There was more of a problem how to identify the new Trehernes when they came up from the country to London. They were not rich, nor were they well connected. Families – brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts – usually made a simple enough matrix for the giving and receiving of hospitality, as did work, or political allegiance. None of these helped describe the Sussex Trehernes. To go about at all in society meant they had to have some circle of acquaintance and it is probable that the greater part of it was provided by Georgina. When carriages were summoned and Georgina parted regretfully from her hosts after what she hoped was an irresistible contribution to the evening, the question arose: who was she? Parsed, this meant who were her parents? Mr Treherne himself had no cronies, political or otherwise, and belonged to no clubs. He was estranged from his own family. His wife was a dumpy and unfashionable lady happier when she was in the country. If it was asked what this family wanted, what advantage it was trying to seek (a perfectly understandable enquiry) no easy answer was forthcoming. The change of name might indicate that Morgan wished to be considered Welsh but he would have been bitterly disappointed to have given this impression.
When Thackeray’s The Snobs of England was published ten years earlier it made the whole country anxious. Some of those who read the work in serial form wrote in to ask whether they could be accounted snobs and Thackeray cheerfully included the details of their lives in his next instalment. How far did a man like the new Mr Treherne come under the title? The word derives from Cambridge undergraduate slang in use during Morgan’s time at Trinity. In the narrow sense, the Welshman was indeed a ‘snob’ as much as he was a ‘tassell’ – his parentage bridged town and gown. Thackeray’s extension of the meaning to include anyone wishing to be something he was not was useful in principle but applied so indiscriminately by him that Morgan and many others might have wondered whether anyone at all in society could escape the term. One of the small miracles of literature is how Thackeray escaped the crude and gluey morass that was The Snobs of England to begin in the very next year his literary masterpiece, Vanity Fair. There he devoted a famous chapter to how to live well on nothing a year. The new tone is more realistic and generous: ‘The truth is, when we say of a gentleman that he lives elegantly on nothing a year, we use the word “nothing” to signify something unknown – meaning, simply, that we don’t know how the gentleman in question defrays the expenses of his establishment.’
This describes Morgan’s situation when seen about town in London or Brighton. His innate anxiety led him to claim more than he possessed, in wealth as well as rank, but he was not as fatuous as some of Thackeray’s more helpless victims. Nor was he in the slightest way ingratiating. He paid no man his loyalty. If the question turned on whether he was a gentleman at all, most Victorians would have concluded that he was. They might have gone on to say that he was not a very pleasant one, nor a very distinguished example of the breed. That was beside the point. Morgan’s desire was not so much to remake himself in a different image, but to consolidate what little rank he had. In that respect, he had gone away one person and come back as another.
His daughter was the immediate beneficiary of the new surname and the first to give it lustre. In October of 1857, Miss Georgina Treherne was included in the cast list of a private musical extravaganza devised in honour of the Duchess of Cambridge, called endearingly Hearts and Tarts. The performance took place at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, the home of Lady Marion Alford, a widow in her forties who kept up a lively artistic and political salon. The Queen of Hearts was played by Princess Mary of Cambridge, whom Queen Victoria always found so wanting for her terrible size, her dirty ball gowns and the racy company she kept. The Princess had been childhood friends with Constance Villiers, which explained her presence in the cast, as well as that of Lady Villiers’s father, Lord Clarendon, who acted as stage manager. His fellow Minister, Lord Granville, played the Knave of Hearts and had as his father in the play the newly succeeded Duke of Manchester. In fact, only Georgina was without noble connection. Princess Mary, perhaps confused by the surname and the obscurity of her background, remembered her afterwards as a handsome young lady from Cornwall.
How had Georgina come to be in such august company? It pleased her in later years to describe herself as racked by shyness but of all her fantasies this rings least true. She was certainly very pretty – the Pre-Raphaelite Frederick Sandys considered her one of the most beautiful women in England (though in this and practically every other area, his was a very unreliable opinion). It was her voice that gave her the entrée. There was a very long-established tradition of musical entertainment in great houses. If you were well-bred and could sing, you could do something very useful for your hostess and add to the charm of the occasion. It did not much matter if people talked through your rendition of some touching ballad – you were there to see and be seen. And it was a wonderful means of social introduction. At some of the grander functions, duchesses filled the first chairs and the audience were ranged back in strict order of precedence. Invitations to these evenings – when they took place in the London high season – might exceed a hundred. The better houses had music rooms, but in other places the company crammed into drawing-rooms and sat in bundles on the stairs. If there was not much glamour in it for the old, for the young it was exciting. For their mothers, it was a battleground.
Constance Villiers liked and remembered Georgina for her performance on this particular evening at Ashridge. Hidden in the playbill is the clue to how she may have come to take part. The prompt for Georgina’s performance in Hearts and Tarts was a wonderful old piece of Regency flotsam, Freddy Byng. It may have been his sponsorship that got Georgina into such august company. Poodle Byng (who was given his nickname by the Prince Regent because of the tight blond curls he wore as a young man) flits in and out of Victorian memoirs like an elderly and homeless bat. It was the Poodle who so scandalised the Court in the first months of Victoria’s reign when she was still considered a green girl by playing cards and making eyes at her, until he was gently shown the door. The fifth son of Viscount Torrington, he was fond of very young women and is said to have married his mother’s chambermaid. He seems to have travelled light in Victorian society and been tolerated in the houses of the rich for his manners and gentle heart – because he knew everybody and was so very old. His only official duty anyone could remember had come in 1824 when he was given the job of escorting the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands about London as a representative of the Crown. He did the best he could to amuse these two monarchs but could not stop them dying of influenza two months after they arrived. Acting with unusual decisiveness, he had them embalmed in brandy and shipped back to the South Pacific.
Byng seems to have been genuinely besotted by Georgina. Three years on, Thackeray, who knew the Poodle rather better than he knew Georgina, surprised her buying a wedding ring in Cockspur Street. Later in the afternoon, he ran across the decrepit old man and broke his heart by saying, ‘Poodle, you have lost your singing bird. Miss Treherne has married some other fellow.’ Poodle Byng found her when she first came out and introduced her to those of his many friends who spent part of their time and wealth on private concerts and recitals. If he was amorous, he was also kindly: after blandishments from Georgina, he helped get her parents presented at court in 1858. Even Morgan could see the use of a sponsor like that, however old and decrepit he might be.
Georgina at twenty possessed an enchanting and very idiosyncratic soprano voice (her diction was considered exceptionally clear and distinct) and what she lacked in manners and sophistication she made up for by being seen everywhere. If she was coquettish – and this could certainly be levelled against her – then it was all very artless and inconsequential. Suspicious mothers and society hostesses alike were quickly reassured