Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Rosina Bulwer-Lytton’s Blighted Life (Part 2) About this episode 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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby
1:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost, so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, Sponsored Jobs posted directly
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2:16 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:29 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:31 Tracy V. Wilson? This is part two of our episode on Rosina Bulwer-Litten, wife of Edward Bulwer-Litten. Although where we're picking up on this story, he was still known as Edward Litten 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 1836. By that point, Edward had become a bestselling 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
3:15 Tracy V. Wilson? try to do basically the same thing. She tried to write books to make up for a gap in her income. 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 Devay, quote, "Great as were the troubles of Mrs. Bulwer's married life 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
3:59 Tracy V. Wilson? after the date of her separation." That all reached its apex in 1858, when Edward had Rosina committed, which we of course will be getting to.
4:11 Holly Frey? As we said in part one, Rosina and Edward's deed of separation specified that she would receive 400 pounds per year, plus an additional 50 pounds for each of her children, as long as they lived with her. And initially, they did live with her, but that changed in 1838, when her daughter Emily Elizabeth was 10 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 Green's supervision. But eventually, even that stopped and she was separated
4:55 Holly Frey? 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.
5:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Rosina had no legal standing 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 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.
5:46 Holly Frey? 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, someone congratulated Rosina on becoming a lady, and she said she wished it had made Edward a gentleman.
6:06 Tracy V. Wilson? 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, she was having financial problems. There is really not a great way to convert the £400,000 that she was given annually into something comparable in today's currency. Like, the Bank of England's inflation calculator puts that at roughly £40,000. But ways of living and social expectations were radically different in the 1830s as compared to today.
6:46 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 400 pounds a year might be enough for somebody of Rosina's class to afford a home and their basic needs and a couple of servants, maybe a cook and a ladies 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 bestselling writer and a member of Parliament and a baronet.
7:27 Holly Frey? That 400 pounds a year was less than the 600 pounds her husband had said he would give her during their initial informal separation and less than the 500 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 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 who spent how much and who owed how much with
8:10 Holly Frey? 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.
8:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, this is like, this is way more money than a laborer had every year 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 scrimping 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 1838 in which he wrote, quote, "I tremble
9:04 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 to all that is more galling in public gossip." Later on, Rosina wrote a letter to artist A. E. Chalamet that said in part, quote, "Exposure is the only thing that complex monster dreads and consequently the only check I have upon him."
9:34 Holly Frey? Rosina's first novel was Chevalier or The Man of Honor, published in 1839. 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 de Clifford is a thinly disguised version of Edward and his extramarital affairs and that fatal fall really reads like wish fulfillment.
10:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Edward, unsurprisingly, did not want this book to be published and apparently he tried to put a stop to it, including going to Rosina's publisher, Edward Bull, and telling him that Rosina's trustee, Frances 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.
10:37 Holly Frey? Someone also published a response to this book in the form of a satirical pamphlet, written in 47 pages of verse, titled Lady Chevalier or The Woman of Honor. It was printed anonymously, but literary historian Marie Mulvey-Roberts, who has written on Rosina Bulwer-Lytton and edited modern reprintings of her letters and other writings, suggests that it may have been written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
11:03 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 which the couple's relationship deteriorated to the point that the wife went mad and poisoned him.
11:34 Holly Frey? People didn't necessarily know about Rosina's allegations of Edward's physical abuse, but they absolutely knew about the separation and estrangement. In 1839, 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 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
12:18 Holly Frey? Henry and to humiliate him.
12:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Apparently, none of this was true, and Henry was not even there that night. Rosina wrote a letter to The Morning Post, 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 50 pounds.
12:44 Holly Frey? While Edward did give permission for her to file this suit, it was also around this time that Rosina started to believe that he was spying on her. She got a letter from a Friend dated October 4th, 1839 relating a strange incident in which a man had approached Mrs. 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, and whether a Mr. H had ever taken rooms there as well. These questions all seem to suggest that the man asking them was trying to figure out if Rosina and this Mr. H had been involved with one another.
13:26 Holly Frey? 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 friend's words, quote, "When Mrs. Stockman said Sir E.L.B. was living with Miss Deacon, the man's face flushed and he looked savage."
13:47 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 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.
14:31 Holly Frey? Tensions between Rosina and Edward escalated beyond their already high point in the 1840s, and we're going to get to that after a sponsor break.
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16:51 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what health versus hype. From the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
17:33 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
17:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
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18:59 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1841, Edward lost his seat in Parliament, and in 1843, 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.
19:22 Holly Frey? Part of Edward's inheritance was Nebworth House, where he had already been living. This had been the Lytton family residence since the late 15th 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 1989 version of Batman and Thornfield Hall in the 1997 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 Tudor Gothic elements to its exterior and putting in a formal Italian garden.
20:07 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 literary connections to keep her books from getting published or to minimize their impact when she did manage to find a publisher. Her books during this period included Bianca Capello: An Historical Romance, published in 1843. This was about a real historical figure, but it still contained a lot of material about men's bad treatment of their wives.
