One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  56.Hansard, vol. 127, col. 1092, 3 June 1853.

  57.Dickens, ‘The Murdered Person’, Household Words, vol. 14 (11 October 1856), p. 290.

  58.[Charles Egan], A Handy Book on the New Law of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, and the Practice of the Divorce Court (London, 1860), pp. 6–7.

  59.Hansard, vol. 145, col. 486, 19 May 1857.

  60.Ibid., vol. 142, col. 406, 20 May 1856.

  61.Crim. Con. Gazette, vol. 2 (1839), p. 75, quoted in Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce, England 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990, paperback 1992), p. 366. Stone’s is the most comprehensive study of the history of divorce in England.

  62.Stone, Road to Divorce, p. 357, A Handy Book, p. 8.

  63.Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2009, paperback 2011), p. 67.

  64.Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1836, reprinted in Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, ed. Dennis Walder (Harmondsworth, 1995), pp. 110–12. See also Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 33.

  65.Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), chap. 23.

  66.Caroline Norton, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855), p. 154. For Caroline Norton’s life see Diane Atkinson, The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton (London, 2012).

  67.Hansard, vol. 147, cols 1021, 1073, 4 August 1857; col. 1996, 21 August 1857; col. 2036, 24 August 1857.

  68.Rosina Bulwer Lytton conducted a campaign against her husband, often in novels, including The World and his Wife: or, A Person of Consequence, which she published in May 1858.

  69.Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1858.

  70.Punch, vol. 34 (9 January 1858), p. 11, and vol. 35 (6 November 1858), p. 184.

  71.See Hansard, vol. 145, col. 532, 19 May 1857.

  72.Letters of Dr John Lee, May–June 1858, MS 2876, Lambeth Palace Library.

  73.For a full account of the case see Kate Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (London, 2012).

  74.Dickens to Forster, 30 January 1858, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition, ed. Madeleine House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson et al., 12 vols (Oxford, 1965–2002), vol. 8, p. 511.

  75.See George Curtis to Thackeray, 17 June 1858, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1945–6), vol. 4, p. 92; John Blackwood to G.H. Lewes, 23 May 1858, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn., 1954–5, 1978), vol. 2, p. 458.

  76.See Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London, 1969), pp. 71–2, 73, 76.

  77.For George Eliot’s life and career see Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London, 1996, reprinted 1997).

  78.See George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), chap. 17; John Blackwood to George Eliot, 30 January 1857, The George Eliot Letters, vol. 2, p. 291; Dickens to John Forster, ?mid-April 1857, Letters, vol. 8, p. 317.

  79.The triptych is in Tate Britain. For the symbolism see Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (London, 1987), pp. 61–3.

  80.Thomas Carlyle to Jane Carlyle, 15 July 1857, and to John Carlyle, 28 January 1858, and Jane Carlyle to Mary Russell, 19 November 1857, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke–Edinburgh Edition, ed. C.R. Sanders, K.J. Fielding, Clyde de L. Ryals et al., 42 vols so far (Durham, North Carolina, 1970–), vol. 32, p. 188, vol. 33, pp. 173, 120.

  81.See Rosemary Ashton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage (London, 2002, reprinted 2003), chaps 14 and 15.

  82.Annual Register (1858), p. 90; Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 43 (May 1858), p. 441.

  83.See Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1978), p. 411.

  84.For details of Frith’s painting and career see Aubrey Noakes, William Frith: Extraordinary Victorian Painter (London, 1978), and Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge, 1989).

  85.Comic Songs and Recitations forming Mr Merryman’s Magazine of Miscellaneous Mirth (1840).

  86.G.A. Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes They Shine Upon (London, 1859), p. 384.

  87.See Roger Mortimer, The History of the Derby Stakes (London, 1962).

  88.See Dickens, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 581–2n.

  89.Dickens to Thomas Chapman, ?28 June 1846, Letters, vol. 4, pp. 576–7, and to Richard Watson, 21 July 1849, ibid., vol. 5, p. 580.

  90.Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, 16 September 1857, Letters, vol. 7, p. 67.

  91.Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 8 March 1838, ibid., vol. 3, p. 33.

  92.Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, ?13 February 1839, ibid., vol. 3, p. 143.

  93.See Darwin to Joseph Hooker, 26 May 1859, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al., 22 vols so far (Cambridge, 1985–), vol. 7, p. 300; to Hooker, 18 April 1860, ibid., vol. 8, p. 163; and to Hooker, 27–28 September 1865, ibid., vol. 13, p. 246.

