Throughout the summer and autumn of 1884 Georgina and her assistants continued to work away in the cramped, stuffy office in Red Lion Court. Harcourt, Chaffers, de Bear and Walter Rawlings were joined by another clerk, ‘little’ William Holmes, who claimed to have spent five years in penal servitude. He had ‘lovely’ handwriting and was ‘such a contrast to Old Misery’ (Harcourt). Harcourt and Chaffers were both prickly and quick to take offence. They were jealous of each other and of their companions, and there were frequent quarrels. But was plenty of work to do, as a number of her fellow lady-litigants looked to Georgina for help and advice. As she told her mother, ‘I am a kind of female Don Quixote. All the unfortunates knock on my door.’

The first of these ‘unfortunates’ was Louisa Trevelyan, the wife of Colonel Harington Trevelyan, a veteran of the Charge of the Light Brigade. The two had married in 1858 and had several children, but by the end of 1883, when Georgina first encountered Mrs Trevelyan, she was ‘a poor crushed woman’, separated from her husband and penniless. She moved into 33 Loughborough Road and Georgina helped her to retrieve her clothes from the pawnbrokers. Colonel Trevelyan was supposed to pay his wife £300 a year, but she had received nothing for two years. Georgina was determined to force him to pay up. Before long, however, Mrs Trevelyan began to stay out all night. One evening she returned late, obviously drunk, made ‘a great row’ and smashed a window. Georgina had to send for the police, who took her away. When she was arrested for stealing a jacket and brought before the magistrate at Marylebone Police Court, Georgina refused to bail her out. Mrs Trevelyan was ‘an extremely nice person’, she wrote, but directly she went out ‘she disgraced, not only her family but her sex’. A few weeks later Mrs Trevelyan was in the workhouse, but she continued to appear at the Law Courts from time to time.

Another protégée was Mary Ann Trower, who was already ‘well-known in the Chancery Courts as a litigant in person’.