One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  76.See Bennett, London and Londoners, p. 75.

  77.Examples are quoted in Denis Pellerin and Brian May, Crinoline: Fashion’s Most Magnificent Disaster (London, 2016), pp. 24, 54, 154–6.

  78.‘Perversion of Crinoline’, People’s Paper, 10 July 1858.

  79.Athenaeum, 1 January 1859, p. 24.

  80.The British Library catalogue lists eleven items under the title ‘Hoop de dooden do’ from 1850 to the 1870s.

  81.‘Hoop de dooden doo. A fashionable ballad’, Punch, vol. 34 (5 June 1858), p. 229.

  82.Illustrated Times, vol. 6 (26 June 1858), p. 446; see also People’s Paper, 17 July 1858.

  83.Jane Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle, 5 September 1864, Collected Letters, vol. 41, p. 7.

  84.Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, p. 63.

  85.Darwin to Lyell, 13 April 1857, Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 377.

  86.Darwin to Hooker, 29 April 1857, ibid., vol. 6, p. 384.

  87.Darwin to W.D. Fox, 30 April 1857, ibid., vol. 6, pp. 385–6.

  88.Darwin to his son William, 13 May 1857, ibid., vol. 6, pp. 394–5.

  89.See Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 20, 27–9, 61.

  90.Rosanna Ledbetter, A History of the Malthusian League 1877–1927 (Columbus, Ohio, 1976), p. 58.

  91.See ODNB entry for Charles Drysdale.

  92.Charles Drysdale, ‘Tobacco and the Diseases It Produces’, The Times, 25 September 1878.

  93.[George Drysdale], Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, by a Student of Medicine (London, 1855), pp. 53–4.

  94.See E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age (1850–1875) (London, 1967), p. 338. See also Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1978).

  95.See Charles Gibbon, The Life of George Combe, 2 vols (London, 1878), vol. 2, pp. 215, 298; George Combe, journal, 10 October 1850 and 25 May 1851, MS George Combe Papers, National Library of Scotland.

  96.Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 55–6.

  97.Ibid., pp. 8–10, 132.

  98.Ibid., pp. 106–7, 131–2.

  99.Ibid., pp. 114ff., 254–5; Summerscale’s account of the trial is drawn from daily reports in the newspapers and from the first volume of Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Probate and in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, ed. M.C.M. Swabey, T.H. Tristram et al., 4 vols (London, 1858–65).

  100.‘Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’, The Times, 16 June 1858.

  101.Ibid.

  102.Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 156–7.

  103.The Times, 17 June 1858.

  104.People’s Paper, 19 June 1858.

  105.‘Crim. Con. and Hydropathic Love’, Era, 20 June 1858.

  106.Ibid., 22 June 1858; Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 172–5.

  107.Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 81–6. The quotations are from the more scurrilous newspapers and the Reports of Cases; the journal itself has disappeared.

  108.Daily News, 23 June 1858. For a discussion of the discriminatory remarks about women in the newspaper reports of the Robinson case, see Janice M. Allan, ‘Mrs Robinson’s “Day-book of Iniquity”: Reading Bodies of/and Evidence in the Context of the 1858 Medical Reform Act’, in The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, ed. Andrew Mangham and Greta Depledge (Liverpool, 2011), pp. 169–81.

  109.‘Classified Advertisements’, The Times, 29 May 1854.

  110.British Medical Journal, vol. 80 (10 July 1858), pp. 561–2.

  111.Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, pp. 181–3.

  112.Ibid., pp. 163–4.

  113.Ibid., p. 167.

  114.Ibid., p. 168.

  115.Darwin to Fox, 24 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 116.

  116.Darwin to Hooker, 23 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 115.

  117.See ibid., vol. 6, p. 386, n. 5.

  118.Darwin to Hooker, 25 June 1857, ibid., vol. 6, p. 416.

  119.See Darwin to Fox, 3 October 1856, ibid., vol. 6, p. 238. For Annie Darwin see Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter, and Human Evolution (London, 2001).

  120.Darwin to Hooker, 30 October 1857, Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 476.

  121.Darwin to Lyell, 18 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 107.

  122.For a dismissal of the suggestion by some commentators that Darwin was less than candid about the date on which he received Wallace’s communication, and that he may have borrowed the idea of divergence from Wallace, see the editors’ Introduction to volume 7 of Darwin’s Correspondence, pp. xvii–xix, and the lengthy note to Darwin’s letter, ibid., vol. 7, p. 108. The editors of Wallace’s Letters from the Malay Archipelago also dismiss the accusation against Darwin, pp. xv–xvi, as does Darwin’s most recent biographer Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (London, 2002), pp. 16, 501, n. 17.

