A Monkey Among Crocodiles (ePub)

Georgina Thomas was born in 1837 on the fringes of aristocracy. Her Early life was spent in Florence, squabbling with her preposterous father. The Thomas family returned to England with the intention of putting their argumentative and reckless daughter on the marriage market. Georgina was not to marry for less than £10,000 a year - a fortune.

When the prize was actually within her grasp, she eloped with a penniless Hussar called Harry Weldon. After ten years of what we would now call scuffling, she returned to London, took up the lease of Dickens' old house and opened a singing academy, In this way and when her marriage was already on the rocks, she met Gounod. The revered French composer came to live with the Weldons in ménage à trois that was scandal to his countrymen.

Georgina dumped the young ladies of the singing academy and replaced them with orphans named after characters in Gounod's operas. They were driven round London's West End in a converted milk float, advertising weekly concerts at the Langham Hotel.

Harry Weldon tried to have his wife committed for lunacy - about which she has left probably the fullest account ever recorded on the part of the victim. He then threatened divorce. Intertwined with the story is her relationship with two ghastly French crooks called Menier. The husband robbed her blind: she fell in love with the wife.

In 1882 the Married Woman's Property Act allowed women to sue in their own right. Georgina discovered her métier - dragging people through the courts. She sued everyone who had ever remotely crossed her path - her husband, Gounod, the mad doctors, Menier, even her own lawyers. She hired a detective, drove judges mad, published pamphlets, embraced spiritualism , addressed public meetings, had a catastrophic lesbian affair, and became a celebrity in the press. She spent her twilight years in voluntary exile at a convent in Gisors, surrounded by thirty-seven tea chests of legal documents, her caged birds and a monkey called Titlieehee.

All this monstrous egotism manifested itself in a six-volume record of her life written in idiosyncratically terrible French. In 1996 Brian Thompson came across one of the last surviving copies of this garrulous work and began to piece together the facts and fantasies of a quite extraordinary life. Georgina Weldon is one of the great undiscovered eccentrics of the nineteenth century. 'A Monkey among Crocodiles' is a book that bristles with tears and hilarity in equal measure.

"To spend the day with Georgina Weldon would be like going for a walk in a hurricane. A rollicking book!"
AMANDA FOREMAN