Tag: emily forbes

Not very, is the short answer. At least, not compared to many men of his class and background. Forbes came from a well-off, upper-middle-class family but his father, a banker, was ruined when his bank collapsed in 1843. Although the family were never anywhere near the kind of poverty we think of when we hear the phrase “Victorian poverty”, this did mean Edward Forbes had to earn a living rather than living off private means. He also had to help support his youngest brothers, especially after his father remarried¹ and left for Australia in the late 1840s.

In recent years, I’ve noticed a few references cropping up² to Forbes leaving his widow an inheritance worth £50,000 (in 1854 money!) on his death and this being the reason that in 1858 Major Charles Yelverton wanted to marry Emily Forbes³ . Having looked into the inventory that the sheriff’s court compiled on Forbes’ death, as per Scottish law, it quickly becomes clear that that is nowhere near the true figure; he was worth a lot less.

Had Forbes been worth £50,000 in his lifetime, he would never have had to work and could have pursued his scientific interests in comfort and security while supporting his family. According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator⁴, that amount would be equivalent to around £4.9 million today.

So what was he actually worth on his death? First, a quick explanation and summary. His inventory is split into two sections, one for his Scottish assets and one for those outside Scotland. It includes everything from the cash in the house, salary owed him and the contents of his bank accounts to the value of his furniture, books and clothes. He did not own his home; as most people did at the time, he and his family rented their house⁵. Although most of his property was in money or movable assets, he did have property on the Isle of Man, which was rented out; the value of the property itself was not included, probably because it belonged to the Forbes family and Edward as the eldest son was in charge of it.

Emily’s marriage portion (£460 with interest) was held in trust and was included as part of the inventory, because until 1882 women’s assets and possessions still became the property of their husbands on marriage. Emily would have received this back, along with the rest of her husband’s assets, as he had not made a will⁶.

The total value of Forbes’ assets comes to £1,756 1s 6d or roughly £168,000 in today’s money. Not an amount to be sneezed at, at a time when the annual middle-class income required to live fairly comfortably was around £400, but certainly not a fortune and nowhere near the £50,000 that’s been bandied around. In addition, much of the value was in items like furniture, so Emily wouldn’t have been immediately able to realise this (I haven’t found a record of a sale of any items).

I haven’t been able to determine exactly when and where the £50,000 figure comes from; the earliest I’ve seen it mentioned is in 2015. It doesn’t appear in either of the two books about Theresa Longworth/Yelverton and the Yelverton case (Chloe Schama’s account of the life of Theresa Longworth/Yelverton in 2010, or the earlier book on Theresa and the Yelverton case, written by Duncan Crow in 1966). Crow states, and this is the much more likely reason for Yelverton’s hasty proposal and marriage, that Emily was around six weeks pregnant when the couple married, and Schama concurs this was almost certainly the reason for the marriage.

As a widow, especially of a prominent and well-loved academic whose friends already largely disliked her, revealing a pregnancy out of wedlock – and by a man she’d only known for a couple of months – would have been a disaster for Emily both socially and personally⁷. From Charles Yelverton’s perspective, she was much more socially acceptable to his family than Theresa, being from a military family and the widow of one of the country’s best-known scientists, while Theresa was the daughter of a silk manufacturer and not especially socially-connected. Yelverton also had his own money, being from minor Irish aristocracy.

Perhaps the £50,000 was concocted in more recent years to make Yelverton seem like even more of a cad than he already was; but given his ungentlemanly, underhand behaviour towards Theresa and his attempts to rubbish her reputation in court, his image as a selfish, venal player really doesn’t need any additional burnishing. To be scrupulously fair to him, he does seem to have loved Emily, and they remained together until his death, having three more children; but we don’t know what she thought of the bigamy accusations. She did not appear in court and very much kept her head down during what must have been a horrible time for her (John Beete Jukes mentions in a letter that after the Irish trial she had taken to her bed with neuralgia⁸). This was really the only option if she wanted to maintain her dignity. There’s no indication that she knew anything about Theresa, until the latter sued her husband.

Regardless, it’s safe to say Yelverton didn’t marry Emily for her money; she didn’t have that much, because her husband hadn’t been a wealthy man.

Notes

1. His first wife Jane, Edward’s mother, had died in 1836. ↩︎
2. I’m not going to name and shame, but the sites that make the claim can fairly easily be found. ↩︎
3. And which caused a huge scandal and two bigamy trials, in Ireland and Scotland, because Yelverton’s previous partner Theresa Longworth claimed he had already married her – twice. For more on this see the books by Crow and Schama listed in the Sources, or just go to Wikipedia if you only have ten minutes. It’s safe to say Yelverton does not come out of it all looking like a prize catch. ↩︎
4. The Bank of England site notes that as the costs of goods and services have changed over time (for example, domestic servants were much cheaper to employ in the 19th century than they would be today), the figures given can never be an exact equivalent. ↩︎
5. Renting was the norm among all classes, the main difference (aside from the quality and cost of the accommodation) being how often the rent came due. Wealthier households might pay by the quarter or even by the year. As well, the Forbes family had only moved to Edinburgh around eight months before Edward’s death so may not have decided to settle at Wardie for good. ↩︎
6. Or if he had, there doesn’t appear to be a record of it, either in Scotland or England. ↩︎
7. At least she was well past the two-year mourning period it was recommended widows observe for their dead husbands (this would have ended in 1856 and she met and married Yelverton in 1858). ↩︎
8. “Mrs Yelverton writes from a sick bed suffering from neuralgia in the most dreadful way.” This was just after the bigamy case in Dublin had gone against her husband, so no wonder she was unwell. ↩︎

Sources

Bank of England Inflation Calculator

Beete Jukes, John, letter to Archibald Geikie, May 14th 1861. Papers of Sir Archibald Geikie, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh. Ref. Gen.524/3/23.

Chartist Ancestors Blog downloadable Pre-Decimal Calculator

Crow, Duncan, Theresa: the Story of the Yelverton Case, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1966

Forbes, Edward, Esq., 1856 (Wills and Testaments Reference SC70/1/91, Edinburgh Sheriff Court Inventories) National Records of Scotland, via ScotlandsPeople.org

Schama, Chloe, Wild Romance: The True Story of a Victorian Scandal, Bloomsbury, 2010