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

by Kate Summerscale

  Phillimore called Thom’s attention to an entry of 4 July 1854, about his meeting with Isabella at Moor Park. This, too, said the young man, was a ‘highly coloured’ rendition of the facts.

  Finally, Phillimore asked Thom about the entry of 15 July 1854, which included the reference to ‘that tree, which I never see without thinking of my escapade with Mr Thom’.

  ‘The word “escapade”,’ said John Thom, ‘is inexplicable to me. I remember one day that I was reading under a tree in the garden with Mrs Robinson, when Mr Robinson approached, and Mrs Robinson then ran round a corner, in order apparently to keep out of her husband’s way.’ He categorically denied that any kind of impropriety had ever passed between Mrs Robinson and himself.

  On cross-examination, Thom admitted that he was a friend of Dr Lane: after he had acted as tutor to the Robinson children, he said, Mr Robinson had introduced him to the doctor, with whom he had since remained upon ‘terms of intimacy’.

  With this, the trial was adjourned.

  Over the next three weeks the Robinson case threw the Divorce Court into deeper confusion. When Cockburn, Cresswell and Wightman returned to it on Monday 21 June, Cockburn said that five of the six judges authorised to sit in the court had concluded that they were unable to dismiss Edward Lane from the suit. The one dissenter was the elderly William Wightman, who argued that there was nothing in the wording of the Act to prevent them from doing so. Cockburn, expressing his regret that Wightman was not in accord with the majority, said that the case would proceed as planned. He invited the barristers to sum up.

  Since the judges had agreed that there was no case against Edward, Forsyth was not required to speak. Phillimore, on behalf of Isabella, repeated his argument that the diary was a fabrication; he suggested that his client ‘supposed she was writing a sort of novel, in which she evidently thought the scenes she described would have formed an appropriate climax’. Chambers, for Henry, summarised his case by pointing out that though the diary was ‘undoubtedly written – as women will sometimes write – in a high-flown strain, it appears to be a perfectly accurate account of things that took place. My learned friend has attempted to disparage it by quoting passages relating to Mr Thom, and then placing Mr Thom in the box to deny the correctness of those passages. But Mr Thom does not deny them. He only says they were exaggerated accounts of what really took place.’ Chambers added that Mrs Robinson’s age in 1854 was not fifty but forty-one.

  Cockburn said that the judges would deliver their verdict in just under a fortnight.

  Twelve days later, on Saturday 3 July, a crowd of elegantly dressed ladies squeezed in to the courtroom to hear the conclusion of the Robinson case; but they were soon disappointed. Cockburn announced that he had changed his mind. Like Wightman, he and the other judges now believed that Dr Lane should be dismissed from the suit so that he could appear as a witness. What was more, they had learnt of a Bill to amend the Divorce Act, soon to be presented to Parliament, which would include a clause to allow the dismissal of a co-respondent in a case such as this. Cockburn had decided to adjourn the trial again, to await the passing of the Bill.

  The judges continued to consider other petitions. On Monday 14 June, the first day of the Robinson trial, the court had heard that a Mrs Ward wanted to divorce her drunken, violent husband on account of his adultery, cruelty and desertion. She was ‘a quiet, hardworking woman’, testified their landlady, who after years of ‘ill-usage’ had seemed ‘quite agreeable’ to her husband’s leaving her. The police confirmed that Mr Ward had beaten his wife. But Cresswell pointed out that if Mrs Ward had been glad to see the back of her husband, the court might have to deny the divorce. ‘The act of desertion,’ he noted, ‘must be done against the will of the wife.’ Divorce could not be consensual, nor could it be justified by unhappiness alone. When formulating the new law, the legislature had been keen to avoid the example of the French who, in 1792, had sanctioned divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, with the result that over the next decade one in every eight French marriages was dissolved, nearly three-quarters of them on petitions by wives. Yet Cresswell found a way to give Mrs Ward her freedom. On Wednesday 16 June, after John Thom’s appearance in the Robinson case, Cresswell ruled that she was ‘clearly entitled to a dissolution on the ground of adultery and cruelty, even if there were any doubt about the desertion’. Thanks to the regulations of the new Act, she would be entitled to keep any property that she subsequently acquired.