20:47 Holly Frey? When Rosina learned about Edward's mother's death, she thought there was really no excuse for him to continue to allow her only £400 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. 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.
21:28 Holly Frey? She had genuine fears that she would never actually be able to pay it back.
21:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Sometimes she did find ways 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 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. 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.
22:10 Holly Frey? Finally, a sympathetic friend gave Rosina £400 and then tore up her letter offering to pay it back at 5% interest. And this was enough to settle most of her debts on the continent, and she arrived back in England in May of 1847. She did eventually repay this money, but it took her several years.
22:31 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 care of the places that she knew he frequented, like the Athenian Club and the Albion Hotel. When she didn't get a response, she started addressing them along the lines of "Sir Liar, Coward, Bulwark, 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 and embarrassing Edward and of seeding rumors about him around London via what was written on the outside of his mail.
23:11 Holly Frey? In April of 1848, Rosina got word that her daughter was very ill and she tried to see her. She bribed the landlady at the boarding house where Emily was staying, as well as the nurse who was caring 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.
23:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Word got back to Edward that Rosina was there, and he ordered that she be removed from the boarding house. Emily died on April 28, 1848, just a couple of months before her 20th 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. 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.
24:20 Holly Frey? Rosina and Edward both proclaimed themselves to be bereft after Emily's death, and they each used it as 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 a death notice for Emily that made it sound as though she had died at the Lytton home of Nebworth House, rather than at a boarding house. Rosina's mother, Anna Doyle Wheeler, also died that same year.
25:01 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1851, Edward staged a play called "Not So Bad As We Seem", with the assistance of Charles Dickens. The two writers 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.
25:22 Holly Frey? 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 Guild 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.
25:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Rosina also wrote and distributed a piece called "Even Worse Than We Seem", which was framed 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, "with a gutter percher rental of £10,000 for his acquaintance, which conveniently shrinks into as many hundreds whenever he is applied to give his wife enough to live on."
26:29 Tracy V. Wilson? According to this, he was cast in the role of "Sir Plagerry Puff," a philanthropic, exclamation point, "literary gentleman?" question mark, "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.
26:56 Holly Frey? Charles Dickens hired security for the performance, also getting Edward to 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, and when she had trouble getting it off the ground, she claimed that Charles Dickens had assassinated her character in the British theatrical world.
27:32 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1852, Edward Bulwer Lytton was elected as a Member of Parliament for Hertfordshire. A year later, Rosina was living in Wales and alleged that someone had tried to poison her. She moved periodically, and she continued to publicly lambast her estranged husband and to try to earn money through writing.
27:55 Holly Frey? In 1856, 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 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 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,
28:39 Holly Frey? turning that poor little martyr 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 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.
29:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, the reason that I did not say which character specifically says this is that when I was trying to like trace back through it to 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 piece through. The biggest and most public blow up of their marriage was still to come and we will get to that after a sponsor break.
29:41 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them,
30:24 Holly Frey? not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
31:27 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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33:55 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1857, Parliament passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, which changed divorce law in the UK. 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 law in our two-part episode on Caroline Sheridan Norton, which came out on April 3rd and 5th of 2023. Her story has some common elements with this one, although Caroline Norton's writing was really focused on advocating for legal reforms
34:40 Tracy V. Wilson? that would help protect the rights of married and divorced women. While this law made it 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.
34:58 Holly Frey? 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 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 exclamation points. She instead solicited subscriptions for the book for the price of £1.11.
35:39 Holly Frey? 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 no workhouses for the destitute wives of rich men."
35:56 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of Rosina'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 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."
36:33 Holly Frey? She 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, I have but one name. Surely, to the most forbearing and least logical mind, the inference is obvious."
37:05 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 rhetorically 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 rumors that he had only gotten this cabinet position because he was having
37:49 Tracy V. Wilson? an affair with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
37:52 Holly Frey? Rosina worked with her landlady, Mrs. Clark, to go to Hertford the day before the June 8th election and put up posters denouncing Edward and to distribute copies of her Appeal to Justice and Charity pamphlet. They also distributed handbills that read, quote, "Lady Bulwer-Lytton urgently solicits the attendance of the yeomen and electors of Hertfordshire in the town hall of Hertford on Tuesday, the 8th of June at 12 o'clock at noon, not indeed to solicit their votes, but for their true interest."
38:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Edward had the help of their son, Robert, who was now 26, in trying 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 address. She also claimed that she would run against Edward in the election, something that was not possible since women did not have the right to vote or to serve in Parliament.
38:55 Holly Frey? 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 11 a.m. So she got there just as Edward was finishing his speech. She was dressed all in white and carrying a white parasol and started loudly insulting Edward to everyone around her.
39:19 Tracy V. Wilson? 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-Carlisle to her husband, Thomas Carlisle, when Edward realized that when Robert kept saying, "Lady Lytton," he meant Rosina. He did not mean his aunt, who would also be called Lady Lytton. Edward, quote, "turned as white as a sheet, cast one wild look at his wife, and rushed down the companion ladder, the platform steps, near the bottom of which, by the kind foresight of somebody, his carriage and servants stood ready."
