):
Edward had become a best selling novelist. That is, something
that he had turned to in order to make up
for losing a generous allowance from his mother because he
married Rosina, and then after their separation, Rosina would try
to do basically the same thing. She tried to write
books to make up for a gap in her income.
(01:07):
We talked about Edward's physical abuse of Rosina during part one.
While the separation got her away from that, it did
not in any way free her from him. In the
words of her biographer and literary executor Louisa de Vay
quote great as were the troubles of missus Bullward's married life,
(01:29):
and bitter the sufferings she underwent while living under her
husband's roof, they became almost insignificant as compared with the
squalid misery, the unremitting persecution, and the mental and bodily
torture she endured after the date of her separation. That
all reached its apex in eighteen fifty eight, when Edward
(01:52):
had Rosina committed, which we of course will be getting to.
As we said in Part one, Rosina and edward deed
of separation specified that she would receive four hundred pounds
per year, plus an additional fifty pounds for each of
her children, as long as they lived with her, and
initially they did live with her, but that changed in
(02:14):
eighteen thirty eight, when her daughter Emilie Elizabeth was ten
and her son Edward Robert was seven. The details on
this are a little bit fuzzy, but Edward had the
children removed from Rosina's care and placed with a woman
known as Miss Green. At first, Rosina was allowed to
see them briefly about once a month, always with Miss
(02:36):
Green's supervision, but eventually even that stopped and she was
separated from her children entirely. Rosina framed this as a
continual source of heartbreak. Edward claimed that she did not care,
and in a lot of ways, both children were used
as pawns in their parents' attacks on one another. Rosina
(02:58):
had no legal stand to change this custody arrangement. Women's
status after marriage in the UK was known as coverture.
Married couples were essentially merged as one legal entity under
the man's identity. The man held all economic property and
(03:18):
legal rights for his wife and for any children that
they might have. Married women could not own their own property,
or sign their own contracts, or file suit on their
own behalf in court. After being separated from her children,
Rosina went to Bath. That year, Edward was knighted and
named Baronet of Nebworth, a newly created baronetcy. Allegedly, after this,
(03:43):
someone congratulated Rosina on becoming a lady, and she said
she wished it had made Edward a gentleman. So Rosina
was now separated from her children, and she was seeing
her husband ascend in exactly the way that they had
been planning earlier. On in their marriage. On top of that,
(04:04):
she was having financial problems. There is really not a
great way to convert the four hundred pounds that she
was given annually into something comparable intoday's currency, like the
Bank of England's inflation calculator puts that at roughly forty
thousand pounds. But ways of living and social expectations were
(04:26):
radically different in the eighteen thirties as compared to today.
The most approachable comparisons are usually about things like Jane
Austen novels, which are set just a little earlier than
this was happening. But just generally speaking, an income of
four hundred pounds a year might be enough for somebody
(04:48):
of Rosina's class to afford a home and their basic
needs and a couple of servants, maybe a cook and
a lady's maid, But their money would still have to
be very carefully managed for that to work, and it
wouldn't have been a lifestyle that was considered luxurious, especially
for somebody whose husband was a best selling writer and
(05:09):
a member of parliament and a baronet. That four hundred
pounds a year was less than the six hundred pounds
her husband had said he would give her during their
initial informal separation, and less than the five hundred pounds
she would have been entitled to if she still had
the children. It did not really allow for the various
initial expenses that were involved in getting established in a
(05:32):
household of her own, or for anything unexpected to happen.
It also doesn't seem like she made this transition to
a life on her own very easily, Like early on
in her time of living without her husband and children,
there's an account of her staying with a family that's
full of what sounds like modern day roommates, squabbling over
(05:52):
who spent how much and who owed how much, with
everyone accusing everyone else of spending too much money. On
top of that, according to Rosina, Edward's payments to her
were often late and sometimes very late. Yeah, this is like,
this is way more money than a laborer had every year,
(06:14):
or like a farm worker, or you know someone that
was in a more working class, But for someone who
was of Rosina's class married to a baronet, like it
does not seem like it was allowing her to meet
the expectations of her socially, or just to live a
life that didn't feel like it was full of scramping
(06:36):
and saving, so she started trying to supplement her income
by writing, and Edward, of course heard about this. He
had a diary entry in eighteen thirty eight in which
he wrote, quote, I tremble every day lest my domestic
sores should be dragged still more into light than all
that is most sacred in men's hearts and homes, exposed
(07:00):
to all that is more galling in public gossip. Later on,
Rosina wrote a letter to artist A. E. Chalon said,
in part, quote exposure is the only thing that complex
monster dreads, and consequently the only check I have upon him.
