Humiliated and considerably impoverished by his fickle wife’s fondness for jewels and gambling, Ralph remained abroad through the mid-1870s. Following Fannie’s death in 1878 (and an ill-considered, swiftly terminated engagement to an American author, Julia Fletcher), he returned home. In 1880, Lord Wentworth embarked upon a happy second marriage, one that had been actively encouraged – in an unconscious echo of the role played by Annabella in matchmaking Ada to William Lovelace – by the bride’s mother. Mary Stuart-Wortley proved to be both a loving wife to Ralph and a talented successor to his architect father. Working in collaboration with Charles Voysey, Mary continued William Lovelace’s exuberantly imaginative redevelopment of the villages of Ockham and East Horsley. Ralph and Mary never had – and seemingly did not regret the absence of – children of their own.
By 1880, having returned from years of travelling in the Middle East, the Blunts had settled at Wilfrid’s family home, Crabbet Park in Sussex. Here, a handsome house newly designed by the multi-talented Lady Anne Blunt was surrounded by the park in which the couple managed their celebrated stud of Arabian horses. Ralph and his second wife had meanwhile moved into an immense new home on Swan Walk, Chelsea, a corner house which had been built to Ralph’s specific requirements during his years abroad.* (Fannie’s gambling debts and jewel purchases were evidently not on quite the prodigious scale that her distraught husband’s letters had once suggested.)
It was Wentworth House that became, from 1880, the headquarters for discussions about the family papers with which Ralph had grown understandably obsessed. Just along the road in Cheyne Row, and always ready to sympathise with his difficulties, Sophia De Morgan shared a house with her agreeable and very social daughter, Mary. Nearby, slowly gathering together various anecdotes and fragments of literary history for fictional use in The Aspern Papers (1888), lived that most anglicised of American writers, Henry James.
The acknowledged and most direct source for his story about the ethics of literary collection was the tale related to James about a hopeful Bostonian’s courtship of the ageing Claire Clairmont. (Edward Silsbee, from 1872–5, was an attentive lodger in the Florentine house where Miss Clairmont and her niece then presided over a treasure trove of letters from the time when she had given birth to a daughter, Allegra, accepted by Lord Byron as his own.) By 1887, when the London-based writer began work on his wonderful novella, Henry James was also intrigued by Lord Wentworth’s tireless pursuit of any papers that could throw light upon the historic scandal of the Byron marriage. It is fair to assume that the trials of an obsessive collector stirred the imagination of a writer whose attentiveness to ‘données’ (inspiring ideas) was second to none.
Ralph’s lifelong endeavour to restore honour to his grandmother’s besmirched name resulted in numerous battles. He made no public response in 1883, when The Athenaeum published a series of fifty-year old Byron and Leigh letters intended to demonstrate that the talk of incest had been a malicious fabrication. In 1886, however, the eminent Leslie Stephen added a lengthy essay on Lord Byron to his heroic and home-produced Dictionary of National Biography. In these august pages, the father of Virginia Woolf (a man whose own daughter not long after this would be molested by an older half-brother) loftily dismissed the allegations against Augusta Leigh as ‘absolutely incredible’, the jealous ramblings of a scorned wife whose reasons for leaving her husband had never been established. Stephen also (much to the delight of the Leigh family) suggested that Mary Chaworth, rather than Augusta, had been the enduring object of Byron’s secret love. Another step had been laid on the stairs ascending to a purified Mrs Leigh – and leading down to the already grubby realm inhabited by a desanctified Lady Byron.
Challenged by an infuriated Ralph about his allegations, an unphased Leslie Stephen requested evidence to the contrary. In 1887, while conceding that the letters produced by Lord Wentworth had indeed entirely undermined his own assertions, the ageing author-editor proved too enfeebled to undertake his promised revisions, or even a modest errata note. The DNB entry on Lord Byron, somewhat shockingly, remained unaltered. Instead, Sir Leslie volunteered his services as a consultant as to which letters should be included in Ralph’s own first discreet submission to the historic controversy.*
The redemptive intentions of Ralph’s book, Lady Noel Byron and the Leighs, were apparent from the fact that he completed it on his grandmother’s birthday (17 May) and dedicated it to his parents. Quoting a line from Carlyle’s French Revolution as his inspiration (‘Where thou findest a lie that is oppressing thee, extinguish it’), Ralph focused his attack upon the reviewers of 1869–71 who had first set out to make a monster of Lady Byron and a martyr of Mrs Leigh. Augusta, so Ralph now stated, had been neither pure nor upright, nor even conveniently plain. She had never been slandered by Lady Byron. In fact, Augusta’s own family had thanked Ralph’s grandmother for her generosity. (As evidence, Ralph cited the 1856 letter in which Augusta’s widowed half-sister, Mary Chichester, had requested a meeting with Lady Byron, in order to convey her own heartfelt gratitude on behalf of the ‘unfortunate’ family of Mrs Leigh.)
Diligently though the arguments were set out and substantiated by the letters of which Ralph by then owned the largest collection in the country, the tiny print run of a mere three dozen copies for Lady Noel Byron and the Leighs (1887) ensured that its influence