  94.See, for example, Darwin to Charles Lyell, 9 August 1838, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 98; to Mary-Anne Herbert, 5 May 1842, ibid., vol. 2, p. 318; and to Hooker, 25 September 1853, ibid., vol. 5, pp. 155–6.

  95.Darwin to Hooker, 10 December 1864, ibid., vol. 12, p. 459.

  96.Disraeli, Tancred, 3 vols (1847, reprinted 1864), vol. 1, pp. 225–6.

  97.See Barbara Black, A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland (Athens, Ohio, 2012), pp. 59–63.

  98.Darwin, Autobiography, pp. 34–5.

  99.Blake, Disraeli, pp. 81–2, 88–9, 435.

  Chapter Two: May 1858

  1.‘Banquet at the Royal Academy of Arts’, The Times, 3 May 1858.

  2.See ODNB entry for David Salomons.

  3.‘Banquet at the Royal Academy of Arts’, The Times, 3 May 1858.

  4.See Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 68–9, and Thackeray, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 1, p. cxxi. For a fictionalised account of the relationship between Dickens and Seymour, which criticises the part played by Dickens in the tragedy, see Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr Pickwick (London, 2014).

  5.Dickens, Speeches, p. 262.

  6.Thackeray, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, p. 392; Dickens to Thackeray, 28 April 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 551.

  7.See Athenaeum, 1 and 8 May 1858, Illustrated London News, 8 May 1858, and Era, 30 May 1858.

  8.Rossetti to William Bell Scott, c. 21 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 213.

  9.Dickens, Speeches, pp. 246–53.

  10.See Dickens to Wilkie Collins, 21 March 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 535.

  11.See Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 426–7, 435–6.

  12.Francesco Berger, Reminiscences, Impressions and Anecdotes (London, 1913), pp. 19, 24.

  13.Ibid., p. 22.

  14.Queen Victoria, journal, 4 July 1857, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 43, p. 202.

  15.Dickens to Frederick Evans, 16 March 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 533.

  16.Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 461–8.

  17.‘Mr Charles Dickens’, The Times, 16 April 1858.

  18.‘Mr Charles Dickens and “The Cricket on the Hearth”’, Era, 2 May 1858.

  19.Ibid.

  20.Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 9 May 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 558.

  21.See Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London, 1983), pp. 145–6.

  22.See Dickens, Letters, vol. 8, pp. 558–60n.

  23.For a history of the journalistic activities on Wellington Street, see Mary L. Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (Farnham, 2015).

  24.See Slater, Charles Dickens, pp. 471, 587; Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Ithaca, New York, 2011), pp. 245, 285, 287.

  25.See Macready’s Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries, ed. Sir Frederick Pollock, 2 vols (London, 1875); Tracy C. Davis, ‘Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London’, Theatre Research International, vol. 13 (1988), pp. 221–34.

 
; 26.Dickens to Wilkie Collins, 2 August 1857, Letters, vol. 8, p. 394.

  27.Dickens to Frank Stone, 17 August 1857, and to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 5 September 1857, ibid., vol. 8, p. 412 and n., p. 433 and n. See also Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (London, 1990).

  28.Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 5 September 1857, Letters, vol. 8, pp. 432–3.

  29.Dickens to Wilkie Collins, 29 August 1857, ibid., vol. 8, p. 423.

  30.See Andrew Lycett, Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (London, 2014).

  31.Dickens to John Forster, 3 September 1857, Letters, vol. 8, p. 430; Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 375.

  32.Dickens to the Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 7 December 1857, Letters, vol. 8, p. 488; see also Dickens to Lady Duff Gordon, 23 January 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 508.

  33.See Dickens to Georgina Hogarth, 15 September 1857, ibid., vol. 8, p. 447 and n.

  34.Dickens and Collins, ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’, chap. 5, Household Words, 31 October 1857, reprinted in Dickens’ Journalism, ed. Michael Slater, 4 vols (London, 1994–2000), vol. 3, p. 471.

  35.Dickens to Wilkie Collins, 21 March 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 536.

  36.Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 19 May 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 565.

  37.Catherine Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 19 May 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 565n.

  38.Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 19 May 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 565.

  39.Dickens to Macready, 28 May 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 570.

  40.See Michael Slater, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2012), chap. 1.