  123.Darwin to his son William, 20 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 113.

  124.Darwin to Fox, 24 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 116.

  125.Darwin to Lyell, 25 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 117–18.

  126.See ibid., vol. 8, p. 600 (Appendix VII).

  127.Darwin, Autobiography, pp. 86–7.

  128.Ibid., p. 87n.

  129.Darwin to Wallace, 22 December 1857, Correspondence, vol. 6, p. 515.

  130.Darwin, Autobiography, p. 130.

  131.Darwin to Lyell, 26 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 119.

  132.Darwin to Hooker, 29 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 121.

  133.Wallace, My Life, pp. 201, 203; Wallace to Philip Sclater, 31 March 1862, Letters from the Malay Archipelago, p. 283 and n.

  134.Hooker and Lyell to the Linnaean Society, 30 June 1858, Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 7, pp. 122–3.

  135.Ibid., vol. 7, p. 123.

  136.Darwin to Hooker, 29 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 122.

  137.Ibid., vol. 7, p. 121.

  Chapter Five: July 1858

  1.‘Register of Burials in the Parish of Downe in the County of Kent in the Year 1858’, Bromley Local Studies Library.

  2.Darwin to W.D. Fox, 6 July 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 129.

  3.Darwin, journal, ibid., vol. 7, p. 504 (Appendix II).

  4.Darwin’s memorial on the death of Charles Waring Darwin, ibid., vol. 7, p. 521 (Appendix V).

  5.See Keynes, Annie’s Box, pp. 225–6. Keynes is the only biographer of Darwin to notice that Charles Waring Darwin’s funeral took place on the same day as the Linnaean Society meeting.

  6.Henrietta Lichfield (ed.), Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 2 vols (London, 1915), vol. 2, p. 162.

  7.See Darwin to Hooker, 16 May 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 94. Darwin’s next visit to London was on 19 October 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 504 (Appendix II).

  8.Darwin to Hooker, 5 and 13 July 1858, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 127–8, 129.

  9.Darwin, Autobiography, pp. 103–4.

  10.Hooker’s speech, The Darwin–Wallace Celebration held on Thursday 1 July 1908 by the Linnaean Society of London (London, 1908), p. 15.

  11.Ibid.

  12.For the list of those attending the meeting, see Darwin–Wallace Celebration, p. 83.

  13.Darwin to W.B. Carpenter, 18 November 1859, and to Hooker, 20 November 1859, Correspondence, vol. 7, pp. 378, 382.

  14.The information about the order of items on the agenda comes from Darwin–Wallace Celebration, pp. 85–6.

  15.Darwin to Hooker, 13 July 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 130.

  16.‘Abstract of Darwin’s Theory’, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 508–9 (Appendix III; original letter to Asa Gray, 5 September 1857, ibid., vol. 6, pp. 448–9).

  17.Wallace, My Life, pp. 189–90.

  18.See ODNB entry for Malthus.

  19.Darwin, Autobiography, p. 120.

  20.Wallace, My Life, pp. 190–91.

  21.‘Wallace’s Essay on Variation’, Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 514 (Appendix IV).

  22.Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. John Burrow, p. 117.

  23.‘W
allace’s Essay on Variation’, Darwin, Correspondence, vol. 7, pp. 516–18.

  24.Hooker’s speech in 1908, Darwin–Wallace Celebration, p. 15.

  25.Darwin, Autobiography, p. 122.

  26.See ODNB entry for Samuel Haughton.

  27.Wallace to his mother and to Hooker, 6 October 1858, Letters from the Malay Archipelago, pp. 180, 181.

  28.Wallace to Bates, 4 January 1858, ibid., p. 147.

  29.Wallace, My Life, p. 194.

  30.Huxley to Hooker, 5 September 1858, Life and Letters, vol. 1, p. 159.

  31.Ibid., vol. 1, p. 171.

  32.Darwin to W.D. Fox, 21 July 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 138.

  33.See Darwin to his publisher John Murray, 10 September 1859, ibid., vol. 7, p. 331.

  34.Darwin, Autobiography, p. 124.

  35.Darwin’s journal, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 504 (Appendix II).

  36.‘Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’, The Times, 5 July 1858.

  37.Ibid.

  38.Darwin to W.D. Fox, 21 July 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 138.

  39.Letters to the editor of The Times, 8 July 1858.

  40.See Disraeli, Letters, vol. 7, p. 219 and n., and Queen Victoria to Bulwer Lytton, 24 July 1858, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, p. 376.

  41.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Rebecca Ryves and to Frederick Hale Thomson, 12 June 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 72–4.

