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

by Kate Summerscale

  Combe was ‘deeply mortified’ … cause of religious freedom’. Letter GC to Charles Bray, 15 Nov 1854.

  ‘Bible of the Brothel’. Cited in William H. Johnson’s Life of Charles Bradlaugh, MP (1888).

  Among the neo-Malthusians … See Tomoko Sato’s ‘E. W. Lane’s Hydropathic Establishment at Moor Park’ in the Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 10, (1978).

  She was ‘a treasure … remarkably modest’. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. IV (1967), ed. Ernest de Selincourt, p. 495.

  She asked her husband … and their future children. Account of John Wordsworth’s behaviour in letter from Henry Curwen to his son Edward, dated 30 Jan 1846, Curwen archive, Whitehaven, DCu/3/31. ‘The old Poet I know has altered his will,’ Curwen wrote, ‘& left all to Isabella’s children, out of his JW powers, and I have done the same.’

  He wrote to his son-in-law … In William Wordsworth: a Biography (1965) Mary Trevelyan Moorman makes a cryptic reference to this letter: ‘A letter from old Mr Curwen exists,’ she writes, ‘in which John is unmercifully abused,’ p. 598. She had evidently read the letter, but she gave no clue to its whereabouts nor any detail of its contents. Even a century later, it seems, a biographer of Wordsworth felt bound to protect his family’s honour.

  Isabella continued to correspond … Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1855.

  ‘sweet, mournful little note … they missed each other. IHR’s journal, 27 Apr 1855.

  ‘I have found more employment … to prepare.’ Letter IHR to GC, 28 Feb 1855.

  Unknown to Henry … HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint in the Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.

  Henry’s house was Italianate in design … kitchen. Details from Balmore House sale catalogues (1861 and 1865), Reading Central Library.

  As soon as Isabella … a fortnight’s water therapy. EWL’s testimony to Divorce Court, 23 Nov 1858.

  The establishment at Moor Park … Letter IHR to GC, 4 Nov 1855.

  douche the vagina with a syringe. The syringe is recommended, for instance, in Charles Knowlton’s bestselling Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married People (1832). See also Angus Maclaren’s Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (1978).

  ‘It is very far from finished …’ Letter IHR to GC, 4 Nov 1855.

  Queenwood School … See ‘A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Experiment in Science Teaching’ by D. Thompson in Annals of Science, Vol. 2, (1955).

  ‘long been on the worst of terms … be called sane’. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  marital bond as a ‘superstition’ … Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.

  Mrs Norton set out the injustices … to destroy’. See A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855).

  ‘one of the chief instruments for the degradation of women …’ See Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion (1854).

  the longest and gravest diphtheria epidemic … See Ernest Abraham Hart, ‘On Diphtheria’ (1859), a pamphlet reprinted from The Lancet.

  ‘Boulogne sore throat’. A French physician had dubbed it ‘diphtheria’ in 1855; the term derived from the Greek word diphthera, meaning leather, a reference to the thick, dry throat membrane that characterised the condition. See Charles Creighton’s A History of Epidemics in Britain (1891).

  As she lay in her bed … HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

  BOOK II: OUT FLEW THE WEB

  CHAPTER 7: IMPURE PROCEEDINGS

  ‘The Robinsons married in 1844 … Details of the trial of Robinson v Robinson & Lane are taken from reports in The Times, Morning Chronicle, Liverpool Mercury, Manchester Times, Reynolds Newspaper, The Era, Daily News, Daily Telegraph, Observer, Caledonian Mercury and The Morning Post published 15–22 Jun 1858; 5–6 Jul 1858; 27–30 Nov 1858; and 3 Mar 1859; and from Swabey and Tristram’s Reports. Most of the quotations from counsel are attempts to translate back into direct speech the continuous prose of the legal and press accounts. For instance, the line given in Reports as: ‘He proposed to put in evidence certain diaries written by Mrs Robinson’ is here given as ‘I propose to put in evidence certain diaries written by Mrs Robinson.’

  The three judges … See entries in ODNB; (Michael Lobban on Cockburn, Joshua S. Getzler on Cresswell); Edward Foss’s Biographia Juridica: A Biographical Dictionary of the Judges of England from the Conquest to the Present Time (1870); Mr Serjeant Robinson’s Bench and Bar, Reminiscences of One of the Last of an Ancient Race (1894); Justin McCarthy’s Reminiscences: Vol. II (1899); and John Duke Coleridge’s memoirs.

