Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

by Kate Summerscale

  A fortnight before the Robinson trial began, a painting of an adulteress had been put on show in the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy, a mile west of the Divorce Court. The central panel of Augustus Leopold Egg’s triptych showed a middle-class family in their living room, the husband having just learnt that his wife has betrayed him. Like Henry Robinson, this husband has not found his wife’s transgression in the flesh but in writing: he has uncovered her crime by reading a letter. The husband is slumped in a chair, dead-eyed, a leaf of the letter in his hand. Beneath his foot is a portrait of his wife’s lover. The wife lies flung across the richly carpeted floor of the room, her face hidden in shame. Their children, two girls, are momentarily distracted from the house of cards that they are building in the corner, a fragile tower balanced on a book by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Half of an apple lies next to the wife on the floor, an emblem of the apple with which Eve tempted Adam. The other half of the apple, stabbed through with a knife, sits on the table by the husband.

  The panels on either side of this central scene show the family’s fate. The mother and children are divided by the moment of discovery. On the left are the two girls, living together in melancholy poverty; on the right is the adulteress, huddled with a baby under Waterloo Bridge, a mile north of the Divorce Court, a notorious haunt of prostitutes and suicides. Two playbills on the brick arches under the bridge advertise farces about miserable marriages. The more recent of these, Tom Taylor’s Victims, which opened at the Haymarket in London in July 1857, featured an intellectually pretentious woman who despised her businessman husband and flirted with a pale young poet.

  Egg’s painting plunged the viewer into a collapsing marriage, a terrible turning moment. Instead of a title, the triptych was labelled with a fictional diary entry, intensifying the realism and immediacy and incompleteness of its story. ‘August the 4th. Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!’ Like most representations of adultery – and unlike Isabella Robinson’s diary – the painting did not depict the wife’s excited transgression, but her dismal disgrace.

  Yet the message of the painting was equivocal: on the one hand it was a moral work about the awful consequences of adultery; on the other a work of pathos, in which the adulteress and her children were tragic figures. The Times observed that the painting ‘is not easy to read’. The Athenaeum judged it ‘an impure thing’: ‘there must be a line drawn as to where the horrors that should be painted for public and innocent sight begin, and we think Mr Egg has put one foot at least beyond this line’. By giving voice to both sides of the Robinsons’ story, the new court was negotiating the same treacherous boundary.

  See Notes on Chapter 7

  8

  I HAVE LOST EVERY THING

  1856–58

  In May 1856, Isabella’s version of her story had fallen almost silent. The diary stopped at the point at which it was seized. But in a series of letters to George Combe in 1858, she, Edward, Henry and Lady Drysdale outlined the events of the two years between Henry’s discovery and his petition for divorce. In the course of the correspondence, Combe took on the role of a kind of judge, a moral arbiter of the case. The letters that he sent and received, which are held in an archive in the National Library of Scotland, hover between the private and public realms, the world of the diary and the world of the court. They reveal how and why the case came to trial, in spite of the potentially terrible consequences for all concerned.

  In June 1856, Isabella recovered from her illness and returned from France with her eldest son. Henry refused to allow her back into the family home, so she and Alfred, who was now fifteen, stayed briefly in Albion Street, a small, smart terrace north of Hyde Park, and then moved twenty miles south, to a cottage in the market town of Reigate, Surrey. In the ‘gloom & solitude’ of their two rented rooms, wrote Isabella, she descended into a ‘deep & continued sorrow’. She had been cast out of society and separated from her beloved Otway and Stanley. Her younger sons, she said, had been ‘dragged’ from her side as she lay shattered by illness. Henry retained all of the furniture and other goods that she had brought to the marriage, as well as her diaries, poems, essays and correspondence, among them her letters from Edward Lane.

  ‘I have lost every thing,’ she wrote, ‘but I was careless & thoughtless, & so deserved to suffer.’ For many months, she was ‘in a state bordering on distraction, & seriously contemplated self-destruction’. She said that only the hope of one day being reunited with her children saved her from suicide.