Rosina's first novel was Chevy or the Man of Honor,
(07:23):
published in eighteen thirty nine. One of its characters is
Lord de Clifford, who seduces and then abandons the daughter
of one of his tenants. She is driven insane by
his treatment, and Lord de Clifford winds up in court.
He also winds up being publicly denounced, and not long
after he dies after a fall from his horse. Lord
(07:45):
de Clifford is a thinly disguised version of Edward and
his extramarital affairs, and that fatal fall really reads like
wish fulfillment. Edward, unsurprisingly did not want this book to
be published in Apparently he tried to put a stop
to it, including going to Rosina's publisher, Edward Bull and
(08:05):
telling him that Rosina's trustee Francis Doyle had forbidden this.
Bull published the book anyway, and it sold well. It
went through three editions in its first year, and Bull
also agreed to publish another book for her based on
that success. Someone also published a response to this book
in the form of a satirical pamphlet written in forty
(08:28):
seven pages of verse, titled Lady Cheveley or the Woman
of Honor. It was printed anonymously, but literary historian Marie
Moldy Roberts, who has written on Rosina Bullwer written and
edited modern reprintings of her letters and other writings, suggests
that it may have been written by Edward buller Lytton.
(08:48):
Four years after this, Rosina and Edward each wrote novels
that had some running themes. Rosina's were also full of
dastardly philandering men who were clearly based on her opinions
of Edward and her relationship with him, and a number
of Edward's novels featured mad Women, There was one in
(09:10):
which the couple's relationship deteriorated to the point that the
wife went mad and poisoned him. People didn't necessarily know
about Rosina's allegations of Edward's physical abuse, but they absolutely
knew about the separation and estrangement. In eighteen thirty nine,
(09:30):
Rosina visited Paris, and by then her situation had become
notorious enough that she wound up in the gossip columns.
At least two publications, The Morning Post and the Court Journal,
reported that Rosina had been at a soiree hosted by
Lady Amler and had run into Edward's brother, Henry, who
was in Paris working as a diplomat. The Morning Post
(09:53):
said that Rosina had made quote certain wry faces, the
meaning of which could not be mistaken, and the Court
Journal contended that she had gone to the party specifically
to run into Henry and to humiliate him. Apparently, none
of this was true, and Henry was not even there.
That night. Rosina wrote a letter to The Morning Post
(10:13):
asking for an apology and a retraction, saying that she
had never met Henry in Paris at all. The Morning
Post complied with this with Edward's permission, Rosina also filed
suit against the Court Journal and was awarded fifty pounds.
While Edward did give permission for her to file this suit,
it was also around this time that Rosina started to
(10:35):
believe that he was spying on her. She got a
letter from a friend dated October fourth, eighteen thirty nine,
relating a strange incident in which a man had approached
Missus Stockman in Bath, who ran a lodging house there,
and that man had asked all kinds of questions about Rosina,
about her rooms when she'd stayed there, who her acquaintances were,
(10:58):
and whether a mister H had ever taken rooms there
as well. These questions all seemed to suggest that the
man asking them was trying to figure out if Rosina
and this mister H had been involved with one another.
And this man also seemed to know every detail of
Rosina's life and habits, and he had also apparently been
asking questions around Ireland and France as well. In this
(11:22):
friend's words, quote, when Missus Stockman said Sir ELB was
living with miss Deacon, the man's face flushed and he
looked savage. Not long after this, Rosina tried to file
another suit in Paris, this one against an attorney named
Thackeray and his clerk named Lawson. She alleged that they
(11:44):
had fraudulently tried to seize her personal papers, according to
Rosina's letters, which is the one source I had on this,
although this had taken place in France and her suit
was in a French court. After some deliberation, it was
decided that because she was married under English law, the
requirement for her husband's consent still applied. She did not
(12:07):
have that consent, so this suit did not go anywhere,
and she was required to pay for the cost of
the proceedings, which was money she just did not have.
Tensions between Rosina and Edward escalated beyond their already high
point in the eighteen forties, and we're gonna get to that.
