One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Their father wrote frankly to friends of his troubles with them, his attempts to find them suitable appointments, his disappointment when they failed, and, above all, his irritation with them for racking up debts which he was obliged to pay until he lost patience completely. In March 1862 his Lausanne friend William de Cerjat received a letter containing a round-up of their doings. The oldest, Charley, had ‘married not particularly to my satisfaction’ (that is, to the hated Frederick Evans’s daughter Bessie), had gone into business in the City, ‘and will do well if he can find continuous energy’.66 His doubts about Charley went back to the boy’s childhood and youth. Dickens had told Angela Burdett-Coutts in January 1854, when Charley had just turned seventeen, that he had inherited from his mother, along with ‘tenderer and better qualities’, ‘an indescribable lassitude of character’.67

  As the boys grew up he discovered a similar lack of energy or willpower in several of them. Though he was proud of his second son Walter’s exploits in India, he tells de Cerjat in 1862 that Walter ‘spends more than he gets and has cost me money and disappointed me’. Two years later Dickens had to pay off Walter’s debts after the boy’s death in Calcutta, in December 1863, only days after Thackeray’s. Walter had stopped writing home after being told by his father that he would not continue to pay his debts.68 He was twenty-two. In 1862, as Dickens tells de Cerjat, his third son, Frank, is working for him in the office of All the Year Round. Two years later Frank joined the Bengal Mounted Police. Alfred, born in 1845, ‘a good steady fellow, but not at all brilliant, is educating expensively for engineers or artillery’, Dickens writes. Eventually Alfred became a land agent in Australia. After his father’s death Alfred wrote of his shock and sorrow, and also of the ‘one unfortunate incident of our father’s life’, his ‘separation from our mother’. ‘We their children always loved them both equally’, and ‘not one word of the subject ever passed from the lips of either father or mother’. ‘Of the causes which led to this unfortunate event’, which had occurred when Alfred was twelve, ‘we know no more than the rest of the world.’69

  Ploughing on with his list, Dickens reaches his fifth son and seventh child, Sydney, aged fifteen in 1862, whom he describes as ‘a born little sailor’ and already a midshipman at Bermuda. Sydney would go on to trouble his father more than any of the others; he wrote from Vancouver Island in 1869, where he was a second lieutenant on HMS Zealous, telling his father that if he refused to pay his debts the result would be ‘utter ruination’. Dickens replied that he would not be received in Gad’s Hill on his next return to England.70 The other two are still at school in 1862. Harry is ‘very bright and clever’; the youngest, Edward, having just turned ten at the time of this letter to de Cerjat, is given no character or prediction by Dickens at this point.71 A few years later, when Edward was fifteen, Dickens wrote to his schoolmaster to suggest that his son drop Latin and learn subjects likely to be more useful to him when he leaves school to join Alfred in Australia. Dickens bemoans Edward’s ‘lack of application and continuity of purpose’ and says he has ‘tried to trace it up to its source’, by which he once more means Catherine.72

  Charley, who displeased his father with his choice of wife in November 1861, further displeased him by becoming a partner in a papermaking company alongside Bessie’s brother Frederick Evans Jr. When the company failed in 1868 Dickens fumed about ‘Charley’s connexion with this precious Paper Mill Company; against which … I wrote him a letter of warning when it first loomed in the Evans atmosphere. It is coming to irretrievable bankruptcy, smash, and ruin.’73 (Sala wrote jauntily to Yates in August 1868, ‘So young Charles D has gone smash.’74) In response to this disaster Charley ‘staggers back’, wrote Dickens with despairing humour, ‘with a family of five children in the present and fifty in the future, on the parental shoulder’.75 However, Charley avoided bankruptcy and the following year Dickens, who had by now accepted his son’s wife – despite her hated maiden name – and was fond of his grandchildren, gave Charley the job of running All the Year Round. His excellent colleague Wills was retiring due to ill health after twenty years of supporting Dickens’s journalism and discreetly acting as go-between for his messages to Ellen. Charley was ‘a very good man of business’, Dickens told Macready, ‘and evinces considerable aptitude in sub-editing work’, despite having made ‘a terrible Mess of his paper-making’.76

