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

by Kate Summerscale

  In a quick monotone, Karslake asked Edward about the supposedly free access to his study.

  The doctor conceded: ‘It was understood that the servants were not to pass through the study when I was there. The servants would generally knock before entering.’

  Karslake asked him to elaborate on the nature of his friendship with Mrs Robinson.

  Edward said that in Edinburgh, ‘the intimacy between my family and the Robinsons sprang up rapidly. We saw them nearly every day. We could hardly be more intimate as friends than we were at this time. Mrs Robinson and I frequently talked together on scientific subjects, on books, on phrenology, and other topics. I wrote her letters when she was absent from Edinburgh; sometimes long letters.’

  Under further cross-examination, Edward agreed that he had given Isabella a locket.

  ‘I once presented Mrs Robinson with a locket, as a gift from my wife, which contained my children’s hair. She and my wife had exchanged lockets. That was at Edinburgh. My wife made her presents of that sort on one or two occasions.’

  He was asked again about his visit to Isabella’s room.

  ‘Mrs Robinson slept in whatever room was vacant when she came to Moor Park. I repeat, that I never remember having been in Mrs Robinson’s room in the morning. I have been in her room in an evening. It was early one evening in 1855. I might have dropped into her room in the evening on more than one occasion but I can’t recollect having done so. On that occasion I met Mr Thom there.’

  Karslake asked whether this was her bedroom.

  ‘It was her sitting room, not her bedroom,’ Edward replied. ‘I was never in her bedroom at any time in the evening.’

  When in 1856 did Mrs Robinson visit, asked Karslake, and had they corresponded since then? He was trying to establish the extent of their conversation after Henry’s discovery of the diaries in May.

  ‘The date of Mrs Robinson’s visit in 1856 was August or September,’ said Edward, slightly changing his previous estimate of late September or October. ‘I may have corresponded with her after that visit. I saw Mrs Robinson last in December 1856.’

  He was asked when he had learnt of Henry Robinson’s decision to take the case to court.

  ‘I did not know for certain, until July 1857, that Mr Robinson had instituted a suit against Mrs Robinson in the ecclesiastical court. I heard of it from my gardener. I saw a report of some proceedings in the November of that year. It was about two lines, I believe, in The Times, stating that a divorce had been obtained. My gardener, John Burmingham, told me his sister had been up as a witness.’ This was Sarah Burmingham, who had also testified on Henry’s behalf in the current case.

  And did he correspond with Mrs Robinson after that?

  ‘I had no communication with Mrs Robinson in 1857,’ said Edward, ‘or with any person in reference to that lady.’

  Bovill rose to re-examine his witness, and asked him to describe more fully what he knew about the divorce suit.

  ‘The report I saw was in The Times of the fourth of December 1857,’ said Edward. ‘It merely stated that the suit was promoted by Mr Robinson against Mrs Robinson by reason of adultery; that Dr Addams was about to open the case for the husband, when the Admiralty Advocate, for the wife, said he would offer no opposition; and that the Court pronounced sentence of divorce.’ By ‘divorce’, here, he meant a divorce a mensa et thoro, a separation; the Admiralty Advocate to whom he referred was Dr Phillimore.

  Cockburn asked Edward whether Isabella had made contact with him when that case was heard in the church court.

  ‘I was not communicated with on behalf of Mrs Robinson when that suit was commenced. I understood I was implicated in the proceedings instituted by Mr Robinson.’

  Bovill reminded Cockburn that the doctor could not have been examined in the suit in the ecclesiastical court.

  Cockburn corrected him: it was true that he could not have been examined ex proprio motu (of his own accord), he said, but if Mrs Robinson had chosen to resist the suit she could have made him a witness.

  Edward was permitted to leave the witness box. He had conducted himself with restraint, refraining from making any attacks on Isabella, calmly denying the charges of adultery. He was courteous, poised, detached, free from rancour, passion or intensity. In his letters to George Combe he had been far more outspoken. Then, he had been keen to persuade Combe of his innocence; now, he had a debt to pay Isabella, who was fighting the divorce petition for his sake.

