Georgina was now convinced that the members of the musical establishment were determined to belittle and ignore her because she was ‘a lady’ and refused to bribe the critics. She was especially vitriolic towards the Times critic James Davison, who had been ‘particularly prominent’ in his ‘persecution’ of her, refusing to mention her by name in his reviews of concerts in which she had performed. Davison was also against Gounod, she believed, because of a thirty-year feud with Henry Chorley, the music critic of The Athenaeum, who had praised Gounod's music when it was first performed in England. By the 1870s, however, Gounod had ‘a strong antipathy’ to Chorley who, he claimed, had been abusing him and Georgina ‘in a shameful manner’. When, in mid September 1871, Gounod finished his Funeral March of a Marionette, he and Georgina decided to dedicate it to Chorley, because the critic walked like ‘a stuffed red-haired monkey’.

It did not help that Gounod had also fallen out with most of the music publishers in London. He had tried to take legal action against a number of them, accusing them of selling about a hundred compositions to which his name had been falsely affixed. In each instance an out-of-court settlement had been agreed – always, Georgina believed, at the last possible moment ‘so as to give the opportunity to solicitors on both sides to run up costs’. Visitors to Tavistock House were left in no doubt as to the composer's opinions. He told them that vampires were not only to be found in ‘certain villages in Illyria’:

The Funeral March and two songs, ‘Oh, happy home!’ and ‘Ivy’, were offered to the publisher Arthur Chappell, but he refused to buy them.