  Dickens’s two black sheep brothers died before him. Augustus succumbed to consumption in Chicago in October 1866. ‘Poor fellow!’ wrote Dickens, who had helped to support his brother’s abandoned wife since he left her in February 1857.77 Augustus had used his famous name to try to involve Dickens in his foolish business ventures and had generally been an embarrassment.78 Fred, much the more troublesome of the two, was divorced by his wife Anna in 1859 on grounds of adultery and desertion. She had told her sister as early as 1852 that Fred was ‘violent & disgusting’ in his treatment of her, calling her an unfit companion, and even threatening to get medical advice which would justify his stopping her from pursuing an artistic career.79 Sir Cresswell Cresswell of the Divorce Court granted the separation in July 1859, having ordered Fred to pay alimony. Fred gave up his job at the War Office and disappeared without keeping up his payments to Anna.80 He died on 20 October 1868 in the northern town of Darlington, a useless wreck. It was ‘a wasted life’, Dickens told John Forster; he sent Charley to Darlington to organise the funeral.81 Fortunately the London press paid no attention to the news, though a few northern newspapers picked it up from Fred’s local paper, the Darlington Times.82 In London Sala, who shared Fred’s problem with alcohol, noted in a letter to his friend Yates of 26 October the sad details of Fred’s life and death:

  I suppose you have heard that Fred Dickens is dead. And I suppose he was a bad egg; but assuredly a most miserable life he had led since 1858. One hundred and twenty pounds a year superannuation from the War Office and out of that £60 per ann. set aside by the Divorce Court as alimony for his wife, and £20 by the Bankruptcy Court for his creditors. F.D.’s habitual breakfast was a penny bun and a glass of gingerbeer. The remainder of his diet was mainly gin; cold. He couldn’t smoke; he had no taste for reading: in fact he had no taste for anything save Van John and three card loo [card games]: luxuries not altogether attainable on a net income of £40 per ann. Poor devil.83

  In June 1870 Dickens died of a stroke at Gad’s Hill, aged fifty-eight. He had exhausted himself with months of reading in America and a final set of performances in St James’s Hall in London, which came to a premature end in mid-March. Despite being in poor health, he had insisted on continuing to give his particularly fatiguing performances of Nancy’s murder from Oliver Twist; Ellen attended one of these on 21 January.84 In March the first instalment of Edwin Drood was published to acclaim and huge sales, at which Dickens was overjoyed.85 The country mourned his death, and he received a funeral service in Westminster Abbey. In his will he left £1,000 to Ellen, who continued to live quietly, marrying a young schoolmaster, George Robinson, in 1876. Dickens had no last words for Catherine other than that he wished to record that she had received an annual income of £600 from him, ‘while all the great charges of a numerous and expensive family have devolved wholly upon myself’. He could not bring himself to be gracious towards her, and his children may well have felt uncomfortable at the words ‘expensive family’.86

  More admirably he demanded in his will that his friends should ‘on no account make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works.’87 He had used almost the same words when expressing his disapproval of the plan for a statue of Shakespeare to be commissioned in 1864, with one suggestion being that it should adorn Bazalgette’s brand new Thames Embankment. ‘I dread the notion of a statue’, he told Hepworth Dixon in January 1864, ‘shiver and tremble at the thought of another graven image in some public place’. ‘I believe that Shakespeare has left his best monument in his works,
and is best left without another.’88 Dickens did not know it, but his old adversary Thackeray had given vent to the same feeling in one of the last letters he wrote before his death. On 17 December 1863 he told George Smith that he had received ‘a circular about the Shakespeare business’. ‘I think the scheme is bosh.’89

