The Dilke Affair

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29336, 15 October 1960, Page 3

The Dilke Affair

The Tangled Web. By Betty Askwith. Gollancz. 200 pp. One of the major scandals of the later Victorian era was the divorce case brought by a staid Scottish lawyer, Donald Crawford, against his young wife Virginia in which he cited Sir Charles Dilke, then at the height of his political" fame, as co-respondent. The charge was based on Mrs Crawford’s confession to her husband and was strenuously denied by Dilke, who, though the accusation was never proved, was ruined, politically, by the scandal. In this book the author, basing some of her observations on the known facts, but drawing as well upon Her own conjectures, has reconstructed the affair in the form of a novel.

The two most important premises on which she has built her story are unequivocally true. The first is that Sir Charles Dilke and Mrs Eustace Smith, Virginia’s formidable mother, were lovers. The second that Virginia Crawford, aged only 19 and bored and repelled by the elderly husband whom her mother had forced her to marry, very soon fell for the charms of the penniless but fascinating Captain Harry Foster, and plunged into a liaison with him, the discovery of which would have ruined his military career. Betty Askwith bases her belief that Virginia deliberately “framed” Sir Charles as her supposititious lover on the assumption that while still a child she had accidentally discovered him and her mother “in flagrente delicte,” and had thereafter cherished a shocked hatred for both of them. The author further attributes Mrs Crawford’s course of action to the influence of Mrs Rogerson, an unbalanced creature, lovesick for Dilke and desperately anxious to prevent him from making a projected marriage with another woman.

Though the story is built up plausibly, the tortuous thinking of Victorian women barred by convention and the spying eyes of servants from following their natural desires does not always appear convincing. Mrs Crawford seems to have taken the marriage for money of her lover quite calmly, and that she should have compromised a rising statesman simply to save her now unattainable Casanova from disgrace would seem to argue a vindictiveness to one and fidelity to the other not quite in keeping with the character of the seriousminded young woman she was later to become.

Both parties lived to a great age, Dilke protesting his innocence to the last, and Mrs Crawford, a devout convert to the Chun* of Rome, dying in the odour of sanctity and practical good works. Both would appear to have been victims of Victorian taboos and prejudices.