Footnotes

CAROLINE NORTON FIGHTS FOR THE INFANT CUSTODY BILL, THE FIRST SUCCESS OF BRITISH FEMINISM IN GAINING EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN. Trapped in a disastrous marriage to George Norton, she had enjoyed a flirtatious friendship with the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, which resulted in Norton suing Melbourne for 'criminal conversation' with his wife and in a hearing so farcical that it features in lightly fictionalised form in The Pickwick Papers (dedicated incidentally to Talfourd). However because of the failure of his action, Norton was unable to sue Caroline for divorce, and so 'activated less by interest in his children's welfare than by a desire to cause his wife pain and to secure the least onerous financial settlement, took full advantage of the law, which vested custody of children in their father, and took his three sons away to Yorkshire. Enraged and distraught, Caroline began a campaign to change the law... She published a pamphlet, Observations on the natural claim of the mother to the custody of her infant children... (1837), and Sergeant (Thomas Noon) Talfourd was persuaded to introduce a child custody bill in the House of Commons. The bill failed but Caroline kept up her lobbying (three further pamphlets on the subject are attributed to her pen), and in 1839 the Infant Custody Act was passed, with the support of Talfourd in the Commons and Lord Lyndhurst in the Lords. This act gave custody of children under seven to the mother (provided she had not been proven in court to have committed adultery) and established the right of the non-custodial parent to access to the child. The act was the first piece of legislation to undermine the patriarchal structures of English law and has subsequently been hailed as the first success of British feminism in gaining equal rights for women' (K. D. Reynolds, ODNB). Our letter was clearly written after the Commons had passed the bill, but while it was still being blocked by the Lords. The "first pamphlet" she refers to is the Observations of 1837, noticed above, the second probably her Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Law of Custody of Infants (1839).

The letter's recipient was the author Anna Maria Hall who lived with her husband, S.C. Hall, at 'The Rosery' in Old Brompton, which they had turned – as the ODNB puts it – into 'a meeting-place for writers and artists at the mass end of the market'. She campaigned energetically for the rights of working women and similar causes; and dispensed comfort and advice to a wide circle of young women who attended her soirees. Her husband was editor of the Art Union Monthly Journal, to which Caroline Norton refers at the end of our letter. In 1846 it was to achieve the distinction of being the first magazine in the world to be illustrated with a photograph (a Fox Talbot calotype).