  The end of the Robinson case

  In November 1858, four months after the judges had adjourned the Robinson divorce case in order to await the expected amendment to the Divorce Act which would allow Edward Lane to give evidence as a witness, the case came to court again. Since the adjournment on 3 July Lane had quietly continued with his hydropathic practice at Moor Park. Among his loyal patients was Darwin, who spent a week there from 25 October, noting once more that his visit improved his health. ‘Moor Park did me wonderful good’, he told Hooker on 2 November; ‘I walked one day 4½ miles! with only a few rests!’90 The case resumed on 26 November, when Lane was formally dismissed from the suit and sworn in as a witness. Sir Alexander Cockburn was in the chair. Lane answered questions from both Isabella’s and Henry’s lawyers about his relations with her and the entries in her diary. He declared the former to have been in no way inappropriate, let alone adulterous. As for the diary, it was ‘utterly and absolutely false – a tissue of romances from beginning to end, as far as they implicated me in anything improper’. The court could not resolve the question of whether Isabella was of sound mind when she wrote the diary (which Henry’s counsel sought to prove) or under delusions related to her menopausal state (the line pursued by Isabella’s counsel). Cockburn adjourned the case once more, without fixing a date for its renewal.91

  Darwin, working with urgency to finish Origin of Species – though he still called it his ‘abstract’ in a letter to Wallace in January 185992 – took himself off to Moor Park once more on 5 February. Halfway through his two-week stay he told W.D. Fox that he was feeling better. ‘We are a very pleasant party here’, he wrote, ‘& are very comfortable, & I am glad to say that not one of Dr Lane’s patients has given him up & he gets fresh new ones pretty regularly.’93 By the time he returned to Moor Park in May – when among his leisure reading was Adam Bede, which he described as ‘excellent’, telling Hooker that ‘entire rest & the douche & Adam Bede have together done me a world of good’94 – the Robinson case had returned to court for the last time.

  The three original divorce judges – Cresswell, Wightman, and Cockburn – were present when the case resumed on 2 March 1859. Cockburn summed up, beginning by describing the case as ‘peculiar and remarkable in its character and circumstances’. Since the diary was the only evidence, it could not be used to ‘establish the criminality of the co-respondent Dr Lane’, which was the reason why the court had adjourned the previous summer in order to take advantage of the forthcoming amendment to the Divorce Act. The court now had to decide whether through the admission by Isabella in her diary ‘a case of adultery was made out which entitled the petitioner to the redress he sought’, or whether, with Lane dismissed as a co-respondent and acquitted of guilt, ‘the suit against the wife must not of necessity fail’. The judges, Cockburn said, so far agreed with Henry Robinson’s lawyers as to believe that his wife was not insane, but they did not think that the diary disclosures amounted to a confession of actual adultery, however suggestive of intimacy they might appear. It simply could not be proved that she and Lane had committed adultery. The case was therefore dismissed, though Cockburn expressed regret at Henry Robinson’s position, with his separation granted earlier by the Ecclesiastical Court but no full divorce settlement available to him. He remained ‘burdened with a wife who had placed on record the confession of her misconduct’ or at least ‘of unfaithful thoughts and unchaste desires’. Nonetheless, the court could not find legal proof of adultery ‘in the incoherent statements of a narrative so irrational and untrustworthy as that of the respondent’. Though the judges had decided against Henry’s petition, they decreed that Isabella, having independent means, must pay her own costs.95 According to the report in The Times, Cockburn and Wightman retired from the court after this judgment, while Sir Cresswell Cresswell continued with the other cases scheduled for a hearing that day. The very next one was Dickens v. Dickens, a stage in the case being brought by Anna Dickens against the impecunious Fred which was finally resolved in her favour in July.96

  Lane survived the scandal unscathed. In 1860 he moved with his family, including his mother-in-law Lady Drysdale, to another handsome establishment, already well known for its water-cure treatments, Sudbrook Park near Richmond in Surrey, closer to London than Moor Park and containing one of the first Turkish baths in Britain.97 Isabella became estranged from her friends and family. She rented a cottage and took in lodgers. Her youngest son chose to live with her rather than with his father when he left school in 1861. Henry finally succeeded in divorcing Isabella in 1864. His hired agents had found her with a man in a hotel room in London in June 1863; the man was a tutor she had employed to teach the boys French in 1855. Henry was now free to marry again, which he did in 1865.98

