Georgina Weldon

Georgina Weldon (24 May 1837 – 11 January 1914) was a British campaigner against the lunacy laws, a celebrated litigant and noted amateur soprano of the Victorian era.

Georgina Weldon (née Thomas) was born at Tooting Lodge, Clapham Common in 1837, one of seven children and the oldest daughter born to Morgan Thomas MP, JP, DL (1803–1867), a member of the Welsh landed gentry, and his wife, Louisa Frances, daughter of John Apsley Dalrymple of Mayfield in Sussex. 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. In 1856 the Thomas family changed its name to Treherne, the surname of Morgan Thomas's ancestors up to the mid-eighteenth century.

On 21 April 1860, against her father's wishes, Georgina married William Henry Weldon, a lieutenant in the 18th Royal Hussars at Aldershot in Hampshire, causing her father to promptly disinherit her. 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. In August 1860 she suffered a miscarriage when her husband threatened to kill her and himself. In 1863 William Weldon took a mistress, the nineteen-year-old Annie Stanley Dobson (born 1843), who secretly became his partner for life. She claimed to be a widow and went by the name Mrs Lowe, and gave him a son, Francis Stanley Lowe (1868–1955). On the death of his grandmother he inherited £10,000 a year and in 1870 he leased in Bloomsbury, which had a small theatre that had been added by Charles Dickens, a former resident.

...
Wikipedia