How an English Orphan Girl Became a Viscountess and Went to California

In 1852, when returning home from a visit to her sister in France, she met Captain William Charles Yelverton of the Royal Artillery. Their ship was overbooked, so Teresa and the captain spent the night sitting in deck chairs, wrapped in his plaid blanket. When they disembarked in London, she gave him her address and he called upon her the next day, but that was the end of their encounter for a time. A little later, Theresa wrote to Yelverton, then stationed in Malta, and this led to steady correspondence between the pair, which gradually became affectionate.

Then Yelverton was sent to the Crimean war and, as luck would have it, Teresa went too, as a nurse, a Sister of Charity working in the French hospitals. (She was a Roman Catholic who had been educated in a French convent.) In 1855 or 1856, Yelverton chanced to visit the hospital where Teresa was working, renewing their acquaintance. According to Teresa, he proposed marriage, but she declined because she could not leave her nursing post until the war was over. They met up again in the tent of a general, where they were accepted as lovers, and when Teresa left the Crimea, Yelverton, now a major, went with her. Later, Teresa said that he wanted to marry her in the Greek Church, but she was insistent upon a Roman Catholic marriage.

When they landed back in England in 1857, she went to live with a friend in Edinburgh. Yelverton visited her there, and by his own admission, “triumphed over her virtue,” and married her in the Scotch manner by reading the marriage ceremony to her and acknowledging her as his wife before a witness. But Teresa still wanted a proper marriage. Yelverton finally agreed, and they went to Waterford, Ireland, where they were married by a Father Mooney for the sum of five pounds.

After the wedding they traveled in England, Scotland, and France. When in Bordeaux, Theresa fell ill, and also was pregnant (she lost the baby). The major left her there. When she was well, she wrote to him, imploring him to make their marriage public. He said that this would ruin him, and told her to find some rich man to marry and go to New Zealand. This was the last she heard from him.

As so often happened to single Victorian women, she had nowhere to go but to friends, so she went to one in Scotland. Imagine her surprise when she heard the news of her husband’s marriage to the Widow Forbes, a woman of large fortune from Edinburgh!

She sued him for alimony at once, and he paid her some money uncontested. But then, in 1861, Teresa went further. She got her landlord to sue Yelverton in the Court of Common Please in Dublin for the amount her board while she had stayed in his house. This was an effort to get a public admission that she was Yelverton’s wife, and that he should pay her debts. But Yelverton denied that he had married her, and thus began a world-famous trial, Thelwall vs. Yelverston. The trial transcript was published in “Harper’s Weekly,” and in the papers of the entire English-speaking world. The case was such a cause celebre that two plays were written about it: “A Wife and Not a Wife” by Cyrus Redding, and “Gentle Blood, or The Secret Marriage” by James Roderick O’Flanagan.

Teresa was the chief witness in the trial that lasted three days. She was extremely composed and made a very favorable impression. Yelverton, on the other hand, was forced to admit that he was a cad who had behaved dishonorably throughout. Father Mooney testified that the marriage he had performed was not really valid. Although the validity of both the Scottish marriage and the Roman Catholic one were affirmed and the case ended in her favor, Major Yelverton did not give up the fight, and in 1867 he persuaded the House of Lords to decide against the marriage.

By this time, Teresa had spent most of her money in litigation, and so she decided to travel and earn money by writing. She adopted the name Therese Yelverton, Viscountess Avonmore, to which she had no claim, but which added to her celebrity and must have given her some satisfaction to flaunt the name of the man who so much did not want her to have it.

In 1870 Teresa traveled to the Yosemite Valley, where a geological survey was just then underway. There she met the Hutchings family, whose daughter Florence (1864-1881) was the first white child born there, as well as the naturalist John Muir. Hutchings wrote many books about Yosemite and had a sawmill that Muir operated for a time. There, Teresa wrote a novel called “The Daughters of Ahwahnee” whose characters were quite obviously the Hutchings and Muir, who became Kenmuir in the book. The title was later changed by the publishers, Hurd and Houghton, to Zanita, a Tale of the Yo-Semite, published in an edition of 2,000 copies in 1872, and rather scarce today. Zanita was Florence (Floy) Hutchings, Cozy her sister Cosa, and the parents are Oswald and Placida Naunton. Teresa herself appears in the book as Mrs. Brown. According to Muir’s extant letters, the book has a fairly good description of him, as well as accurate accounts of the theories of Muir and others regarding the geological formation of the Yosemite Valley. Interestingly enough, in the novel, Zanita dies by falling (or being pushed?) from a mountain, and in real life, years after publication of the book, Florence died in a fall while guiding some tourists a month after her seventeenth birthday.