  The Robinson case, coming right at the beginning of the jurisdiction of the new Divorce Court and containing such unprecedented elements as to require the law to be amended to accommodate it, touched many people outside the immediate family circles of the Lanes, the Drysdales, and the Robinsons. Through Lane’s profession patients like Darwin became involved, if only by watching from the sidelines as the case took its protracted course, from the hot June days of 1858 to the final decision in March 1859. At a time when the new Medical Act, designed to regulate and improve the profession, was finally passing into law, the standing of the medical profession itself was threatened, as both conventional and alternative practitioners realised, by the possibility that women would accuse doctors of improprieties when they attended their female patients. And the whole question of what constituted lunacy, particularly in women of a certain age, was being raised at the same time as the Robinson case, with many stories reaching the public ear about incarcerations of inconvenient spouses and the accompanying scrutiny of the efficiency of the Lunacy Commission. One writer who quickly exploited the subject’s potential for fiction was Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White, with its plotting by the wicked husband Sir Percival Glyde to put his wife in an asylum in order to claim her fortune, began serialisation in Dickens’s new paper All the Year Round, succeeding A Tale of Two Cities in November 1859.

  Darwin triumphant

  Darwin’s main concern after the sad death of his son, and the excitement (and anxiety) of Wallace’s letter and the reading of his and Wallace’s work to the Linnaean Society, was to regain health by holidaying with his family, before returning to Down on 13 August 1858 to get on with his work on natural selection. Despite recognising the need to publish something soon if he wanted to be sure of receiving the recognition he craved, he had not yet decided to print his major findings in one volume, thinking that he would first of all extend the short pieces introduced by Lyell and Hooker on 1 July into ‘a long abstract on my notions about Species & Varieties, to be read in parts’ before the Linnaean Society at its subsequent meetings and then printed in its journal. ‘My bigger Book will not be out for some two or three years’, he wrote to the naturalist Thomas Campbell Eyton from the Isle of Wight on 4 August 1858.99 Slowly and in a way reluctantly he came to the idea that the long abstract would in fact be his ‘big book’ on the subject, and that it would be published by a mainstream publisher (in the event the respected firm of John Murray) rather than in a specialist journal, where it would be read only by fellow scientists. As he frequently told his correspondents, he was a slow worker; in addition, his diffidence and fear of upsetting his wife and many devout friends contributed to the snail’s pace at which he moved while finally coming to realise what had to be done.

  The modest papers by Darwin and Wallace, harbinger of one of the greatest landmarks in the progress of science, not only received no press attention after their presentation to the Linnaean Soci
ety on 1 July; when they were published in the Proceedings of the society in August, they attracted no notice then either. The next event in the scientific world was the meeting in Leeds of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in September. Darwin was listed in the press as being one of the likely attendees, but on 1 September he wrote to John Phillips, the assistant general secretary of the association, saying his health would not permit him to take over as president of the zoological section for the occasion; indeed, he would not be able to travel to Leeds to attend the meeting.100 Darwin only ever attended three BAAS meetings, at Southampton in 1846, at Oxford in 1847, and at Glasgow in 1855.101 His home-loving character and increasingly poor health kept him away from such gatherings, though he always heard all about them from his more active friends Hooker and Huxley. The latter looked forward eagerly to attending; in a letter of 5 September to Hooker he ‘rejoiced’ that Wallace had moved Darwin nearer to publication of his work, which Huxley was confident would effect ‘a great revolution’ and bring in ‘an English epoch in science and art’. ‘Shall I have a row with the great O. there?’ he asked, referring to Richard Owen, president of the BAAS and a man who was determined, as Darwin pointed out after the publication of Origin of Species in November 1859, that there would be ‘only one cock of the walk!’102