  The Wards’ marriage was one of nine undone that day, a speed of despatch that prompted questions in the House of Lords. If the judges moved too slowly, they let a rotten union linger in the national consciousness; too fast, and they seemed to be dissolving the institution of marriage before the public’s eyes.

  On 21 June, after the third adjournment of the Robinson trial, Cresswell delivered his verdict in a case originally heard over four days in May: Curtis v Curtis, a wife’s petition for a judicial separation by reason of cruelty. Since it was a plea for separation rather than divorce, Cresswell could judge it alone. As in the Robinson case, the court’s decision turned on the interpretation of a document written by a woman.

  Frances and John Curtis, like Henry and Isabella Robinson, had made an unequal marriage, and Cresswell identified the disparity in the couple’s social status as key to their discord. Fanny’s father was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, the same Inn to which Isabella’s father and grandfather had belonged, while her husband, like Henry, was a civil engineer. Fanny’s parents did not take to John Curtis. On the night before the wedding, John spent four hours quarrelling with his prospective father-in-law about Fanny’s marriage settlement. At parties at Fanny’s parents’ house, John felt he was treated as ‘inferior’. Fanny admitted that her mother and father often referred to her husband’s work as ‘engineering rubbish’, though she claimed it was not said offensively.

  John became increasingly unstable, suffering an attack of ‘brain fever’ in 1850 and developing extreme religious views. In her petition for a separation, Fanny alleged that he also became brutal towards her and the children – for instance, she said, he frequently beat his son ‘with great violence and with heavy and deliberate blows on his face, head and ears’.

  When the case was heard in May, John Curtis’s witnesses included Forbes Winslow, who testified that John had fully recovered from his attack of brain fever. To counter the accusations of violence, John produced a letter from Fanny to her mother, written while the family was resident in New York in 1852 – the children, May and John, were aged three and two.

  The letter described an afternoon on which John reached home to find his children playing with two girls aged four and six, the daughters of a neighbour, while being supervised by a maid. John railed against Fanny for exposing his son and daughter to strangers – ‘all the misery of his life’, he told her, ‘had arisen from immoral habits learnt from other children’. Though she apologised, he became more and more excited about what could befall his children, talking – as she thought – in a ‘disgusting’ and ‘corrupting’ way. She made a sharp remark about his mental state – ‘Really, if things go on in this manner I shall be obliged to put my children under the protection of the Government’ – and instantly regretted it. The furious John banned her from seeing the children, scolded her in front of them and the servant girl, to whom he made a point of serving breakfast before he served his wife. He also tore up and burnt Fanny’s magazines, forbidding her from bringing books and journals into the house without showing them to him first.

  ‘I would to God I could tell what to do,’ wrote Fanny to her mother, ‘but he seems so wrapped up in the children that I do not like to take them away, in spite of anything I may suffer, and I do not see that they are at present threatened … I would to God he would do something that would set me at liberty. I often wish he would strike me, but that he never attempts – indeed, he seemed much kinder for a while; but the plain fact is, that he carries the idea of his authority to a man
ia … I feel my own irresolution and weakness are to be blamed as much as you can blame them, but it is very hard to know what to do.’ She feared that John’s mind was going. ‘The extraordinary mixture of arrogance, self-love, love of power, with religious feeling and enthusiasm, is too much for me to understand,’ she wrote, ‘and especially when, added to all this, there is the occasional breakdown into tears and misery.’ Soon after Fanny’s parents received this letter, her father sailed over to New York and arranged for his son-in-law to be detained in a lunatic asylum.

  When John was released from the asylum some months later, he went to Spain to work as a railroad engineer and then, in 1857, came looking for Fanny and the children at her father’s estate in Ireland. John posted placards in which he offered a £10 reward for information about them. The bills read like lost-property notices, or wanted posters: ‘Mrs Frances Henrietta Curtis, native of England, age 35, height 5 feet 3 inches, figure inclining to stout, hair very dark brown, eyes blue, not very prominent, complexion fair and fresh, eyebrows not strongly marked, nose slightly turned up, front teeth rather large, great expression of countenance, manner self-possessed and quiet.’ Fanny fled to London, where she and the children adopted assumed names. When John tracked them down, she resorted to the law.