  The judges had decided … This was one of twenty-two cases – for divorce or for judicial separation – to be heard before the full court without a jury in 1858.

  The sun funnelled … Description of the architecture, the judges’ bench and the spectators from an engraving of the new divorce court at Westminster Hall published in the Illustrated London News, 22 May 1858, and from the series ‘Divorce a Vinculo’, Once a Week; Vols I & II (1860).

  The temperature climbed … See The Annual Register 1858 (1859) and reports in The Times.

  Mr Chambers … For Montagu Chambers, see his obituary in The Law Times, 1885, and lithograph after Robert Samuel Ennis Gallon, 1852 or after, printed by M. and N. Hanhart, NPG.

  In moments of impatience … ‘Divorce a Vinculo’, Once a Week.

  The Divorce Court investigated adultery … Barbara Leckie argues in Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper and the Law, 1857–1914 (1999) that the partial perspectives of the Divorce Court narratives influenced the emergence of the unreliable narrator in English fiction; her book includes a chapter on the Robinson case.

  The law required … to this effect. See Richard Thomas Tidswell and Ralph Daniel Makinson Littler’s The Practice and Evidence in Cases of Divorce and other Matrimonial Causes (1860).

  Proximate acts might include … Ibid.

  ‘The testimony of discarded … and alarm.’ John J. J. S. Wharton, ‘An Exposition of the Laws Relating to the Women of England, showing their Rights, Remedies and Responsibilities’ (1853), quoted in Stone’s Road to Divorce (1990).

  Most of the petitioners … The Parliamentary Papers: Accounts & Papers 1859, Vol. 19, paper 131, reports that the earliest of the 356 instances of adultery alleged in the court (by men and by women) in its first eighteen months took place in 1833; most, though, were from the 1850s – 30 in 1853, 27 in 1854 (including Isabella and Edward’s), 32 in 1855, 41 in 1856, 53 in 1857, and 53 in 1858.

  The new law stipulated … bourgeois society. See David M. Turner’s Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (2002); Ann Sumner Holmes’s ‘The Double Standard in the English Divorce Laws, 1857–1923’ in Law and Social Inquiry, Vol. 20 (1995); and Lynda Nead’s Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian England (1998). The issue of whether men and women should be equal under the divorce law had been debated in the Houses of Lords and Commons. In a vote in the Lords on 25 May 1857, the motion to approve a distinction in the divorce laws between men and women was carried by 71 to 20; in the Commons on 7 Aug it was carried by 126 to 65. George Drysdale objected to the double standard by which ‘For a man to indulge his sexual appetites illegitimately, either before or after the marriage vow, is thought venial; but for a woman to do so, is the most heinous crime.’ Women were granted equal rights in divorce in 1923, soon after they won the vote.

  ‘a light literature entirely based … Saturday Review, Jul 1857.

  a notorious haunt of prostitutes and suicides. Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844) had forged the association of this spot with sexual transgression and self-destruction. The poem commemorated the suicide of a prostitute washed up on this bank of the river: ‘Still for all slips of hers,/ One of Eve’s family – / Wipe those poor lips of her/ Oozing so clammily.’ The fallen woman was redeemed and purified by her remorse and death, but also preserved as an object of grues
ome erotic fascination. John Everett Millais made an etching inspired by the poem in 1858.

  CHAPTER 8: I HAVE LOST EVERYTHING

  Henry refused to allow her back … HOR’s answer to IHR’s Bill of Complaint, Court of Chancery, 17 Apr 1858, NA, C15/550/R24.

  moved twenty miles south … Letter IHR to GC, 26 Feb 1858.

  ‘gloom & solitude’ … shattered by illness. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  ‘I have lost every thing … Ibid.

  His first plan was to sue … Ibid. ‘He tried, in the autumn of ’56 a direct legal attack; that, of course, failed’.

  a lawyer called Gregg … This may have been the William Gregg who read Law at Edinburgh University with Edward, graduating with an MA in 1844.

  Neither Edward nor Isabella … See letters IHR to GC, 21 and 26 Feb 1858.