After a sponsor break in eighteen forty one, Edward lost
(12:37):
his seat in Parliament, and in eighteen forty three his
mother died. He inherited money and property from her side
of the family, and this is also when he started
going by Bulwer Lytton rather than Lytton Bulwer. This made
his full name Edward George Earl Lytton Bulwer Lytton. Part
(12:58):
of Edward's inheritance was no Ebworth House, where he had
already been living. This had been the Lytton family residence
since the late fifteenth century, and this is a mansion.
It served as a stand in for an assortment of
rich people's homes and palaces in movies and television, including
Wayne Manor in the nineteen eighty nine version of Batman
(13:19):
and Thornfield Hall in the nineteen ninety seven adaptation of
Jane Eyre. It was also the virtually impregnable Mallory Gallery
in The Great Muppet Caper, the best of the three
in my opinion. Edward continued refurbishment work that his mother
had started on the house, including adding lots of tudored
Gothic elements to its exterior and putting in a formal
(13:41):
Italian garden. By this point, Rosina had spent a few
years in France and Italy, believing that she was being
spied on by Edward and that someone was opening her
mail looking for some kind of evidence of adultery so
that Edward could divorce her. He also seemed to be
using his life literary connections to keep her books from
(14:02):
getting published or to minimize their impact when she did
manage to find a publisher. Her books during this period
included Bianca Cappello, unhistorical romance, published in eighteen forty three.
This was about a real historical figure, but it still
contained a lot of material about men's bad treatment of
their wives. When Rosina learned about Edward's mother's death, she
(14:26):
thought there was really no excuse for him to continue
to allow her only four hundred pounds a year, especially
since he seemed to be intentionally undermining her efforts to
earn more money for herself. She could really only argue
for an increase in her annuity if she went back
to England, but she found herself stuck on the continent.
(14:48):
She had outstanding debts in Italy and France, including the
legal expenses from her failed lawsuit that were still unpaid.
She also did not have the money to arrange her
passage back to England, and she had gotten to the
point that she was deeply hesitant to borrow from anyone.
She had genuine fears that she would never actually be
able to pay it back. Sometimes she did find ways
(15:11):
to get smaller amounts of money, though, after a friend
told her that her daughter, Emily, was living on minimal
support from her father and only had two pairs of stockings.
Rosina sold a bracelet and sent her friend the proceeds,
but her friend returned to that money several months later,
saying that she had not been able to figure out
an appropriate way to pass the money on to Emily.
(15:35):
Rosina also bought a watch and a chain and sent
it to her son Robert, and that was returned as
well with a message not to send any more packages. Finally,
a sympathetic friend gave Rosina four hundred pounds and then
tore up her letter, offering to pay it back at
five percent interest, and this was enough to settle most
(15:57):
of her debts on the continent and she arrived back
in England in May of eighteen forty seven. She did
eventually repay this money, but it took her several years.
Back in England, Rosina started writing to Edward to ask
for more money, but she did not know exactly where
he was At any point. She would send letters in
(16:18):
care of the places that she knew he frequented, like
the Atheneum Club and the Albion Hotel. When she didn't
get a response, she started addressing them along the lines
of Sir Liar Coward Bulwer Lytton, and she would also
put notes on the outside about women that she thought
he was involved with. This had the effect of infuriating
(16:38):
and embarrassing Edward and of seating rumors about him around
London via what was written on the outside of his mail.
In April of eighteen forty eight, Rosina got word that
her daughter was very ill, and she tried to see her.
She bribed a landlady at the boarding house where Emily
was staying, as well as the nurse who was caring
(16:59):
for her. They would not let Rosina actually see her daughter, though,
saying that any kind of sudden emotion might make her worse.
Rosina sat at the top of the stairs outside Emily's room,
where she could hear Emily calling for her as she
got worse. Word got back to Edward that Rosina was there,
(17:19):
and he ordered that she'd be removed from the boarding house.
Emily died on April twenty eighth, eighteen forty eight, just
a couple of months before her twentieth birthday. Some accounts
say that Rosina was able to see her daughter, but
only briefly before her death, and then other accounts say
that she did not get to see Emily at all.
