Introduction

Summary

Caroline Norton's forgotten novel, which has remained unpublished until now, tells of the perils of courtship facing a naïve young girl Alixe, who has been launched onto the London social season. Her encounters with both a worthy and an undesirable suitor open an intriguing window onto the fashionable society of the 1820s in which Love in “the World” takes place. Caroline was able to draw upon her own experiences of the bon ton and those of her elder sister, Helen. The time in which the novel was set coincides with her first ball in the late summer of 1825. It was then that her sister Helen asked their mother to relate “every little incident […] and whether she is admired or no.” In anticipation of her younger sister's entrée to society in March 1826, Helen wrote to her: “I wish you joy with all my heart of all the pleasing anxious cares of coming out and all attending circumstances.” That Spring Caroline burst upon the scene with all her beauty and brilliance, later recalling “the night upon which she made her début, coming down dressed to the room where her mother and aunt were awaiting her.” She added, “I came out […] to find all London at my feet.”

Caroline believed that London, “where the cry of the drowning suicide is lost in the hum of gathered multitudes restlessly pursuing the pleasures or the business of life,” could be as callous as the metropolitan social scene might prove treacherous, and in alerting the reader to the dangers of fashionable society, she could make ample use of her own observations as a debutante at her first London season. In a highly readable and coherent narrative with an indeterminate ending, which throws a spotlight onto her life and times, the plot of Love in “the World” initially follows a pattern broadly representative of her own experience and anticipates that of her young heroine Beatrice Brooke in her later novel, Lost and Saved (1863). All three women had to respond to the advances of an apparently virtuous, but in reality immoral, suitor. For Alixe, this is Everard Price, for Beatrice, the Jekyll and Hyde persona of Montagu Treherne, while Caroline had to grapple with the advances of George Norton, who had first proposed to her when she was about sixteen.