  In the autumn she visited Moor Park and told Edward about what had happened in Boulogne, warning him that Henry was intent on revenge: having taken almost everything that she held dear, he now wanted to bring about her public disgrace and the destruction of the family she admired. And he wanted money.

  Henry hated and envied Edward Lane, Isabella explained to Combe. ‘He resolved if possible to ruin him. He said publicly that he would shut up Moor Pk.’ He also believed, she said, that if he blackened Isabella’s name he would be able to retain much of her property and keep her as ‘a poor pensioner on his bounty’. Henry told her that he intended to allow her only £100 a year on which to live.

  Henry consulted solicitors. His first plan was to sue Edward for damages on the grounds of his ‘criminal conversation’ with Isabella, who by law was her husband’s chattel, but his lawyers advised him not to commence proceedings straight away. They presumably told him that he had no chance of winning with only the diary as evidence, since the law then required two witnesses to prove adultery. In December 1856 he hired ex-Inspector Charley Field to gather further evidence against his wife.

  Edward was still running the spa at Moor Park, while suffering from renewed attacks of dyspepsia. When he discovered that Henry’s agent had been questioning his servants, he wrote to Isabella. He sent his letter via a lawyer called Gregg, a former patient at Moor Park, and Isabella replied in the same way. This system concealed the correspondence between the pair, cloaking their exchanges in envelopes addressed to or penned by a third party, and so eluding – for instance – the attention of curious servants, or the inquiries of a wife or mother-in-law. Edward hoped to keep the story from Mary and Lady Drysdale. He arranged to meet Isabella to discuss their situation.

  Edward and Isabella suspected that Henry intended to obtain a judicial separation. Isabella assured Edward that if Henry sued for a separation, she would accept the charge of adultery. By this means, she would spare Edward from being involved in the case, making it possible that his part in the story would remain a secret. Edward’s last words to her, she later said, were that ‘come what would, he should know that he suffered unjustly’. As the author of the incriminating diary, she accepted that the fault was all hers.

  Neither Edward nor Isabella expected Henry to seek a full divorce, which under the system then in place was extraordinarily complicated and expensive. A cuckolded husband had to be granted a separation in the Consistory Court in Doctors’ Commons; to be awarded damages in the Court of the King’s Bench; and then to secure a private Act of Parliament to end the marriage. The cost could run to thousands of pounds. Only 325 such divorces had been granted between 1670 and 1857, an average of fewer than two a year.

  Since the early 1850s, though, Parliament had been debating how to change the law to make the procedure fairer, cheaper, more consistent and transparent. This would entail a transfer of power from the ecclesiastical court in Doctors’ Commons – described by Dickens as a ‘cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family party’ – to a new secular court. Henry’s lawyers advised him that if he secured a separation under the existing ecclesiastical system, he would be well placed to win a full divorce if a secular court were established by Parliament.

  In April, Henry petitioned for a formal separation from his w
ife, and the citation was served on Isabella at the end of the month.

  George and Cecy Combe were staying at Moor Park in July 1857, when Edward Lane learnt about Henry’s petition and finally revealed to his wife and mother-in-law the disaster that might descend on them all. They hid their distress from their guests. Combe merely noted in his diary that both his hostesses had fallen ill. ‘Mrs Lane is still in bed from a Sun-stroke received at the zoological gardens on 14th July,’ he wrote on 25 July. ‘Lady Drysdale is taken ill, her pulse 120, with great derangement of the digestive system.’ The women’s ailments, he wrote, ‘make us sad’.

  This was the Combes’ second visit to Moor Park. George suffered from digestive problems, and Cecy from nervous depression and anxiety. They enjoyed their month at the spa. The wheat and rye in the neighbourhood were under the sickle, George noted, and the brambleberries and lime trees in blossom. The guests picked huge figs from the espaliered trees in the walled garden, and at night gathered glowworms from the paths. ‘Cecy & I walked in the Dell,’ George wrote on 25 July, ‘& enjoyed the balmy zephyrs & beautiful landscape. We reposed long on the dry turf, & she sung old English melodies which are my delight.’