(17:40):
Even the accounts of people who were actually there in
the house that night are contradictory. It's also not really
clear what Emily died of. Various sources attribute it to typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis,
and fever. Rosina and Edward both proclaimed themselves to be
beret after Emily's death, and they each used it as
(18:03):
ammunition against the other. Edward and their son Robert both
claimed that the shock of either seeing or hearing Rosina
had killed Emily, while Rosina said that Edward had worked
his daughter to death and withheld appropriate medical care in
her final days. Rosina was also furious that Edward placed
(18:23):
a death notice for Emily that made it sound as
though she had died at the Litton home of Nebworth
House rather than at a boarding house. Rosina's mother, Anna
Doyle Wheeler, also died that same year. In eighteen fifty one,
Edward staged a play called Not So Bad As We
Seem with the assistance of Charles Dickens. The two writers
(18:45):
had just founded the Guild of Literature and Art as
an organization to provide things like pensions and health insurance
to British writers. This play was to be a fundraiser
for the guild. When Rosina heard about this, she sent
a ton of letters about it to an assortment of people.
She said that this guild should be renamed The Guilt
(19:07):
of Literature and Art. She threatened to show up dressed
as a beggar in protest of Edward's perpetually late annuity payments.
Edward and later his son alleged that she threatened to
show up and throw rotten eggs at the Queen. That
would have been treason. Rosina also wrote and distributed a
piece called Even Worse Than We Seem, which was framed
(19:30):
as a parody of Edward's play, although nobody outside the
production actually had a copy of the script when she
wrote this, so she didn't actually have any way of
knowing what the contents of the play were. To parody them,
she printed pamphlets that included a dramatist persona that described
Sir E Bulwer Lytton as quote a gentleman question mark
(19:54):
with a guttaperchure rental of ten thousand pounds for his acquaintance,
which conveniently shrinks to as many hundreds whenever he has
applied to give his wife enough to live on. According
to this he was cast in the role of Sir
Plagarie Puff, a philanthropic, exclamation point literary gentleman question mark
(20:14):
who has literally translated his poor young daughter into heaven
and nobly leaves his wife on public charity. This pamphlet
also described Charles Dickens as having a dead child in
one pocket and a dead father in the other. Charles
Dickens hired security for the performance, also getting Edward to
(20:37):
send someone who actually knew what Rosina looked like. It's
not entirely clear whether she disrupted the performance itself. Newspapers
were really fond of gleefully covering whatever Rosina was doing
and writing about her husband, but there's not an account
of her being there when the play was staged. Later on, though,
Rosina would try to stage a play of her own,
(20:59):
and when she had trouble getting it off the ground,
she claimed that Charles Dickens had assassinated her character. In
the British theatrical world. In eighteen fifty two, Edward Bulwer
Lytton was elected as a Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire.
A year later, Rosana was living in Wales and alleged
that someone had tried to poison her. She moved periodically,
(21:23):
and she continued to publicly lambast her estranged husband and
to try to earn money through writing. In eighteen fifty six,
she published a novel called Very Successful. One of the
characters in this novel incredulously quotes real advertising material for
Edward's novels, which said that they quote abound in illustrations
(21:44):
that teach benevolence to the rich and courage to the poor.
They glow with the love of freedom. They speak a
sympathy with all high aspirations and all manly struggles. This
character then gives a recounting of seemingly everything Rosina had
experienced and alleged about Edward at this point, physically destroying
(22:05):
one child, morally destroying another, kicking his wretched victim of
a wife a month before her first child was born
till she was nearly dead, turning that poor little murder
out of the house the moment she was born, as
he ultimately did to die, springing in one of his
rabid furies upon his wife and making his hideous horse
(22:27):
teeth meet in her cheek. Till the blood streamed down her,
and ultimately turning her and her children out of their
home to make way for one of his infamous mistresses.
Are no doubt among these high aspirations and manly struggles,
and it goes on from there. Yeah. The reason that
I did not say which character specifically says this is
(22:50):
that when I was trying to trace back through it
toy figure out who's talking here, I couldn't figure it out.
A lot of this book looks kind of like a
wall of text, and I found it difficult to peace through.
The biggest and most public blow up of their marriage
was still to come, and we will get to that
(23:11):
after a sponsor break. In eighteen fifty seven, Parliament passed
the Matrimonial Causes Act, which changed divorce law in the UK.
