Walter Sholto Douglas’ life is fascinating from many angles. As a talented writer, published by one of the most prestigious Scottish publishing houses, and a close friend of Mary Shelly and her circle; as an illegitimate child of one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Scotland, and indeed Britain; and as a non-gender conforming person – probably a trans-man - of the early nineteenth century who was forced to relocate to Paris and leave behind the people who would know and recognise him, in order to become a husband and father, only to find himself betrayed by his wife and left to die in a debtors’ prison.
I’d like to start by noting that I will use male pronouns and his chosen name Walter throughout, when referring to our protagonist, rather than the female name he was given at birth. This is despite the fact that it was later in life before Walter was able to present himself with his male identity. I appreciate this might feel a little confusing at times, but hopefully as the story progresses, all will become clear.
In 1821 William Blackwood, founder of the famous Blackwood’s Magazine, received a submission from one David Lyndsay. The Magazine had started just 4 years earlier and had quickly gained a reputation – despite its conservative editorial – for publishing radical Romantics such as Percy Shelly and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the 1820s and 30s it was at a peak of success and circulation, publishing authors such as James Hogg. In later decades Blackwood’s was to recognise the talent and start the careers of George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and John Buchan, amongst many others, and its contributions would inspire the likes of Dickens, the Bronte sisters and Edgar Allen Poe.
Back in 1821, Blackwood was so impressed with Lyndsay’s poem ‘Plague of Darkness’, that he requested Lyndsay send more material for the Magazine – as much as he could, whenever he could – and in addition asked if Lyndsay would like to publish a book. Surely the dream response for any new writer, tentatively submitting their work for publication for the first time. Blackwood also mentioned in his letter, that he realised that ‘David Lyndsay’ was an assumed name, a common device for contributors to his, and other, magazines, and that he had no need of knowing Lyndsay’s true identity. What Blackwood could not know, was that Lyndsay’s true identity was a subject far more complex that he might ever have imagined.
Walter (b1790) and his sister Georgiana were born the illegitimate children of George Douglas, who was fifteenth Earl of Morton, a Knight of the Thistle, a Representative Peer of Scotland, chamberlain of the household to the queen consort and held many other powerful royal, political, scientific and social positions. Their mother was, presumably a servant within his Scottish household based between Dalmahoy House on the west of Edinburgh and Aberdour Castle in Fife. We know nothing of her, other than that, likely her last name was Dods – the name given to both children growing up.
As far as the Earl was concerned, he had two daughters that he needed to hide from the world. At the turn of the eighteenth/nineteenth century, the idea of ‘fornication’ outside of marriage went against everything the church taught and, women especially, were shamed and punished for it. As Lord Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland it would not have been seen as setting a particularly good example. Interestingly, the siblings do seem to have remained within the Earl’s household in Scotland for most of their early lives. Georgiana left when she married Captain John Carter in around 1808 and went with him to India. Walter, known by his birth-given female name, seems to have stayed until 1814, the year the Earl married a woman about the same age as his children, and Walter started receiving an allowance from his father. An allowance which would be the bane of Walter’s and Georgiana’s lives until the Earl’s death.
Walter appears to have headed first to live in Swansea – where he racked up debts - later joined by the now widowed Georgiana and her two children, and all of them moved to London in 1820. Whilst the Earl lived in luxury, with vast lands and income, he treated his children as though they were supplicants begging for the allowance he had promised them. Their appeals had to go through a third party – presumably so that it would be far less easy for any link to be made between him and them – and had to be written in language that cajoled and tried to persuade him that they were living the simplest, most lady-like of lives. They had clearly been brought up in the luxurious circumstances that the Earl still enjoyed, whilst he was now expecting them to live in much more basic conditions. The allowance was mean enough, had it been paid regularly, however, it seems that it was always paid late and never in full, leaving them borrowing money which they were unable to return in a timely fashion. Their letters are constantly trying to coax out enough to cover their debts and his are constantly scolding them, unfairly and hypocritically, for living above their means.
Walter used his initiative to try and supplement their income. He and a friend took in scholars – private tuition was one of the few jobs seen as fit for a woman, and he started sending his writing to Blackwood. Neither of these ventures, however well they began, seem to have lasted in terms of gaining the income he and his sister’s family required. There is an interesting period of about 5 years, when Walter’s identity is completely split – on the one hand letters to his father under his original, female name are written in a deferential meek and ‘feminine’ tone, whilst on the other letters to Blackwood under the name of David Lyndsay show him taking on a bold, self-assured and more traditionally masculine voice. Sadly, despite all his and Blackwood’s confidence in his writing talents, the promised book did not sell well.
But over this time in London, a third persona also emerges. An identity, whilst still presenting as female, with which he starts to move in the city’s literary circles. Walter attended salons and soirees alongside the most erudite and intellectual individuals of the capital. Here he was described by Eliza Rennie as having short, thick, curly hair ‘resembling that of a man’, and that in his white dress and short green jacket, completely against any fashion of the time, that at first glance ‘she’ resembled ‘someone of the masculine gender… in the masquerade… of feminine habiliments…’ A man in women’s clothing, Rennie didn’t realise how correct in her assessment she seems to have been, however malicious her intent.
Most importantly, at one of these gatherings Walter met and befriended none other than Mary Shelly. Shelley was to help Walter by recommending him (as David Lyndsay) to her own publishers, who went on take some of his work. It seems also to have been Shelley who introduced Walter to the woman who would go on to become his wife – Isabella Robinson.