  The occasional despatch from the outside world intruded on the Combes’ peace. On 9 July, George observed that the papers were full of the trial of Madeleine Smith, a Glaswegian architect’s daughter accused of poisoning a lover who had refused to return her incriminating love letters. In these letters Miss Smith had seemed to rejoice in her sexual transgression, noted the judge, ‘alluding to it, in one passage in particular, in terms which I will not read, for perhaps they were never committed to paper as having passed between a man and a woman’. Her conduct was shocking enough, but far worse was the pleasure that she took in recalling it. Combe wrote: ‘the base of the brain must have been generally large & the coronal region deficient’. These were the same characteristics – the large organ of Amativeness and the small organ of Veneration – that he had identified in Isabella.

  By 3 August, the day of the Combes’ departure, Mary and her mother seemed to have recovered. The Lanes and Lady Drysdale gathered with their guests to see off their eminent friends. One patient, a sixty-year-old widow from Aberdeen-shire, begged a lock of hair from Combe. Cecy was amused by the request, especially when George struggled to supply his admirer with a strand: ‘one could scarcely be found,’ he wrote, ‘the locks are so scanty and short’. On this comic note, the affectionate old couple took their leave of the residents of Moor Park, and set off in a carriage for the railway station.

  Edward’s family had succeeded so far in concealing their plight, but Henry Robinson was working against them. Within a few days of the Combes’ departure from Moor Park, Henry called on Robert Chambers in Edinburgh and produced Isabella’s diary, explaining that he had come upon it by accident while fetching something for her from her writing desk. ‘9 August’, recorded Chambers in his own journal. ‘Mr H. O. Robinson called in the evening, and read me extracts from his wife’s journal, revealing the progress of her guilty affection for ——– ——. A singular expose, which kept me up for three hours with unabated interest.’ Even in his own diary, Chambers blanked out Edward Lane’s name, alive to the possibility that this private record too might become public. Though Henry asked Chambers to keep the matter a secret for the time being, he confided the story to other acquaintances in Edinburgh.

  Later that month, as Henry had hoped, Parliament passed an Act to establish a secular divorce court, with procedures that put a full dissolution of marriage within his reach. By making divorce more widely available, Lord Palmerston’s government aimed to reduce the number of ‘irregular unions’ in the country, enabling women legitimately to escape violent husbands and men to rid themselves of unfaithful wives. The court was scheduled to open in 1858.

  In the meantime, Henry proceeded with his suit in Doctors’ Commons and enrolled Otway and Stanley as boarders at Tonbridge School in Kent; he gave his name in the register as the Rev. Henry Oliver Robinson, perhaps in the hope that this would disguise his identity when the separation case came to court. Tonbridge was a traditional boys’ public school, with about 160 pupils. The head was ‘a strict master’, according to a contemporary: ‘the cane was always within reach.’ Otway was selected for the thirteen-a-side football team, which played an unusually ferocious form of the game: ‘anyone running with the ball may be collared, charged, hacked over, or tripped up’, read Rule 13.

  On 3 December 1857, the Consistory Court at Doctors’ Commons, an ancient yard next to St Paul’s Cathedral, was presented with Henry Robinson’s petition for a divorce a mensa et thoro – a divorce from bed and board, or a judicial separation. His evidence, which was heard in private, consisted of the diary extracts and the testimony of two Moor Park servants. Henry’s petition was one of the last, perhaps the very last, to be heard under the old system. Isabella, as she had promised Edward, did not resist the suit. Her counsel rose to say that he felt that he could offer no opposition on her behalf. The court granted Henry his separation and The Times reported the case in a few lines the next day, making no mention of the circumstances of the adultery or the name of the alleged adulterer.

  Under the terms of her marriage settlement, Isabella kept her private income after the separation, though she no longer accrued as much interest on her funds. An economic crisis in late 1857 had reduced the value of many investments. She now received about £390 a year, which after Alfred’s expenses of £150 left her, she said, with ‘scarcely enough to live as a gentlewoman’ – £300 a year was considered the minimum required to run a middle-class household with one servant. While living with Henry, Isabella had been among the most affluent of her class; now she had almost dropped out of it altogether. Henry hoped to reduce her income still further.