(23:31):
Divorces became easier to obtain, but men still had to
prove that their wives had been unfaithful, and women still
had to prove that their husbands had been unfaithful and
had also done some other kind of wrong like cruelty
or abandonment or sexual assault. We talked more about this
(23:51):
law in our two part episode on Caroline Sheridan Norton,
which came out on April third and fifth of twenty
twenty three. Her story She has some common elements with
this one, although Caroline Norton's writing was really focused on
advocating for legal reforms that would help protect the rights
of married and divorced women. While this law made it
(24:13):
possible for more people to obtain a divorce, Rosina and
Edward were still basically stuck because neither of them had
the necessary proof to get one. That same year, Rosina
Bulwer Lytton wrote Lady Bulwer Lytton's Appeal to the Justice
and Charity of the English Public. She said she intended
(24:34):
it to be included in the second edition of Very Successful,
but implied that her husband had prevented a second edition
from being published. She claimed that this suppression had even
extended to the libraries, and that if someone asks for
a copy of Very Successful, the librarian will say quote
that they have not got it as it is not
a book fit for ladies to read, followed by six
(24:57):
exclamation points. Instead, solicited subscriptions for the book for the
price of one pound eleven shilling sixpence. Much of the
pamphlet is made up of long, unbroken paragraphs that run
for pages. Recounting her allegations against Edward, She said she
was appealing for public charity because quote there are yet
(25:19):
no workhouses for the destitute wives of rich men. A
lot of Versino's writing reads as very vengeful, but in
this piece she described herself as not motivated by revenge.
Quote it is self defense. And she gives Sir Edward
bulwer Lytton fair notice that if he continues to hunt
(25:39):
and outrage her as he has done, she will continue
steadily to expose his conduct, for she pretends no pretenses,
and unless her hypocrisy were commensurate with his own, she
could not, even from policy, affect any other feeling but
that of the sovereign contempt she entertains for him. She
(26:01):
also wrote, quote, Sir Edward bulwer Lytton has circled my
life with a snare and crowned it with a curse.
My miserable, lonely, laborious, and disinherited existence. He has made
one great agony, composed of innumerable exquisite, infinitesimal tortures, for
each and all of which, as there is but one source,
(26:23):
I have but one name, surely to the most forbearing
and least logical mind, the inference is obvious. The following year,
Edward was appointed as Secretary of State for the Colonies.
As a result, a by election was held to confirm
him as MP for Hertfordshire. He had to be an
MP to fill this role. He was running unopposed, so
(26:47):
ordinarily this would have been a pretty straightforward and one
would expect quiet election. But in the weeks leading up
to the election, Rosina repeatedly publicly denounced him, including retorically
asking why the people of England would have him as
the head of the Colonies when he should have been
transported there for his crimes years before. She also spread
(27:11):
rumors that he had only gotten this cabinet position because
he was having an affair with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Rosina worked with her Landlady Missus Clark to go to
Hertford the day before the June eighth election and put
up posters denouncing Edward and to distribute copies of her
Appeal to Justice and Charity pamphlet. They also distributed handbills
(27:35):
that read quote, Lady Bulwer Lytton urgently solicits the attendants
of the Yeomen and electors of Hertfordshire in the town
Hall of Hertford on Tuesday, the eighth of June at
twelve o'clock at noon, not indeed to solicit their votes,
but for their true interest. Edward had the help of
their son, Robert, who was now twenty six and trying
(27:57):
to clean up all of this. Robert went around town
tearing down posters and discarding pamphlets and handbills. Meanwhile, Rosina
went to the mayor and tried to secure the town
hall so that she could give her own a dress.
She also claimed that she would run against Edward in
the election, something that was not possible since women did
(28:18):
not have the right to vote or to serve in Parliament.
On election day, both Edward and Robert appeared on the Hustings,
basically a campaign event. Rosina apparently thought this was starting
at noon, but it really started at eleven am, so
she got there just as Edward was finishing his speech.
She was dressed all in white and carrying a white
(28:40):
parasol and started loudly insulting Edward to everyone around her.
Robert saw his mother in the crowd, and he got
his father's attention to warn him. In the words of
a letter from Jane Welsh Carlyle to her husband Thomas Carlyle.
When Edward realized that when Robert kept saying Lady Lytton
(29:01):
he meant Rosina, he did not mean his aunt, who
would also be called Lady Lytton, Edward quote turned us
white as a sheet, cast one wild look at his wife,
and rushed down the companion ladder of the platform steps,
near the bottom of which, by the kind foresight of somebody,
his carriage and servants stood ready. Rosina made her way
(29:25):
through the crowd, got onto the platform and spoke against
Edward for about fifteen minutes. Her exact words are not
recorded anywhere, but she was generally described as largely repeating
the content of her pamphlet. There is some speculation that
Edward and his connections tried to keep this whole disruption quiet.