By 1826 Walter and Isabella appear to be referring to themselves, in certain contexts at least, as Mr and Mrs Douglas. They are taking on, for the first time, Walter’s paternal family name and Sholto Douglas is a form traditionally used by the Earls of Morton in particular. Mrs Sholto Douglas wrote to Blackwood’s with a submission written by her ‘husband’ (of course they would not have been able to actually marry) a story titled Transmogrifications. It is an autobiographical piece telling of the author’s life growing from childhood into young adulthood – entirely from a male perspective. It reads as a wish-fulfilment on the part of Walter, who had, of course, grown up being viewed, treated and dressed as a girl.
At around this same time, Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Adeline, whose birth certificate lists her father as Walter Sholto Douglas. Who her biological father was in reality, is unknown, but the dishonour of having her child outside of wedlock, gives a strong incentive for Isabella to have entered into marriage. By the following year Shelley started referring to them as ‘the Douglases’ in letters to friends. Soon after the Earl of Morton died, leaving a small inheritance for each of his two children, not enough to live on, and ending their allowances.
In order to take on the role of husband, wife and daughter Walter, Isabella and Adeline needed to leave London. They decided to move to Paris along with Georgiana, Mary Shelley and their respective children. Although there was no official need at this time for a passport to go to France, Walter clearly wanted some form of paperwork to confirm his male identity. Mary Shelley helped the Douglases by asking a male and a female friend to go to the official office in London posing as the Douglases in order to acquire passports in their names. The friends were given to believe the favour was needed as the Douglases were out of town and could not get to the office themselves. In September 1827 they left everything they knew behind in order to create a new life for themselves.
Once in France, Walter was finally able to present fully as male amongst the Parisian literary circles who were the groups’ new companions. Only his sister, wife and close friend Mary Shelly had known him in his former life, and all appear to have accepted him as he was. How they understood his identity is hard to know, and of course, we cannot really say exactly how he identified either. Of course, he would not have understood the spectrum of gender as we can see it today, so we cannot know where exactly where within that continuum he might have placed himself. It does, however, seem clear that he was never happy in the role he had been forced to play. There is a poem that Walter wrote in a book he gave to Mary Shelley in 1822, that speaks down the centuries of a tortured soul. These are the opening lines:
There is anguish in my Breast
A sorrow all undreamed, unguessed –
A war that I must ever feel –
A secret I must still conceal –
I stand upon the Earth alone
To none my secret spirit known
In Paris, it seems, he could finally be his true self. So, how cruel, that it took so little time for everything to unravel. By the following year, Isabella was having an affair with at least one man, a prominent literary French figure, and Mary Shelley, in a letter to a friend wrote of Mr Douglas’ ‘diseased body’ and ‘diseased mind’. Walter had always had physical frailties which appear now to have been exacerbated. Perhaps it should not be a surprise that mentally he was also now falling apart. Seeing his wife, to whom he appears to have been devoted, unfaithful; perhaps too he was terrified of his past self being discovered by his new acquaintances; and there were clearly continued money issues. He was still submitting work as David Lyndsay, some published, much rejected, but evidently not earning enough to support his family.
The last that we know of Walter comes in a letter written by one of their French acquaintances, Mary Clark. In November 1829, she writes that Mr Douglas is in prison for debts. She comments that Mr Douglas had sent a friend to buy him a false moustache and side-burns, a fashion item at the time. She takes it as a joke on the friend, however, in confinement, Walter’s continued smooth skin without need for shaving equipment would have become an issue very quickly. With no further mention of his name in any diaries, publications or correspondence, we can only assume that Walter Sholto Douglas aged only about 39, died, ignominiously, in a Parisian debtors’ prison. Isabella, recorded as a widow, lived another comfortable 40 years, having remarried 10 years later. Her daughter Adeline Douglas continued to carry Walter’s name until she too married in 1853. The marriage certificate, once again, listed Walter as her father.
For all his talent Walter was unable ever to make the name for himself that he seems to have deserved. Hindered always by money troubles, probably made harder with the knowledge that they could have been instantly alleviated by his father, had he seen fit; and even harder must have been that he lived with the knowledge that something about his physical self was wrong, something that nobody else would understand, something he could never talk about.
A Star of Love for me hath set
And I must live yet not forget
How once it shone upon my Brow
Though I am lorn and lonely now
A blighted Herb a blasted Tree
A living lie, a mockery –
This further verse from that anguished poem tells how Walter’s life in London felt like a lie. He had obviously hoped that the move to Paris would spell an end to the lies and the mockery, how tragically wrong he was.
It is strange to think that had he been born with his parents married, and with the body that would have matched his male soul, he would have stood to have inherited the lands and titles of the Earls of Morton. His life would have been entirely different and would have ended with a fanfare of a funeral, his burial would be marked with a grand carved stone amongst the other Earls at Ratho, rather than in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Paris.
Bibliography
Betty T. Bennett, Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar, Morrow, 1991
Sara Sheridan, Where are the Women? A Guide to an Imagined Scotland, HES 2019
The New Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, Edinburgh University Press, 2018
Phyllis Rose, Clothes Make the Man, Washington Post, 1991
Heather Rose Jones, Mary Diana Dods - A Reference Timeline, Alpennia.com, 2019
Image are my own other than:
George Douglas, Earl of Morton by William Beechey - in public domain
Dalmahoy House - by Simon Johnston via geograph.org.uk
Aberdour Castle - by MJ Richardson via geograph.org.uk
Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell - in public domain
Costumes Parisienes, 1822, copperplate print made according to Horace Vernet drawings
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