Georgina Weldon
Morgan Thomas was a non-practising barrister, having inherited a large sum of money from his father and uncle, and concentrated on becoming Conservative Party MP for Coventry.
Georgina spent most of her childhood in Florence, and her soprano singing voice was trained by her mother, except for a few lessons she had in 1855 with Jules de Glimes in Brussels.
Georgina Weldon hoped to follow a career on the stage, but her husband, like her father before him, refused to allow her to appear as a professional, and she was restricted to performing in amateur theatricals and charity concerts.
On the death of his grandmother he inherited £10,000 a year and in 1870 he leased Tavistock House in Bloomsbury, which had a small theatre that had been added by Charles Dickens, a former resident.
Slighted by Gounod's departure, Georgina Weldon refused to send his personal belongings, including the draft of his opera Polyeucte.
In 1878 he sought to reduce or stop this payment, and tried to use Georgina's interest in spiritualism to prove that she was insane in an attempt to have her confined in a lunatic asylum kept by L. Forbes Winslow.
Georgina realised that something was wrong and, when staff from the asylum arrived to take her away by force, she escaped and evaded capture for the seven days that the order remained valid.
The magistrate sympathised with her and was convinced that she was sane, but, under Victorian law a married woman could not instigate a civil suit against her husband.
However, having proved her point, Mrs Weldon publicised her story by giving interviews to the daily newspapers and the spiritualist press, in an attempt to provoke her husband and the two doctors into suing her for libel.
[1] In 1882 Georgina Weldon successfully sued her husband for the restoration of her conjugal rights, but he refused to return to Tavistock House, the marital home.
To finance her legal actions in 1884 she sang two songs an evening at a music hall, the London Pavilion, and in 1886 appeared in a brief run of the melodrama Not Alone, but this was not a success.
She was thrust into the spotlight again through her association with the descendants of Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, one of a number of pretenders who claimed to be Louis XVII of France.