  Henry was staying in Balmore House that month, with Otway and Stanley, who were home for the holidays, and with one of his two illegitimate daughters, whom he planned to introduce to society in Reading. On 12 December, nine days after securing his separation from Isabella, he wrote to Robert Chambers to give him permission to divulge the details of the diary to their friends in Edinburgh. Chambers told the story of Isabella’s ‘impassioned and disgusting’ escapades to George Combe, who relayed it to his friend Sir James Clark.

  Clark, who had treated Keats in Rome during his final illness, was one of Queen Victoria’s favourite physicians; it was he who had arranged for Combe to read the heads of the Royal children. Combe apologised profusely to him for having introduced him to the inhabitants of Moor Park, adding that though he had no doubt that Isabella was to blame for the affair, the doctor would ‘pay a sad penalty’. Combe noted that Henry Robinson was said not to have ‘reverenced the conjugal vow’ himself.

  Edward was in London for Christmas, in a six-storey Georgian house in Devonshire Place, Marylebone. With him were his wife, his mother-in-law, his children and his three brothers-in-law. George Drysdale was now a practising physician, having received his medical degree in Edinburgh in 1855, and Charles was a medical student at University College London, having abandoned his career as an engineer in the same year.

  On 28 December 1857, Edward learnt that the rumour of his misconduct was abroad, and he wrote to Combe the next day with a ‘full, flat, peremptory, & indignant denial’ of the affair with Isabella. He claimed that he could not account for the diary entries about him – Isabella must have been ‘half out of her mind’, he said. She had not resisted the judicial separation, he told Combe, because ‘she had done me an incalculable injury, & she determined that, at whatever cost, she wd not add to it by mixing up my name publicly with such a scandal’. Two days later – on 1 January 1858 – Lady Drysdale followed this up with her own letter to the Combes: ‘You will believe my solemn words when I declare that Lane is most perfectly innocent – nay that when Mary and I often urged the necessity of having the unfortunate woman … as she had such an unhappy home, Lane was always loath to yield to our entreaties consi
dering her a bore.’

  Edward went to Edinburgh to defend himself in person, catching the express train that left London at 9.15 a.m. on Saturday 2 January, and reached the Scottish capital at about 10 p.m. The next morning, he spent two and a half hours talking to George Combe at his house in Melville Street. Edward fiercely protested his innocence. Isabella’s diary entries were fantasies, he said: her religious doubts had thrown her ‘clean off the rails of common sense & common propriety’. In her journal’s pages ‘fact and fiction were recklessly jumbled together’ and ‘a loose rein was too frequently given to a prurient & diseased imagination’. He claimed that he had not flirted with Isabella in Edinburgh; in fact, he had always taken a book with him on their carriage rides to the coast in order to have a means of escape from her ‘facile’ conversation. ‘I never wrote a line to Mrs R,’ he said, ‘which might not be proclaimed at the market cross.’ The doctor said that he was eager to sue Henry for defamation, but his solicitor had advised him against doing anything that would publicise the story, since his reputation ‘would be ruined equally by success as by failure’.

  Edward’s indignation was genuine. Isabella’s experience of their relationship probably bore little resemblance to his own. The sentimental terms in which she recounted their trysts, the passion and longing that she attributed to him, may indeed have struck him as fantasies, derived more from romantic literature than reality. In the rhapsodic rhetoric of some of her diary entries she may even have implied that they had sexual intercourse when they did not. She had also been careless: by writing her diary and leaving it lying around, she seemed to have wantonly inflicted pain on him and his family. Edward’s only recourse was to pit his word against the diary’s words, to insist that Isabella had made it all up. He turned on his former friend. She was ‘a rhapsodical & vaporing fool’, he wrote, ‘a vile & crazy woman’ given to ‘moonshine lucubrations’.