(29:46):
It is mentioned in things like personal letters and eyewitness papers,
but the immediate coverage of this election in the major
newspapers doesn't mention it that changed, though after Edward try
to have Rosina committed. On June eleventh, a man named
Frederick Hale Thompson arrived at Rosina's home in Taunton, accompanied
(30:09):
by a nurse to examine her. Rosina agreed to this examination,
and after some discussion, Thompson seems to have concluded that
she was sane. He asked what it would take for
her to stop these kinds of public denouncements of her husband.
She said she wanted her allowance to be increased to
five hundred pounds and for her existing debts to be cleared.
(30:32):
That amount totaled about twenty five hundred pounds. Thompson left,
and when Rosina didn't hear anything else about this for
more than a week, she went to London to his
office to follow up, and she took her landlady and
a friend of hers with her. She got there in
the morning and she was asked to return later in
the day, which she did, but she also said before
(30:54):
leaving that if this matter was not settled, she would
take incriminating letters that she'd brought with her to the magistrate.
Rosina came back to Thompson's office at five pm, as
had been requested, and there were two police officers there
along with staff from a private asylum called Brentford, which
was outside of London, and they had the necessary paperwork
(31:17):
to have her committed Edward's evidence of Rosina's purported mental
state included an assortment of her writing, including her playbill
from Even Worse Than We Seen. He also claimed that
both of her parents had been insane, and she pointed
out that if that was true, he was suggesting that
the same could also be true of their son, Robert.
(31:39):
While it seems like Edward might have kept her disruption
at the Hustings on the June eighth election day from
being widely reported in the newspapers, her confinement in the
asylum became big news, with some papers taking her side
and some taking Edwards. Several newspapers, starting with ones in
Scotland and Ireland, also started revisiting that election, and they
(32:02):
published accounts of Rosina's arrival and Edwards fleeing the scene.
One widely reprinted write up described Rosina as an extremely
handsome woman of about forty five who called him a
coward from the platform, and quote asserting her intention to
confront her husband on every possible occasion until she compelled
(32:24):
him to address her wrongs. Rosina continued to write to
her friends and to public figures from the asylum advocating
for her release, and of course criticizing her husband's actions.
This was a time in which women were disproportionately institutionalized
in Britain, often for behavior that their male relatives found
(32:45):
inconvenient or inappropriate. Rosina made it clear that she was
not being treated poorly, which was often not the case
for women who didn't have the kind of status she did.
She was allowed to move around the house and grounds
and to visit neighboring ville villages with an attendant, with
her own self advocacy from within the asylum and her
(33:05):
friends working on her behalf outside of it. She was
released on July fourteenth, after about three weeks. Rosina had
to be declared insane in order to be committed, and
that meant Edward was obligated to pay off her debts.
He also did agree to increase her allowance to the
five hundred pounds per year that she had been asking for,
(33:27):
and at this point Edward allowed Rosina to see her
son again. They spent several months together traveling in Europe
along with a female friend of Rosina's, until they apparently
had some kind of disagreement and parted ways. In eighteen
sixty six, Edward was raised to the peerage and named
Baron of Nebworth. That same year, Rosina wrote a memoir
(33:50):
of her confinement in the asylum. She did not think
it was publishable as written, and she looked for a
publisher who could help her edit and revise it, but
nothing came up this effort. She did keep writing and
publishing other books, though. Edward Bulwer Lytton died on January eighteenth,
eighteen seventy three, and Rosina went from being her husband's
(34:12):
responsibility to being her son's. Seven years later, that memoir
she had written was published under the title A Blighted Life.
This is something that she insisted happened without her knowledge
or consent. Her son, Robert, was livid about this book,
and he cut her allowance over it. She published refutation
(34:34):
of an audacious forgery of the Dowager Lady Lytton's name
to a book of the publication of which she was
totally ignorant, in an effort to clear her name. I
could not find a copy of this pamphlet anywhere, but
I would like to read it. Rosina Bulwer Lytton died
at her home in Kent on March twelfth, eighteen eighty two,
(34:57):
at the age of eighty, she was buried in an
unmarked grave in the churchyard of Saint John the Evangelist
at Shirley and Surrey. It remained unmarked until her great
great grandson, David Lytton Cobbled had a marker place there
in nineteen ninety five, following her wishes express before her death.
