Ros, I'm guessing that if you're poor, female and unrepresented in court in the early 19th century, you're at a disadvantage before the trial even begins?

Yes, that is absolutely right, because through much of history, the courts have come down really hard on poor women.

They're often the bad women in society.

And there's two reasons for that.

The first is that it's simply very hard for poor women to meet the ideal standards of womanhood.

And the other reason is, of course, because crime is socially constructed.

Crime is often a tool of the elite to keep certain classes under control.

Rod,

I began by asking her, who is Georgina Weldon?

She was born on the 24th of May 1837 at Tooting Lodge in Clapham Common.

Her parents were from the landed gentry and she spends her childhood in Italy, especially Florence, as well as Switzerland and Brussels.

And she sings and goes to balls and she has a huge number of admirers.

Joanna Martin, in her biography of Georgina, has pulled together hundreds of her letters and they give this really wonderful sense of her personality as a young woman and also her sense of herself.

So she writes things like, I sang like an angel and I was irresistible.

Yeah.

I asked historian Ros Crone if she has any chance of bringing the men involved in the plot against her to justice.

Do you think she designed that very chic

little sort of cape dress she's wearing there? Or maybe it looks quite bespoke, doesn't it? I would describe her as a very sophisticated modern woman.

She really loves dancing and going to nightclubs.

This is the roaring 20s.

So she's a flapper.

She has lots of suitors and lots of male friends.

But interestingly, she doesn't seem to have any that much interest in actually having sex.

What was the end of the story then for Christabel and John?

What did trial by media really look like in the 18th, 19th, early 20th centuries?

Well, trial by media is really a product of the rise of cheap print, growing literacy rates, and also a real appetite among people of all classes to read about the growing business of the courts.

If you look at the 19th century court reporting, it looks like what you're getting is a transcript of the trial.

However, these transcripts gave a real illusion of comprehensiveness.

Readers were not consuming a neutral script.

There were still editorial decisions being made about what to include, and also, you know, had an impact on how these trials were consumed, discussed, and then debated.

In the 20th century, we see that process much more obviously where we see editors being much more selective about the testimonies that they're including.

Roz, how unusual is this for a lawyer in the 1920s now to manipulate the media?

So if George Norton is embarking upon the preliminaries to divorce, I think we can assume this is a very unhappy marriage.

marriage.Yes, and frankly, they were very ill-suited.

On paper, it looked like quite a good match.

Caroline came from this large aristocratic dynasty, but they didn't really have a lot of money, and they really needed to marry off their daughters.

Caroline, she was beautiful, she was witty, she was intelligent.

She kind of intimidated men a bit, and so she didn't have that many suitors.

George Norton, on the other hand, he was a second son, but he was heir to the family fortune because his brother was childless, and he had also trained as a barrister, so he could keep things going in the meantime.

So they really don't know each other at all well before marriage.