  The cost could run to … This cost was estimated at anything between £200 and £5,000, according to Gail L. Savage’s ‘The Operation of the 1857 Divorce Act, 1860–1910: A Research Note’ in Journal of Social History (1983). The cost of a separation was far lower: Stephen Lushington, a judge in the Consistory Court, estimated in 1844 that the minimum cost of an uncontested suit was £50, rising to a maximum of £800 for a contested suit. See Stone’s Road to Divorce (1990), p. 188.

  ‘cosey, dosey, old-fashioned … Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

  ‘Lady Drysdale is taken ill … This and subsequent quotations from GC’s journal, 3 Jul–3 Aug 1857.

  George suffered from digestive … anxiety. See Stack’s Queen Victoria’s Skull, p. 156.

  In these letters Miss Smith … From F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Trial of Madeline Smith (1927), quoted in Leckie’s Culture and Adultery (1999).

  Within a few days … unabated interest. RC’s journal, RC papers, NLS.

  Though Henry … acquaintances in Edinburgh. Divorce Court file, NA, J77/44/R4.

  In the meantime … case came to court. See Register of Tonbridge School (1893).

  Otway was selected … Rule 13. See The Tonbridgian of October 1861 and D. C. Somervell’s A History of Tonbridge School (1947).

  Henry’s petition … under the old system. For workings of the ecclesiastical courts, see Stone’s Road to Divorce (1990).

  The Times reported the case in a few lines … The Times, 4 Dec 1857.

  ‘scarcely enough to live as a gentlewoman’. IHR’s petition to the House of Lords Select Committee on Appeals, 6 Jun 1861, HLA. Her brother Frederick invested her settlement in Three Per Cent Consols (government bonds). Though she asked him to invest instead in stocks that might achieve a higher rate of return, he refused. After an international commercial crisis in 1857, he may have felt it incumbent upon him to be cautious on her behalf. See IHR’s response of 4 Mar 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

  £300 a year was considered the minimum … According to R. D. Baxter’s National Income (1868).

  Henry was staying … society in Reading. Letter IHR to GC, 21 Feb 1858.

  ‘impassioned and disgusting’ … Letter GC to Mrs Tennant, the half-sister of Mary Lane, 28 Dec 1857.

  ‘reverenced the conjugal vow’ himself. Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857.

  ‘half out of her mind … such a scandal.’ Letter EWL to GC, 29 Dec 1857.

  ‘You will believe my solemn words … Letter Lady D to GC, 1 Jan 1858.

  Edward went to Edinburgh … Letter EWL to GC, 31 Dec 1857.

  He claimed that he had not flirted … Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 4 Jan 1858.

  I never wrote a line to Mrs R … Letter EWL to GC, 11 Jan 1858.

  She was ‘a rhapsodical & vaporing fool … Letters EWL to GC, 5 Feb and 17 May 1858.

  ‘the consummation of human meanness … Letter EWL to GC, 17 May 1858.

  ‘anxious to escape … Letter EWL to GC, 29 Dec 1857.

  Combe … the doctor’s honour. Letter GC to HOR, 12 Jan 1858.

  She ‘professed a great … all interest for us’. Letters GC to Sir James Clark, 19 Dec 1857 and 4 Jan 1858.

  ‘an extraordinary … her own infamy’. Letter Sir James Clark to GC, 22 Jan 1858.

  ‘by devoting himself … a victim.’ Letter from M. B. Sampson to GC, 9 Jan 1858.

  Disingenuously … private and confidential’. Letter HOR to GC, 4 Jan 1858.

  ‘Now, your offer … his defence.’ Letter GC to HOR, 18 Jan 1858.

  ‘you have acted towards me … malignant’ manner. Letter EWL to GC, 5 Feb 1858.

  136 ‘I speak to you … much moment’. Ibid.

  ‘May I … our only safety.’ Letter from Lady D to GC, 2 Mar 1858.

  When the Court of Divorce … See Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers 1859, Vol. 22, paper 106.

  The new court conducted … before 1858. Tidswell and Littler’s Practice and Evidence (1860).

  In February 1858, Henry served papers … HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

  On 22 April, Isabella … Edward did the same. Isabella’s solicitor was Francis Hart Dyke, Queen’s Proctor, a former practitioner in Doctors’ Commons; Edward’s was John Young of Desborough, Young & Desborough, in the City of London.

  Edward organised for the diary … Letter EWL to GC, 26 May 1858.