It bears the inscription the Lord will give thee rest
(35:19):
from thy sorrow and from thy fear, and from the
hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve. Over the
course of her life for Asena Bulwer Lytton wrote more
than fifteen novels, many of them focused on women in
unhappy and dysfunctional marriages and the negative impacts of married
women's lack of legal and political rights. The year that
(35:42):
she died, Parliament passed the Married Women's Property Act, which
addressed a lot of these issues. Afterward, married women could
own and control their own property. They also had the
right to sue and to be sued, and to enter
under contracts, rather than being considered legally inextricable from their husbands,
with their husbands being the supreme entity in that relationship.
(36:08):
Robert Bulwer Lytton published a very complimentary biography of his
father in eighteen eighty three. This book made it sound
like Edward had never been particularly attached to Rosina. It
claimed that he had been in love with a girl
who had died when he was younger, and that he
had never recovered. In response to this, Rosina's friend and
(36:29):
literary executor Louisa Devi published a collection of Edward's love
letters in eighteen eighty four. Robert put an injunction on
this book in the UK, although it was still published elsewhere.
In eighteen eighty seven, DEVII published Life of Rosina Lady Lytton,
a vindication which included a lot of primary source material
(36:50):
in an effort to clear Rosina's name and offer her perspective.
In light of Robert's biography of Edward, neither Rosina nor
Edward Bulwarin Lytton are widely read today. Some sources say
that during his lifetime, Edward outsold Charles Dickens, and others
say that Dickens was the only writer that he did
not out sell. During his funeral, which was at Westminster Abbey,
(37:15):
writer Benjamin Jowett called him one of England's greatest writers
and one of the greatest men of his time. Past
podcast subject G. K. Chesterton later said of him, quote,
you could not have the Victorian Age without him. But today,
at least in the United States, he's mainly known for
phrases like it was a dark and stormy night and
(37:38):
the pen is mightier than the sword. We haven't even
talked about how some of his books, like The Last
Days of Pompeii, were an inspiration to the Theosophy movement.
But interest in his work really plummeted around World War One,
and reasons for that are largely speculative. Rosina's work also
largely faded from sight, although that's more understandable. She was
(38:01):
usually working with smaller publishers to put out work that
often read like it was written as a form of revenge.
For much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Rosina's
works weren't available at all, although that has changed thanks
to the Internet and the availability of scanned copies of
books that have entered the public domain. I'm sure we'll
(38:22):
have a lot to talk about on Friday, that's for sure.
Do you have a little bit of listener mail in
the meantime? I do. This is from Tandy. Tandy wrote
and said, dear Holly and Tracy, after you're behind the
scenes about the three autoimmune diseases, I thought I should
send you an email. My grandfather had type one diabetes.
He was diagnosed in the nineteen thirties, a little more
(38:43):
than a decade after insulin was discovered. When World War
II started, he went to sign up and made it
through the physical God accepted into the Army and was
filling out the forums and asked how they would get
his insulin to him when he was overseas. Would it
be an air drop or something like that. The Army
realized then that they had made a mistake. They still
(39:04):
weren't used to Type one diabetics living to adulthood, so
he wasn't questioned about diabetes. The Army let him go
and he worked as a civilian mechanic. He did go
blind in the nineteen sixties due to diabetes complications. I
still remember my grandfather giving him his insulin shots. It
was about one a day based on his sugar levels
(39:24):
that they tested using his urine. He passed away in
the late nineteen seventies. So OURFK Junior is completely wrong.
But we knew that type one diabetics have been around
for a long time and living full lives. My youngest
is also a type one diabetic, and the changes in
treatment from the time of my grandfather is amazing. My
youngest uses a continuous glucose monitor and omnipod and monitors
(39:46):
everything from their phone, so here is hoping they don't
get the diabetic complications that my grandfather did. For a
pet tax, here is a photo of my youngest's horse.
His name was Dancer. He passed away in February. Tandy,
we have a very lovely horse looking out from what
looks like a stall in a stable. Maybe. Thank you
(40:07):
so much, Tandy for that email. I think at this
point the folks that I know who have type one
diabetes are mostly using some kind of continuous glucose monitor
and then either using an insulin pump to automatically adjust
their insulin as necessary or doing that part more manually.
(40:28):
But yeah, world's different from when insulin was first introduced.
So thank you again for this email and for this
lovely horse picture. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcast, we're at
History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to our show on the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you'd
(40:49):
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from iHeartRadio
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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