39:56 Holly Frey? Rosina made her way through the crowd, got onto the platform, and spoke against Edward for about 15 minutes. Her exact words are not recorded anywhere, but she was generally described as largely repeating the content of her pamphlet.
40:12 Tracy V. Wilson? There is some speculation that Edward and his connections tried to keep this whole disruption quiet. 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 tried to have Rosina committed.
40:35 Holly Frey? On June 11, a man named Frederick Hale Thompson arrived at Rosina's home in Taunton, accompanied 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 500 pounds and for her existing debts to be cleared. That amount totaled about 2,500 pounds.
41:09 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 5:00 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 to have her committed.
41:52 Holly Frey? Edward's evidence of Rosina's purported mental state included an assortment of her writing, including her playbill from Even Worse Than We Seem. 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.
42:12 Tracy V. Wilson? While it seems like Edward might have kept her disruption at the hustings on the June 8th 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 Edward's. Several newspapers, starting with ones in Scotland and Ireland, also started revisiting that election, and they published accounts of Rosina's arrival and Edward's fleeing the scene. One widely reprinted write-up described Rosina as "an extremely handsome woman of about 45, who called him a coward from the platform", and quote, "asserting her intention to confront her husband on every possible occasion
42:55 Tracy V. Wilson? until she compelled him to address her wrongs."
43:00 Holly Frey? 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 inconvenient or inappropriate.
43:21 Holly Frey? 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 villages with an attendant. With her own self advocacy from within the asylum and her friends working on her behalf outside of it, she was released on July 14th after about three weeks.
43:46 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 500 pounds per year that she had been asking for. 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.
44:15 Holly Frey? In 1866, Edward was raised to the peerage and named Baron of Nebworth. That same year, Rosina wrote a memoir 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 of this effort. She did keep writing and publishing other books, though.
44:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Edward Bullwerlitten died on January 18th, 1873, and Rosina went from being her husband's responsibility to being her son's. Seven years later, that memoir she had written was published under the title Oblited 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 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.
45:25 Holly Frey? Rosina Bulwer Lytton died at her home in Kent on March 12th, 1882, at the age of 80. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist at Shirley in Surrey. It remained unmarked until her great-great-grandson David Lytton Cobbled had a marker placed there in 1995. Following her wishes expressed before her death, it bears the inscription, "The Lord will give thee rest from thy sorrow and from thy fear and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve."
45:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Over the course of her life, Rosina Bulwer Lytton wrote more than 15 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 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 into contracts, rather than being considered legally inextricable from their husbands, with their husbands being the supreme entity in that relationship.
46:40 Holly Frey? Robert Bulwer Lytton published a very complimentary biography of his father in 1883. 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 literary executor Louisa Devi published a collection of Edward's love letters in 1884. Robert put an injunction on this book in the UK, although it was still published elsewhere. In 1887, Debbie published Life of Rosina Lady Lytton: A Vindication, which included a lot of primary source material in an effort to clear Rosina's
47:25 Holly Frey? name and offer her perspective in light of Robert's biography of Edward.
47:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Neither Rosina nor Edward Bulwer 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 outsell. During his funeral, which was at Westminster Abbey, writer Benjamin Joett 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 "the pen is mightier than the sword." We haven't even talked about how some of his books,
48:15 Tracy V. Wilson? like The Last Days of Pompeii, were an inspiration to the Theosophy Movement. But interest in his work really plummeted around World War I, and reasons for that are largely speculative.
48:29 Holly Frey? Rosina's work also largely faded from sight, although that's more understandable. She was 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 19th and 20th 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.
48:54 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about on Friday.
48:57 Holly Frey? That's for sure. Do you have a little bit of listener mail in the meantime?
49:00 Tracy V. Wilson? I do. This is from Tandy. Tandy wrote and said, "Dear Holly and Tracy, after your behind the scenes about the three autoimmune diseases, I thought I should send you an email." My grandfather had type 1 diabetes. He was diagnosed in the 1930s, a little more than a decade after insulin was discovered. When World War II started, he went to sign up and made it through the physical, got accepted into the Army, and was filling out the forms and asked how they would get his insulin to him when he was overseas. Would it be an airdrop or something like that? The Army realized then that they had made a mistake. They still weren't used to type 1 diabetics living to adulthood, so he wasn't questioned
49:41 Tracy V. Wilson? about diabetes. The Army let him go and he worked as a civilian mechanic. He did go blind in the 1960s 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 that they tested using his urine. He passed away in the late 1970s, so RFK Jr. is completely wrong, but we knew that type 1 diabetics have been around for a long time and living full lives. My youngest is also a type 1 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 everything from their phone. So here is hoping they don't get the diabetic
50:23 Tracy V. Wilson? 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. Here we have a very lovely horse, looking out from what looks like a stall in a stable, maybe. Thank you so much, Tandy, for that email. I think at this point, the folks that I know who have type 1 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. But yeah, worlds different from when insulin was first introduced. So
51:07 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you like to get your podcasts.
51:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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