Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise

Author:Sarah Wise [Wise, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-04-09T23:00:00+00:00

This wasn’t quite the rising of the Somerset yeomanry that Lady Lytton had predicted. Still, the Somerset County Gazette, while acknowledging ‘her undoubted peculiarities of temper’ and admitting that she was ‘unamiable’, haughty and capable of harsh words, devoted entire pages to the outrage committed against one of its citizens. The abduction into the asylum had been how the French ancien régime and their Bastille had operated, said the Gazette: was Lady Lytton to be the modern-day Man in the Iron Mask? The newspaper called for a public inquiry to be held before every lunacy certification, stating that ‘only a nation of savages’ would have the sort of admissions system prevalent in England. ‘So strongly do the plot and detail savour of the “atrocious fraud” and “abominable conspiracy” of the modern romance writer,’ the Gazette editorialised, ‘that one might easily imagine it to have been the sole invention of such a genius.’ Which of course it was: Lord Lytton had plotted his wife’s disposal just as he plotted his novels and dramas. But how infuriating that real people would not oblige him by acting and speaking as he dictated.

The Somerset readers were outraged, and some of them (or was it the sub-editors?) staggered recklessly into verse. The following poem appeared in the newspaper on 19 July 1858: ‘Thoughts suggested and put together after perusing the leading article in the Somerset County Gazette of last week’

I call thee, Byron, from the shades,

Thy genius must not sleep;

A woman’s wrongs claim sympathy,

Wrongs cruel, poignant, deep.

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