The Codrington Divorce Trial, or Female Friendship Betrayed

The main point of this article is how, in the course of a Victorian divorce trial that was a ostensibly about heterosexual adultery, lesbianism became the ghost at the banquet–present largely in the refusal of any of the participants to name it. The situation shows the overlapping dynamic between the image of female romantic friendships as acceptable and unproblematic, and the anxiety around friendships that appeared to infringe on marriage imperatives.

The developing image of lesbianism that became established solidly around the turn of the century emerges slowly in hints and whispers as early as the mid 19th century. Romantic friendships existed in a wide range of expressions and evoked a similarly wide range of reactions from positive to negative. Vicinus deliberately uses the word “lesbian” to name a portion of these expressions. The dynamics that tended to provoke anxiety included “mannish” presentation (popular as a fashion style among feminists) and resistance to marriage, especially in favor of female friendships. Although romantic friends frequently described non-genital eroticism, that doesn’t exclude further activities, given the social restraints on what could and could not be spoken of openly. Because such things were not explicit, there was a scope for them to be assumed or understood without being named.

The primary focus of this article Is on the intersection of marriage and lesbian relations. Although the Victorian doctrine of “separate spheres” for the sexes left a great deal of room for homosocial and homoerotic interactions, this was in a context where marriage was an assumed constant. At the same time, the ideal of romantic “companionate” marriage didn’t play well with the reality of patriarchal authority and a legal system that university privileged men.

The 19th century version of feminism focused on reform of marriage laws alongside issues of education and employment. Even after some reform of divorce laws, men were still the primary instigators and beneficiaries. The barrier for a woman to achieve divorce was high (far beyond simple adultery) while men could cite a wide range of faults that damaged their “property interest” in their wives’ reputations.

The essential facts of the Codrington divorce trial are complex. Admiral Codrington had a cold and unaffectionate nature, which was a very bad fit for his vivacious flirtatious wife. He disliked social events, she lived for them. In the hothouse environment of the British base at Malta, her flirtations with young officers threatened his reputation. Back in England, she moved on to probable adultery with two named men, one of whom she plotted an elopement with.

Helen Codrington was emotionally supported, though not necessarily outright abetted, by her close friend Emily Faithful. Faithful was seven years younger than Helen and during several years around age 20 lived in the Codrington household in London. Admiral Codrington at that time had ceased sexual relations with his wife, for the purposes of birth control, and Emily shared Helen’s bedroom and bed while living there. The key incident raised in the divorce trial involved one night when Codrington entered his wife’s bedroom and “attempted to take improper liberties with Miss Faithful.” The question of what actually happened is not resolved–Faithful changed her testimony from “possibly” to “I was asleep and don’t know,” but one of the background implications is that Codrington may have observed something that caused him to be suspicious of the relationship between the two women. He ejected Faithful from the household and allegedly wrote the “sealed letter,” detailing his reasons for doing so, that was later held over her head as an implied threat during the trial.

Faithful moved on to join feminist circles and became a leading activist, lecturer, and publisher. Half a dozen years later during the divorce trial, Faithful initially supported Helen Codrington’s claims of mistreatment, but then suddenly fled London to avoid a subpoena and, when she later returned as the trial resumed, threw Helen under the bus and declined to support any of her claims.

Helen Codrington lost everything in the divorce but Emily Faithful came out with her reputation relatively unscathed, though gossip that combined events of the trial with her position as a prominent feminist hinted strongly at her “mannish” proclivities. It’s quite likely that the gossip was mostly accurate. Faithful lived the rest of her life in all-female circles and in her will left everything to her longtime partner Charlotte Robinson.

Another clue to the nature of Helen and Emily’s relationship appears in the novel that Faithful wrote about a promiscuous and flighty heroine who is an obvious stand-in for Helen Codrington, and a gender-flipped self-insertion hero who vainly believes that he can reform and redeem the woman with his ennobling love. The novel is not at all kind to the Helen character.

The lesbian implications of Helen and Emily’s friendship are elusive. Nothing they did fell outside the bounds of accepted friendship, and even Emily’s later life never involved any open public scandal. Everything was hints and implications. Faithful successfully spun those implications to frame herself as a naïve supportive friend who was led astray by the older, sexually-experienced seductress (by implication only). In a slightly later age, the implications would have been more likely to evoke the image of the mannish lesbian seductress, interfering in the marriage of the object of her devotion. But the discourse hadn’t yet moved to that point.

The lesbian implications were stronger once one moved away from strait-laced London society. The poet Robert Browning (who was a friend of much more overtly lesbian figures such as Charlotte Cushman’s artistic circle in Rome) told a female friend that the “sealed letter” contained “a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you–fear of the explosion of which caused the shift” in Emily’s support. Search references to things that cannot be named or spoken of are common dog whistles for homosexuality.