  42.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Thomson, 15 June 1858, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 75–6.

  43.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Thomson, 20 June 1858, ibid., vol. 3, p. 85.

  44.See ODNB entries for Hill and Conolly.

  45.Advertisement for Wyke House, The Times, 4 December 1856.

  46.Rosina Bulwer Lytton, A Blighted Life, p. 34.

  47.See Wise, Inconvenient People, pp. 227–8, 426–7.

  48.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Rebecca Ryves, 29 June, 4 and 5 July 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 92, 95–6, 98.

  49.The pamphlet is in the archives at Knebworth, Lytton’s country estate; a copy is also held by the National Library of Scotland, see Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, vol. 34, p. 25, where the title page is reproduced.

  50.See Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton, pp. 62–3.

  51.See ODNB entry for Joseph Levy.

  52.Jane Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle, 12 July 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 34, pp. 37–9.

  53.Ibid., vol. 34, p. 39.

  54.Carlyle to Jane Carlyle, 14 July 1858, ibid., vol. 34, pp. 43–4.

  55.Daily Telegraph, 15 July 1858.

  56.The Times, 14 July 1858.

  57.‘Lady Bulwer Lytton’, The Times, 19 July 1858.

  58.See Summerscale, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, p. 158.

  59.Marx, ‘Imprisonment of Lady Bulwer-Lytton’, New York Daily Tribune, 4 August 1858, Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 15, pp. 599, 600–601.

  60.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Edwin James, 5 August 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 111.

  61.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Robert Lytton, 27 August and 3 November 1858, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 117, 121, 122.

  62.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to the earl of Shaftesbury, 25 October 1858, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 118–19.

  63.Rosina Bulwer Lytton, A Blighted Life, pp. 38, 39, 43, 55.

  64.The Times, 20 July 1858.

  65.Hill’s notes, quoted in Wise, Inconvenient People, pp. 232–3.

  66.Robert Gardiner Hill, letter to the editor of Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 23 July 1858.

  67.See Wise, Inconvenient People, pp. 244–5.

  68.Ibid., p. 247.

  69.‘The Lounger at the Clubs’, Illustrated Times, vol. 7 (17 July 1858), p. 42.

  70.Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton, p. 213.

  71.Disraeli to Lytton, 20 December 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 294.

  72.Lytton to Disraeli, 22 December 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 294n.

  73.Disraeli to Lord Derby, 1 January 1859, ibid., vol. 7, p. 308.

  74.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 22 March 1859, ibid., vol. 7, p. 347.

  75.See ibid., vol. 7, p. 358 and n.

  76.Even Disraeli’s most prominent biographer, Robert Blake, devotes only a dozen pages of his 800-page biography to the Derby–Disraeli ministry of 1858–9, and makes no mention at all of the Great Stink or Disraeli’s achievements in relation to it.

  77.‘Parliamentary Committee: The State of the River Thames’, The Times, 1 July 1858.

  78.Editorial, ibid.

  79.‘The Thames and the House’, letter to the editor, ibid., 2 July 1858.

  80.‘The Thames’, letter to the editor, ibid.

  81.Illustrated London News, vol. 33 (3 July 1858), p. 11.

  82.Punch, vol. 35 (3 July 1858), p. 5.

  83.Ibid., p. 7.

  84.‘The Thames and its Doctors’, Era, 4 July 1858.

  85.The Times, 10 July 1858.

  86.‘State of the Thames: Parliamentary Committee’, ibid., 14 July 1858.

  87.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 8 July 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 220.

  88.Hansard, vol. 151, col. 1508, 15 July 1858.

  89.Michael Faraday, letter to the editor of The Times, 9 July 1855.

  90.See Halliday, The Great Filth, pp. 132, 135.

  91.See Halliday, The Great Stink, p. 43, and ‘Pestilential State of the Thames’, Era, 20 June 1858.

  92.‘Liberty and Tranquillity. The Seine and the Thames’, People’s Paper, 10 July 1858. For Paris’s sanitation problems see Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris.

  93.Hansard, vol. 151, cols 1510–15, 15 July 1858.

  94.Ibid., cols 1522–3.

  95.See Halliday, The Great Filth, p. 205.

  96.Hansard, vol. 151, cols 1525–6, 15 July 1858.

  97.Ibid., cols 1532, 1536–7.

  98.Ibid., cols 1538–40.

  99.‘Purification of the Thames’, Illustrated London News, vol. 33 (24 July 1858), p. 72.

  100.‘Sketches in Parliament’, ibid., p. 88.

  101.Punch, vol. 35 (17 July 1858), p. 22.