  Bovill summed up for Isabella. Henry’s case, he said, rested entirely on the diary. ‘I would first observe that it contains no explicit statement of Mrs Robinson’s guilt. Some of the most eminent men in the kingdom have proved that the disease under which she was labouring was likely to excite her imagination, and cause her to imagine what had never taken place. The fact that she had suffered under that disease for several years has also been proved, and the means taken by her and her husband to effect a certain purpose tended to aggravate that disease.’ This was a euphemistic reference to the form of contraception used by Henry and Isabella. Bovill did not specify their method: they might have used a device such as a syringe or a cervical cap, which could cause physical irritation and therefore, it was believed, provoke mental derangement; or it might have been that Henry withdrew before ejaculation, with the same consequences.

  Bovill drew the court’s attention to the diary’s frequent references to the writings of Shelley: it was fair to infer, he said, that Isabella had also been struck with events in Shelley’s life, and with the fact that he had imagined things that had never existed’. He contended that the diary entries were ‘not records of fact but expressions of feeling’, pointing out that the apparently incriminating entry of 7 October 1854, in which Isabella and Edward first kissed, was not composed that day but the next, ‘after a night of sleeplessness and dreaming’.

  Bovill read again several of the diary extracts that tended to show Isabella’s instability, drawing attention to one – dated 25 May, in an unspecified year – in which she claimed to have betrayed Henry a month before their marriage. He argued that Henry’s counsel had failed to incriminate Edward Lane: ‘Several months’ notice has been given of the examination of Dr Lane, yet not a single question could be asked him by Mr Karslake tending to impeach his credit.’ He returned to the central contention of Isabella’s defence, the argument that for a woman to record such disgraceful episodes was itself evidence of madness. ‘If what she described occurred,’ he asked, ‘is it credible that she should day by day have written with her own hand a record of her infamy?’

  Rather, Bovill argued, the erotic passages were experiments in fiction. The extracts relied upon by Henry’s lawyers, after all, were skilfully constructed. When Isabella recounted her first tryst in the Moor Park glade, she did not blurt out her extraordinary news; she began the entry by recreating the innocence of the morning, withholding from the diary her knowledge that Edward desired her. Such entries, Bovill said, suggested that Mrs Robinson was contemplating a novel.

  ‘I hope that “contemplating a novel”,’ said Cockburn, ‘is no sign of a diseased mind.’ There was laughter in the court.

  ‘By no means,’ said Bovill, ‘but the novel she contemplated was connected with events in which she imagined she had taken part. Never before has it been sought to have a lady found guilty of adultery upon such evidence as this.’

  Montagu Chambers then addressed the court on Henry’s behalf: ‘The very journal shows that Mrs Robinson is a sane woman, capable of discussing even the most abstruse and difficult questions. It is the journal of a very romantic but, nevertheless, of a very clever woman, competent to discuss science and subtle subjects.’

  Cockburn interjected: ‘There is not a lunatic asylum where you will not find persons able to do the same.’ The spectators laughed. The judge had dryly pointed out to Bovill that literary aspirations were not in themselves proof of madness; now he reminded Chambers that intellectual sophistication was not evidence of sanity.


  ‘The foundation of the defence,’ continued Chambers, ‘is that Mrs Robinson was labouring under a uterine disease, but that foundation is one of sand. No evidence has been given as to her present state of health, or as to the time when her disease was supposed to have terminated. We do not even know precisely what was the disease with which she was afflicted.’

  He reminded the court of the early entries about Edward Lane. ‘It appears that he was in the habit of reading passages of poetry to Mrs Robinson, and she very clearly records her first love for that gentleman. She called him a handsome man the first time she saw him.’ When Edward ‘made himself free with another woman’, he added, she found him ‘not so agreeable’. To Dr Lane’s credit, said Chambers, he had for several years rejected the advances of Mrs Robinson, responding to her overtures with coldness and reserve. Eventually, though, ‘he unfortunately was not able to resist the temptation that was thrown in his way by the allurements of an agreeable and loving woman’. The fact that no one had seen him act with great familiarity to Mrs Robinson, said Chambers, was only ‘proof that he was a cautious man, and not that he was free from guilt’.