  Like Isabella’s diary entries, Fanny’s letter gave the Divorce Court a vivid, subjective glimpse of daily life inside an unhappy marriage. Fanny Curtis was lonely and confused, devoted to her children, and struggling to conform to the role of subservient wife. Though John had submitted the letter as proof that he was not violent, the palpable anguish of Fanny’s words commanded the court’s sympathy. Her wish that John would hit her was the strongest proof of her unhappiness. Her moments of pity for her agitated husband were testament to her capacity for tenderness.

  In the afternoon of 21 June, Cresswell found against John Curtis, granting Fanny the legal separation that she sought. He conceded in his judgment that her ‘excited feelings’ had ‘caused her to give a somewhat highly coloured account’ of her husband’s behaviour – a passionate partiality that was a feature of the petitions before the new court – and he expressed sympathy for John, scorned and bullied by his wife’s family, prey to desperate insecurities and to spiritual obsessions. But he considered that there was ‘an air of truth, sincerity and candour’ about Fanny’s letter, and that it gave ‘a melancholy picture’ of her life. Cresswell granted her petition, ruling that John Curtis had shown ‘a violent and unreasoning exercise of authority … sufficient to excite a well-founded apprehension of further acts of violence’. He declined to adjudicate on whether the children should live with their mother or their father. The Custody of Infants Act had given women (adulteresses excepted) the right to petition for custody, and the new Divorce Court theoretically had the power to grant it. However, Cresswell said, ‘the Legislature has not prescribed any rules or principles by which the Court is to be governed in dealing with this peculiarly delicate subject’. He left the matter to the Court of Chancery, decreeing that for the next three months at least the Curtis children should remain with Fanny.

  But when Fanny Curtis and her father petitioned Chancery for custody, the judge who heard the case took a radically different view. Vice-Chancellor Kindersley found fault in Fanny’s conduct towards John: ‘I believe it is the common case that very few wives do consider sufficiently their solemn obligation of obedience and submission to their husbands’ wishes, even though they be capricious. However harsh, however cruel the husband may be, it does not justify the wife’s want of that due submission to the husband, which is her duty both by the law of God and by the law of man.’ He accepted that John had beaten the children when they grew restless during prayers or at grace, but he ruled that this fell within the bounds of reasonable behaviour. Crucially, he did not trust Fanny’s letter to her mother: she ‘is relating facts in a manner not only exaggerated, but falsely’.

  In allocating custody, Kindersley said, the court could not consider what was in the best interests of the children, or chaos would ensue. Rather, the authority of the father must be paramount. Even John Curtis’s excesses, after all, were his fixations on two tenets of Victorian society: a man’s power over his family and God’s power over man. To preserve the institution of marriage entailed preserving the pre-eminence of the father. Kindersley dismissed Fanny’s petition and granted custody of the children to John.

  Cresswell’s judgment in the Curtis case was guided by compassionate common sense; Kindersley made his ruling with an eye to precedent and principle.

  Just before the Robinson case began, George Combe had discovered that he was even more closely bound up in it than he had thought. In May 1858, Edward Lane wrote to warn him that his name figured prominently in Isabella’s journal. The diary alluded to him often, said Edward, in relation to phrenology and the immortality of the soul. Combe was appalled. To be implicated in Isabella’s moral anarchy could destroy the rectitude that he had carefully preserved over the past decades. For years he had rejected accusations of atheism. Now he was at risk of having them brought home to him in the person of a highly sexed woman to whom he had shown kindness. To be associated with Isabella’s journals, he told Edward, could ‘damage my reputation & ruin the influence of my books’. He insisted that any letters of his that Isabella had quoted were his copyright, and, less plausibly, that any conversations with him might infringe on his rights over his own ideas. He pleaded with Edward to explain more about the references: did he seem to speak blasphemously? Did he come across as irreligious or immoral?