  41.Thackeray to his mother, early June 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, p. 86.

  42.See The Times, 21 May and 24 June 1858.

  43.Ibid., 20 May 1858.

  44.See Racing Times, 17 May 1858, and St James’s Chronicle, 20 May 1858.

  45.J. Ewing Ritchie, Here and There in London (1859), pp. 99, 101.

  46.Era, 16 May 1858.

  47.‘The Great Derby Extravaganza’, Racing Times, 17 May 1858.

  48.Punch, vol. 34 (22 May 1858), p. 212.

  49.For a clear analysis of the very complicated India question, see Jones, Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism, pp. 234–7.

  50.Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 4 October 1857, Letters, vol. 8, p. 459.

  51.Dickens to Cavendish Spencer Boyle, 5 February 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 516.

  52.Thomas Carlyle to John Strachey, 13 September 1857, Collected Letters, vol. 33, p. 81.

  53.Marx, ‘The Indian Revolt’, New York Daily Tribune, 16 September 1857, Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 15, pp. 353–6.

  54.William Howard Russell, My Diary in India, in the Year 1858–9, 2 vols (1860), vol. 1, p. 356.

  55.Lord Ellenborough’s dispatch to Lord Canning, 19 April 1858, quoted in Irving, Annals of Our Time, p. 518.

  56.Lord Ellenborough to Queen Victoria, 10 May 1858, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, p. 358.

  57.Memorandum by Prince Albert, 16 May 1858, ibid., vol. 3, p. 367.

  58.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 21 May 1858, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 189–90.

  59.Disraeli’s speech at Slough, 26 May 1858, reported in the Era, 30 May 1858.

  60.Disraeli’s Reminiscences, ed. Helen M. Swartz and Marvin Swartz (London, 1975), p. 113.

  61.Lord Derby to Queen Victoria, 23 May 1858, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, p. 369.

  62.The Era described Palmerston and Russell as ‘two Artful Dodgers’, 9 May 1858.

  63.See R.L. Leonard, Nineteenth-Century British Premiers: Pitt to Rosebery (New York, 2008), p. 227.

  64.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 19 April 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 170.

  65.Disraeli to Sarah Brydges Willyams, 22 May 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 191.

  66.Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 44 (July 1858), p. 3.

  67.‘Public Dinner to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’, Era, 30 May 1858; see also The Times, 27 May 1858, and Irving, Annals of Our Time, p. 520.

  68.Irving, Annals of Our Time, p. 521.

  69.‘House of Lords, Monday 31 May’, The Times, 1 June 1858.

  70.Irving, Annals of Our Time, p. 521.

  71.See Joseph S. Meisel, ‘Humour and Insult in the House of Commons: The Case of Palmerston and Disraeli’, Parliamentary History, vol. 28, part 2 (2009), pp. 238–9, 244.

  72.John Lothrop Motley to his wife, 6 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 249.

  73.Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), book 4, chap. 14.

  74.See Patrick Leary, The ‘Punch’ Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London, 2010), p. 42.

  75.Leonard, Nineteenth-Century British Premiers, pp. 271–6; Disraeli, Letters, vol. 7, pp. xx, 51.

  76.For Disraeli’s relationships with men and references to homosexuality in his novels and in Lady Lytton’s writings, see William Kuhn, The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (London, 2006).

  77.See Daisy Hay, Mr and Mrs Disraeli: A Strange Romance (London, 2015), p. 111.

  78.Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way (New York, 1852), quoted in Hay, Mr and Mrs Disraeli, p. 49.

  79.See Kuhn, The Politics of Pleasure, pp. 168, 169.

  80.See Patrick Waddington, Turgenev and England (New York, 1981), p. 67.

  81.See Hay, Mr and Mrs Disraeli, pp. 134, 171–2, 214.

  82.Ibid., p. 248.

  83.For examples of cases continuing from 1857 or requiring refinement before returning before the new court, see The Times, 12 and 18 January, 10 February, 3 March, 17 April, 1 May 1858.

  84.See Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 111–12, and the ODNB entries for Cresswell, Wightman, and Cockburn.

  85.ODNB entry for Sir Cresswell Cresswell.

  86.See The Times, 6 May 1858.

  87.Manchester Times, 15 May 1858.

  88.See Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 138, 260; St James’s Chronicle, 13 May 1858; Era, 16 May 1858.

