Victorian scandal

by Roy Jenkins

"Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 2nd Baronet PC (4 September 1843 ? 26 January 1911) was an English Liberal and reformist politician. Touted as a future prime minister, his aspirations to higher political office were effectively terminated in 1885, after a notorious and well-publicised divorce case....Dilke's younger brother Ashton Wentworth Dilke married May Eustace Smith, the eldest daughter of Liberal politician and shipowner Thomas Eustace Smith and his wife Ellen in 1876. Sir Charles Dilke became Ellen's lover, a relationship which continued after his marriage in 1884. In July 1885, however, he was accused of seducing the Eustace Smiths' daughter Virginia in the first year of her marriage to Donald Crawford MP. This was supposed to have occurred in 1882 when Virginia was 19, and she claimed that the affair had continued on an irregular basis for the next two and a half years."--Wikipedia.