  In the first five months … The Birmingham Daily Post reporting on recently published Parliamentary Return, 25 Jun 1858. According to Parliamentary Papers: Accounts and Papers 1859, Vol. 22,302 petitions for a full dissolution of marriage were presented to the court in its first fifteen months. Of these, 244 were filed in 1858, according to Vol. XXVI: Return of Proceedings (Session 1).

  On 12 May, a solicitor … See Daily News, 13 and 14 May 1858, and Swabey and Tristram’s Reports.

  ‘Everybody with whom …’ See Daily News, 28 May 1858.

  Even Queen Victoria … See Roger Fulford’s Dereast Child: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal Previously Unpublished (1964), p. 99.

  CHAPTER 9: BURN THAT BOOK, AND BE HAPPY!

  Lord Brougham may have been aware … Brougham also had first-hand knowledge of mental illness – he was afflicted by spells of hypochondriacal depression and mania; his sister was insane and his wife had suffered from nervous illness ever since the birth of their second daughter in 1822. Henry Brougham had several affairs and in 1826 paid the courtesan Harriette Wilson to keep his name out of her memoirs (see Michael Lobban’s entry in ODNB).

  He enjoyed the limelight … court. The Daily Telegraph of 17 Jun 1858 noted that this was the first case heard before the new court to be reported in detail in the press.

  Caroline Suckling … a distant relative of Lord Nelson. See William R. O’Byrne’s A Naval Biographical Dictionary (1849).

  Combe described … her mother advice’. GC’s journal, 28 Aug 1856.

  Phillimore was probably … repentant self-flagellation. See H. C. G. Matthew’s Gladstone (1997), pp. 90–95.

  I might, for instance … that he masturbated. William Acton alluded to this in his Functions and Disorder of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (1857) when he wrote that Rousseau ‘pries into his mental and moral character with a despicably morbid minuteness’, a ‘hideous frankness’ that perpetuated the condition it described. Quoted in Stephen Marcus’s The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966), p. 24.

  The edition of 1848 omitted … regret their loss’. From a review of the third edition of the diary in Blackwood’s Magazine, which observed that ‘the great charm of the book is its utter freedom from disguise’. ‘Diary of Samuel Pepys’, Blackwood’s, Vol. 66 (1849).

  Pepys had been edited … honesty. Also edited out of the historical record – by Pepys himself – were the private confessions of Mrs Pepys, as he explained to his diary on 9 Jan 1663. On that day Elizabeth Pepys pulled from a locked trunk a copy of a piece of writing that she had tried to show her husband before. She started to read it aloud. She had written, sa
id Pepys, about ‘the retirednesse of her life and how unpleasant it was’. He was horrified to find that it was written in English (his own diary was encrypted) and therefore ‘in danger of being met with and read by others’. ‘I was vexed at it and desired her and then commanded her to teare it – which she desired to be excused it; I forced it from her and tore it, and withal took her other bundle of papers from her and leapt out of the bed and in my shirt clapped them into the pockets of my breeches that she might not get them from me; and having got on my stockings and breeches and gown, I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it.’ Pepys’s panic and rage was caused by the fact that his wife had written a document that others might read, carrying her private thoughts into a public realm.

  The preface quoted … ‘due to his memory’. According to Kathryn Carter’s analysis of the English Catalogue of Books in this period, in ‘The Cultural Work of Diaries in Mid-Century Victorian Britain’, Victorian Review, Vol. 23 (1997).

  The Diary of an Ennuyée … Jameson was a good friend of Cecy Combe’s cousin Fanny Kemble, and an acquaintance of the Combes.

  pastiche inspired a string of imitations … These included Anne Manning’s The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell: afterwards Mistress Milton (1849); Passages from the Diary of Margaret Arden (1856) by Holme Lee (Harriet Parr); The Diary and Houres of the Ladye Adolie, a Faythfulle Childe, 1552 (1853), ‘edited’ by Lady Charlotte Pepys; and the anonymous Ephemeris: or Leaves from ye Journall of Marian Drayton (1853), The Diary of Martha Bethune Baliol, from 1753 to 1754 (1853); and the Diary of Mistress Kate Dalrymple, 1685–1735 (1856).

  Dinah Mulock … secret journal of a governess. Mulock, Bread upon the Waters (1852).