  Cockburn adjourned the trial. The judges, he said, would take time to consider their decision.

  Over the next few days, most of the newspapers that in the summer had been so inclined to exonerate Edward Lane were silent on the subject. The Daily Telegraph, which earlier in the year had described the diary as ‘nonsense in a notebook’, even ran a piece that suggested that the doctor might be guilty: ‘No one reading her journal, with the events of each day minutely recorded, could possibly doubt the truthfulness of what is set down.’ Edward Lane’s evidence, the newspaper argued, had not dispelled the mystery surrounding the case. He had confirmed everything in the diary bar the sex, and his cross-examination had resurrected the prickly question of why Isabella had not denied adultery – and called him as a witness – when the case was heard in the church court. ‘Dr Lane has been lucky enough to be able to avail himself of an Act passed, it would seem, specially for his benefit, by which he is empowered to figure in the witness box, and give testimony to his own innocence. But no one who knows much of human nature will be disposed to give implicit credence to the testimony of a gentleman so peculiarly circumstanced.’ His lawyers’ argument that Isabella was insane, said the Telegraph, was ‘a very convenient theory’.

  Since the summer in which the Robinson trial began, claims of insanity had become highly contentious. In June 1858, the novelist (and hydropathy enthusiast) Edward Bulwer-Lytton had his wife Rosina abducted and forcibly detained in a private asylum after she denounced him as a liar at a public hustings. Rosina was certified insane by John Conolly, the alienist who had treated Catherine Crowe; but when she was re-examined, after a furore in the press, both he and Forbes Winslow declared her sane. Detailed reports also appeared in the newspapers about the apparently unjustified confinements of a Mrs Turner, a Mr Ruck and a Mr Leech. A diagnosis of madness, especially a convenient diagnosis, was now treated with new scepticism.

  A string of troubling cases came before the court in the weeks after Edward Lane gave his evidence. On Saturday 27 November, Sir Cresswell Cresswell returned to the petition of Caroline Marchmont, who wanted a judicial separation from her husband, a former clergyman, on the grounds of his cruelty. She had brought the huge sum of £50,000 to their marriage, her petition explained, and she and her husband had quarrelled about money from the start. Mr Marchmont was in the habit of demanding cash from her, she said, £100 at a time. He would stand over her, ‘very white’, while ‘his eyes flashed fire’. He abused her when she refused him, calling her a ‘hell-fire, spit-fire cat’, a ‘dirty slut’, a ‘drunken faggot’ and worse. Mr Marchmont claimed that he was provoked: his wife was stingy and controlling with her money, suspicious, foul-mouthed and irritating, especially on the (frequent) occasions on which she drank too much sherry.

  Several witnesses testified that Mr Marchmont had repeatedly forced his wife back to the family home (when he found her hiding at her sister’s, for instance, or in a coal hole, or fleeing over a garden wall) but they gave different accounts of the measure of violence with which he did so. Mrs Marchmont said that her husband once broke into their bedroom to find her writing in an account book in which she kept a record of the treatment that she suffered at his hands. He snatched the book and threw it in the fireplace, at which she reached in to the flames to pull it out. According to Mrs Marchmont, he grabbed the book as she rescued it from the hearth and struck her with it, blackening her face. Mr Marchmont claimed that it was she who smacked him in the face with the burning book, so hard that its clasp cut him under the eye. The jury had to decide whether Mr Marchmont had exercised his rights as a husband or acted with cruelty. On 30 November the court found for Mrs Marchmont and she was granted a judicial separation.

  The Saturday Review disapproved, arguing that Mrs Marchmont’s provocations were quite as bad as her husband’s greed and occasional violence. In the interests of the greatest happiness of the many, it insisted, a judicial separation should be granted only in the ‘gravest emergency’: ‘a married couple should endure a very considerable amount of discomfort, incompatibility, personal suffering, and distress, and yet should continue to live together as man and wife’.