  89.‘The New Divorce Court’, Era, 16 May 1858.

  90.The Times, 13 May 1858.

  91.Ibid., and Disraeli, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 127–8n.

  92.See, for example, Disraeli to Delane, 25 February 1858, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 129–30.

  93.Lord Derby to Disraeli, 25 February 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 129n.

  94.Disraeli to Bulwer Lytton, 24 February 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 127.

  95.See Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (London and New York, 2003).

  96.Rosina Bulwer Lytton, The World and his Wife: or, A Person of Consequence, vol. 1, p. 19.

  97.Ibid., vol. 1, p. 33.

  98.For letters complaining of her publisher, see, for example, Rosina to Rebecca Ryves, 8 March 1858, The Collected Letters of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 3 vols (London, 2008), vol. 3, p. 32.

  99.Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Very Successful!, 3 vols (1856), vol. 1, p. ix.

  100.Ibid., vol. 1, p. 284, vol. 2, pp. 58, 61, 76.

  101.Ibid., vol. 2, pp.178–9.

  102.Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 181, 187, vol. 1, p. 166.

  103.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Lord Derby, 23 February 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 23.

  104.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Lord Stanley, 23 February 1858, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 25–6.

  105.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Lord Lyndhurst, 23 February 1858, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 26–7. For Lyndhurst’s life, and particularly his relationship with Lady Sykes and Disraeli, see Dennis Lee, Lord Lyndhurst, the Flexible Tory (Niwot, Colorado, 1994).

  106.Disraeli’s Reminiscences, pp. 118–19.

  107.See Hansard, passim, summer 1856 and summer 1857; Lee, Lord Lyndhurst, pp. 244, 247.

  108.Disraeli’s Reminiscences, p. 120.

  109.Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 18 (August 1838), pp. 195–6, and Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (1811–1846) (London, 1955), pp. 270–1.

  110.See The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christoph
er Ricks (New York, 1969), pp. 736–9 and n.

  111.Disraeli’s Reminiscences, pp. 61–2.

  112.Ibid., p. 65.

  113.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Rebecca Ryves, 2 March 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 28.

  114.See Dickens to Bulwer Lytton, 9 May 1851, Letters, vol. 6, pp. 379–80 and n.

  115.See, for example, Dickens to his solicitor Frederic Ouvry, 26 May 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 568.

  116.Dickens to William Charles Macready, 7 June 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 579 and n.

  117.John Forster to Frederic Ouvry, 21 May 1858, in K.J. Fielding, ‘Dickens and the Hogarth Scandal’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 10 (June 1955), p. 65.

  118.Legal copy of George Hogarth’s statement, ibid., p. 68.

  119.Dickens to Arthur Smith, 25 May 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 568.

  120.Dickens to Herbert Watkins, 31 May 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 576.

  121.The Times, 3 June 1858.

  122.Queen Victoria, journal, 27–31 May 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, pp. 219–22.

  123.See Disraeli to Lord Derby, 25 May 1858, and to Bulwer Lytton, 30 May 1858, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 196, 198.

  124.‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, Era, 30 May 1858.

  125.‘The Leviathan’, ibid.

  126.‘The Atlantic Telegraph’, St James’s Chronicle, 8 June 1858.

  127.See Darwin to his wife Emma, 25 April 1858, and to Joseph Hooker, 6 May 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, pp. 80, 89.

  Chapter Three: June 1858, part I

  1.Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker, 3 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 98.

  2.Darwin to William Tegetmeier, 5 June 1858, and Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, 8 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 98, 100–102.

  3.A search through The Times Digital Archive for the year 1858 yields only three brief entries on Darwin.

  4.Darwin to Hooker, 10 August 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 148.

  5.Darwin to Hooker, 11 January 1844, ibid., vol. 3, p. 2.

  6.Darwin to Asa Gray, 5 September 1857, ibid., vol. 6, p. 447.

  7.Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 15, 17, 20, 27, 36.

  8.Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 2 vols (London, 1918), vol. 1, p. 495.

  9.See Bromley Record, vol. 1 (1 June and 1 July 1858), pp. 1, 7.

  10.Ibid., vol. 1 (1 June 1858), p. 3.

  11.See Tori Reeve, Down House: The Home of Charles Darwin (London, 2009, reprinted 2011), pp. 16, 21, 36; R.B. Freeman, Charles Darwin: A Companion (Folkestone, 1978), p. 126.