Teresa traveled the world writing articles, including one on Buddha’s tooth, in Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, November 1873, which can be read on-line:

http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bibperm?q1=ahj1472-1363over-74

A good account of Muir in the Yosemite Valley, Teresa, and the Hutchings can be found in The Life and Letters of John Muir by William Frederic Bade, Chapter IX, at The Sierra Club site:

http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/

Postscript: In doing a Google search for Yo-Semite, I came to a link called “Jewish Humor-Semite.” Following this link, I was led to the Encyclopaedia Britannica “Semite” page, and there was Zanita: Tale of the Yo-Semite with an invitation to “Buy This Book.” Unable to resist seeing who might be linking Zanita to Jewish Humor, I clicked that button and was taken to Barnes and Noble, where a reprint is being offered.

Ephemeral Assays – The Word

As for written ephemera, there are many references from the 1500s forward to records, diaries and journals which were considered rather transitory in nature. (“Ephemerides,” which belong to the genus of almanacs and are distinct from true ephemera, contained astronomical charts and tables.) Samuel Johnson, in his Rambler No. 145 (1751), refers to, “These papers of a day, the Ephemerae of learning.” Early in this century we find a reference to pamphlets, etc., “…that have been preserved by accident from the ephemeralness which was the common lot of hundreds of their fellows.”

Gradually, perhaps from its early association with sickness and bugs, the term took on pejorative connotations. “Unnotic’d, dull invective lyes, A mere Ephemeron it dyes, Or but provokes a jest.” “These base ephemeras, so born to die before the next revolving morn.” “When the due distinction had been drawn between the ephemeral and the lasting.” “Let him make good, not ephemerally…but definitely.” “The book-business, in America has been…reduced to a level of ephemeralness, news-value, and m

ere fact-finding past belief.”

Aside from the sudden 1980s corruption of “utopian,” no word has endured as much abuse as “ephemeral.” On the other hand, this helps to create the buyer’s market many purveyors of ephemera currently enjoy. In columns to come we will seek to elevate the term and to enlighten the masses. In my humid opinion, ephemera is the most interesting and most infinite category of collectible, a (we’re talking 1806 here) “Celestial Peacock…whose conscious plumes diffuse a herd of ephemerean dyes!”

We’ll close with an Englishman of 1650, who probably had a house full of fine priceless furniture and other items currently on top of the antiques food chain. “Methought, it was a strange opinion of our Aristotle to hold, that the least of those small insected ephemerans should be more noble than the sun, because it had a sensitive soul in it.”

A Book and an Obsession – the Goldstone’s Out of the Flames

Spirits were high and laughter was afoot at the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Book Fair as noted mystery author and bookman John Dunning introduced Larry and Nancy Goldstone thus:

When Larry the writer met Nancy ‘Twas much more than just fun and romancy. His book-writing career Got a kick in the rear ‘Cause her wit was not just happenstancy.

Now they’ve come on this western safari Like a pair of fine-tuned Stratavari They’re a twice-wicked brew — Without further ado Here’s the duo of Nancy and Larry.*

The Goldstones are book collectors, authors and charming raconteurs who shared their story in Denver on August 3, 2002.

It all begins with Leo Tolstoy and an attempt to save money. With birthdays just eight days apart, the couple decided to economize with a $20 spending cap for presents, so Nancy checked out the local used bookstores and found a Heritage Press copy of War and Peace. Price: $10.

She calls it “the most expensive thing I’ve every done in my life.”

That book was the beginning of an odyssey (or perhaps an obsession) that would take them from corner used bookstores to explorations of the rarest of the rare.

“We didn’t consider ourselves collectors, just people who wanted a library,” Larry said, explaining their naiveté and confusion. “Why would anybody pay more for the first edition of a book?”

That attitude would change with a weekend getaway to Boston, where they found themselves in the venerable Brattle Book Shop, snared by a 1st edition of The Night Visitor and Other Stories by Trevan. At $45, it was the most they’d ever spent for a book.

“We weren’t going to ever tell anybody how much we spent,” Nancy said. They also told themselves they weren’t ever going to spend that much again but, soon enough, they’d moved into the three digit range with firsts of East of Eden and 1984, and a fine binding copy of Bleak House.

The Goldstones chronicled their adventures in a series of books beginning with Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World in 1997, followed by Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore in 1999 and Warmly Inscribed: The New England Forger and Other Book Tales in 2001.

Dunning said in his introduction that the Goldstones “opened the book world to readers as they were discovering it for themselves.”

The Goldstones consider themselves “professional amateurs” who want to get people interested in the book world, and so they share with readers their discoveries of the quirks of the trade and the eccentric characters of the used and rare book world. They venture to book fairs, rare book libraries, museums and anyplace else where the mysteries of the book world might be revealed.

They even interviewed convicted forger Ken Anderson for Warmly Inscribed, which describes how Anderson’s forgeries were detected and eventually prosecuted, largely through the efforts of ABAA members (apparently it’s not an easy thing to convince law enforcement types that writing the names of dead authors in books constitutes a crime).

The Goldstones’ latest book is Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of Michael Servetus and One of the Rarest Books in the World, due out fall 2002. It tells the story of Servetus, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in the 16th century, and his book Christianismi Restutio, of which only three copies survived.

* © John Dunning

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