  In Evans v Evans & Robinson, a long-running case that came back before the court on 5 December, the husband’s evidence of his wife’s adultery had been gathered by Charley Field, the same private investigator employed by Henry Robinson. Field kept a diary of his surveillance. He hired rooms in Mrs Evans’s apartment block in Marylebone, and arranged for a gimlet-hole to be bored in her sitting-room door; through this, several servants saw her having sex with another man. Their evidence was admissible, the judge said, but he disapproved of Field’s methods of securing it. ‘The people of England,’ declared Baron Martin, who delivered the verdict, found it abhorrent ‘to have men running after them wherever they went and making notes of all their actions.’

  In the Divorce Court on 13 December, Esther Keats, the young wife of the owner of the Piccadilly grocery emporium Fortnum & Mason, confessed to having committed adultery with Don Pedro de Montesuma, a Spanish musician, in hotels in London, Dover and Dublin. Mrs Keats’s counsel argued that Frederick Keats had neglected his wife by leaving her alone in Brighton for long periods while he attended to business in London, and had later condoned her infidelity by allowing her back in to the family home. Mr Keats’s counsel urged the court to dismiss the charge of neglect; otherwise, he said, ‘what would become of the wives of members of Parliament, who for six months in the year went to the House of Commons at four or five in the afternoon and remained till twelve or one in the morning? – what would become of the wives of members of the legal profession, who were absent on circuit for six weeks together?’ If a husband’s absence were justification for a woman’s adultery, many of the middle-class wives of England would be licensed to fornicate. Mr Keats’s petition for divorce was granted, and Don Pedro was ordered to pay him £1,000 in damages.

  On 19 December, Reynolds’s Weekly observed that the cases in the Divorce Court ‘seem to indicate that amongst the high, the moral, the respectable, and the Christian classes … adultery is in a highly flourishing, if not exceedingly rampant, condition’. A week later Queen Victoria wrote to Lord Campbell, the chief designer of the Divorce Act, to ask if he could suppress some of the stories coming out of the court. ‘These cases … fill almost daily a large portion of the newspapers, and are of so scandalous a character that it makes it almost impossible for a paper to be trusted in the hands of a young lady or boy. None of the worst French novels from which careful parents try to protect their children can be as bad as what is daily brought and laid upon the breakfast table of every educated family in England, and its effect must be most pernicious to the public morals of the country.’ Campbell replied, regretfully, that he had no power to limit the newspaper stories. On 10 January he confided to his diary his anxie
ties about the new court: ‘like Frankenstein, I am afraid of the monster I have called into existence’.

  The stories emerging from the Divorce Court were turning out to be disturbing in two ways: bestial in their violence and lust; and uncertain in their meaning. The court was trying to reform the institution of marriage by subjecting it to scrutiny, but seemed to be succeeding only in exposing its contradictions. A broken marriage always generated incompatible narratives, just as a diary always created a partial story. It might not become clear, either by reading private words or by testing a private relationship in a public forum, what had really happened, let alone where justice lay. The cracked-open marriages brought before the court seemed signs of a society in which men and women had become entrenched in separate worlds.

  It took the Divorce Court judges three months to reach a verdict in Robinson v Robinson & Lane. On Wednesday 2 March 1859, a fine, mild, dry day in London, Cockburn, Cresswell and Wightman again gathered on the bench. The light leaked in to the courtroom through the glazed panes in the roof and the fans over the doorways.

  Cockburn addressed the court. In a judgment that the newspapers characterised as ‘elaborate and eloquent’, he proceeded to undo all the arguments that had been brought before him, and to set out a new way of deciding the suit.

  Henry Robinson’s case, he said, rested entirely on the entries in the diary, all the corroborative evidence having been dismissed. The judges had found the journal uncommonly revealing, Cockburn said: Mrs Robinson’s ‘inmost thoughts and feelings, even where one would most have expected secrecy, are set forth without hesitation or reserve’. She emerged from its pages as a ‘woman of more than ordinary intelligence and of no inconsiderable attainments’ who appeared to have had ‘great and sincere affection’ for her children. What she lacked was sound sense and judgment: her imagination was too vivid and her passions too strong.