  Combe and his friends had the keenest interest in suppressing Isabella’s unrepentant account of adultery. Her story was a gift to their enemies. She took their ideas to a logical and lurid conclusion: man was an animal, governed only by appetites; there was no immortal soul, so people could behave as they liked without fear of punishment. The diary contained a vision of what society might become if the new, evolutionary view of the world were to take hold.

  Lane, Combe and Robert Chambers lobbied newspapermen for their support. Chambers wrote to Marmaduke Sampson and Eneas Sweetland Dallas at The Times, entreating them to publish a leader in Edward Lane’s defence. In response, Edward received a letter from Mrs Dallas – the former Isabella Glyn, who in 1851 had dined at the Chambers’ house with Isabella Robinson. She assured the doctor that the Times editors ‘were quite alive, from the first’ to the ‘monstrous hardship’ of his position and that a strong editorial to this effect would appear in the paper.

  Eneas Sweetland Dallas’s editorial was published on 6 July, three days after Cockburn had suspended the trial. It argued that Isabella, unable to distinguish her compulsive fantasies from reality, had become haunted by a ‘dreaming world’. She had not deliberately made things up, Dallas suggested, but had submitted to the forces of her unconscious mind. For her, ‘the solid barriers which separate realities from shadows – truth from fiction – the waking from the dreaming world – had no existence. Every wild desire which thrilled through her frame, every vagrant thought which flitted across her disordered brain, was invested with the attributes of personality. She lived in an inner world of her own.’ The diary, Dallas claimed, resembled a chapter from Catherine Crowe’s study of the supernatural, The Night Side of Nature. It dissolved the distinction between memory and imagination.

  ‘Every act of Mrs Robinson’s leaves us nothing but the choice between two conclusions,’ wrote Dallas – ‘either she is as foul and abandoned a creature as ever wore woman’s shape, or she is mad. In either case her testimony is worthless.’ It was a circular argument: by writing about adultery, Isabella had cast herself out of the realm of reason. The words of a self-confessed adulteress – even her confession – could not be trusted.

  The Examiner, a weekly paper run by Marmion Savage, another friend of Edward Lane and a regular at Moor Park, immediately reprinted Dallas’s Times editorial, and also ran an article entitled ‘Defects of the Law – the Case of Robinson v Robinson & Lane
’, which expressed outrage that the court had denied a voice to the doctor, ‘a gentleman of unimpeached respectability and worth’.

  Combe wrote to his friend Charles Mackay, the editor of the Illustrated London News, to ask for his help. Mackay assured him that he had already made up his mind that ‘Mrs Robinson was crazy – & that Dr Lane was entirely innocent’. In the London clubs that he frequented, he added, ‘there is a disposition to exonerate Dr Lane from all blame’. He promised that he would prevent the slightest allusion to the case in his newspaper.

  Charles Darwin told a friend on 24 June: ‘All those, whom I have asked think that Dr L is probably innocent – Mr Thom’s (a very sensible nice young man) evidence; the admitted coldness of Dr Lane’s letters – the absence of all corroborative evidence – & more than all the unparalleled fact of a woman detailing her own adultery, which seems to me more improbable than inventing a story prompted by extreme sensuality or hallucination – altogether make me think Dr Lane innocent & that it is a most cruel case. – I fear it will ruin him. I never heard a sensual expression from him.’ Three days later he wrote to the same friend: ‘I am profoundly sorry for Dr L and all his family, to whom I am much attached.’

  Edward asked Combe to secure him a friendly article in the Scotsman, and he wrote individually to associates in Edinburgh. His name had been ‘dragged through the mire’, he told a lawyer friend on 25 June, in ‘one of the most abominable, the most cruel, & unjust cases that ever came before a Court of Law … My hands have thus been completely tied, & I bid fair to be stabbed in the dark.’ He protested his innocence ‘on the word and honour of a gentleman’. The diary, he explained, was ‘the frantic raving of a monomaniac, who had long been the prey of a severe uterine disease’. He enclosed with his letter copies of the newspaper reports that defended him.