  102.Marx to Engels, 29 March 1858, Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 40, p. 295.

  103.Marx to Engels, 15 July 1858, ibid., vol. 40, pp. 328–41. For the original letter in German, see Marx–Engels Werke, 39 vols (Berlin, 1956–68), vol. 29, pp. 340–42.

  104.Engels to Marx, 16 July 1858, Marx–Engels Collected Works, vol. 40, pp. 332 and 619.

  105.Marx to Engels, 28 January and 8 August 1858, ibid., vol. 40, pp. 258, 336; for his articles see ibid., vol. 15, pp. 453–8, 510–14, 533–8, 602–6. For Marx’s life in London see Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (Oxford, 1986).

  106.Queen Victoria, journal, 4 July 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, p. 266.

  107.Ibid., 17 and 18 July 1858, vol. 45, pp. 280, 281.

  108.Hansard, vol. 150, col. 2241, 17 June 1858.

  109.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 8 July 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 219.

  110.See Waddington, The Medical Profession, pp. 123–5.

  111.‘Parliamentary Intelligence’, St James’s Chronicle, 20 May 1858.

  112.‘Topics of the Week’, Era, 11 July 1858.

  113.‘The Triumph of Moses’, Punch, vol. 35 (10 July 1858), p. 12.

  114.‘Punch’s Essence of Parliament’, ibid., vol. 35 (24 July 1858), p. 23.

  115.‘Notes of the Week’, Illustrated London News, vol. 33 (17 July 1858), p. 57.

  116.For an account of the final toing and froing between Lords and Commons over the Oaths Bill, see Disraeli, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 212–13n.

  117.‘Baron Rothschild and the House of Commons’, Era, 1 August 1858. See also Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (London, 1998), p. 548.

  118.‘Gossip of the Week’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1 August 1858.

  119.W. Cusnie, Tit, Tat, Toe: The Three Butcher Boys; or, Harlequin Old Father Thames and Mephistopheles, licensed for performance at the Effingham Saloon on
27 December 1858, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Add MS 52,977D, British Library.

  120.‘Sketches in Parliament’, Illustrated London News, vol. 33 (24 July 1858), p. 88.

  121.Thomas Aspden, Historical Sketches of the House of Stanley, and Biography of Edward Geoffrey, 14th Earl of Derby (London, 1877), pp. 40, 41.

  122.Lord Derby’s speech in the House of Lords, 1 March 1858, see Jones, Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism, p. 231.

  123.Editorial, The Times, 7 June 1858.

  124.Ibid., 11 June 1858.

  Chapter Six: July–August 1858

  1.Irving, Annals of Our Time, p. 522.

  2.George Hodder, Memories of My Time, including Personal Reminiscences of Eminent Men (London, 1870), p. 277.

  3.Thackeray to his mother, 7 January 1848, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 2, p. 333.

  4.For an excellent discussion of the talk at the Punch table, see Leary, The ‘Punch’ Brotherhood, especially chap. 4.

  5.Ibid., p. 81.

  6.Thackeray to James Wilson, late May 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, p. 83.

  7.Anny Thackeray to Amy Crowe, late December 1858, Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, ed. Lillian F. Shankman, Abigail Burnham Bloom, and John Maynard (Columbus, Ohio, 1994), p. 58.

  8.Thackeray to the committee of the Garrick Club, 19 June 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, pp. 93–4.

  9.Yates to the committee of the Garrick Club, 19 June 1858, ibid., vol. 4, p. 94.

  10.Alexander Doland to Yates, 19 June 1858, ibid., vol. 4, pp. 94–5.

  11.Undated fragment of a letter from Dickens to Thackeray, June 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 591.

  12.Yates to the committee of the Garrick Club, 23 June 1858, Thackeray, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, pp. 95–6.

  13.Doland to Yates, 26 June 1858, ibid., vol. 4, p. 97.

  14.Minutes of the Garrick Club committee, 3 April 1858, quoted in Leary, The ‘Punch’ Brotherhood, p. 97.

  15.Thackeray, The Virginians, number 9 (1 July 1858), quoted in Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, p. 98n.

  16.Yates to the committee of the Garrick Club, 1 July 1858, ibid., vol. 4, p. 98; Yates, Recollections and Experiences, vol. 2, p. 23.

  17.See Silver, Punch diary, 1 September and 21 October 1858, 2 March 1859, Add MS 88937/2/13, British Library; for some of these instances, see Leary, The ‘Punch’ Brotherhood, pp. 30, 38.

  18.Percival Leigh, ‘Liberties of the Press’, Punch, vol. 35 (3 July 1858), p. 7.