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

by Kate Summerscale

  All those, whom I have asked …’ Letter CD to William D. Fox, 24 Jun 1854. Darwin was undergoing personal and professional crises of his own: he had just learnt of the existence of an essay that threatened to pre-empt his own theory of natural selection; and his youngest son was extremely ill. On 1 Jul his friends presented his theory in public for the first time at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Darwin was unable to attend as his son, Charles Waring Darwin, had died the previous day.

  ‘I am profoundly sorry …’ Letter CD to William D. Fox, 27 Jun 1858.

  Edward asked Combe … Letter EWL to GC, 30 Jun 1858.

  His name had been ‘dragged … Letter EWL to Thomas Jameson Torrie, 25 Jun 1858, quoted in Benn’s Predicaments of Love, p. 242.

  184 The Daily News demanded … See Daily News, 25 Jun 1858.

  ‘no man is safe … completely ruined.’ See Observer, 20 Jun 1858.

  ‘Dr Lane is an innocent … See The Morning Post, 8 Jul 1858.

  ‘any of our associates with “curls …’ See British Medical Journal, 10 Jul 1858.

  Both Rousseau’s epistolary novel … Rousseau’s modern Heloise, like Isabella in the diary, seduced her lover in a ‘bosquet’, an arbour or grove. Pope’s Eloisa, like the dreaming Isabella, seemed to cleave to a succubus: ‘I hear thee, view thee, gaze o’er all thy charms,/ And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms’.

  ‘The diary stands self-convicted … See Saturday Review, 26 Jun 1858.

  ‘Never, oh never shall I forget … Discussed in Marcus’s The Other Victorians, pp. 197–216.

  glowing with stimulating fires.’ See Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Wordsworth Editions, 2000), p. 31. See Peter Gay’s characterisation of Holywell Street pornography in Education of the Senses: the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Vol. I (1984).

  For weeks now the newspapers had been spewing … See Saturday Review, 26 Jun 1858: ‘A man has neither morally nor, as we think, legally any better right to corrupt the public morals by increasing than by originating the circulation of such publications.’ In Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century (1871), William Forsyth – Edward Lane’s counsel – compared the ‘polluting details’ in the newspaper reports of the Divorce Court proceedings to the licentious passages in eighteenth-century novels; he upbraided editors for allowing ‘this strain of vulgarity, now driven out of fiction, to find a home in their pages’.

  John George Phillimore … drop of English blood.’ See Phillimore’s The Divorce Court: Its Evils and the Remedy (1859), p. 71, in which he observed that Isabella had felt a ‘morbid excitement in gloating over the accumulated proofs of her own licentiousness’.

  In the summer session … Palmerston had long had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He recorded his sexual exploits in a pocket diary. See David Steele’s entry, ODNB.

  ‘The great law which regulates … The author of both was probably the Victorian essayist and lawyer James Fitzjames Stephen, who often railed against the sentimental excesses of Dickens’s fiction. With the rumours now circulating about Dickens’s private life, Stephen’s attacks on his literary dishonesties had a sharper edge.

  ‘Block up one channel … ‘Old Father Thames has got a rival,’ observed ‘Old Bachelor’ in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1859 or 1860: ‘the accumulated filth that floats on his venerable bosom is not so noxious as the poison that is daily distributed under the sanction [of] our Christian legislature. And to what do we owe this scandal? To ourselves – to our accommodating morals – to the manner in which we educate our women – to the fearful license we grant them.’ Quoted in Leckie’s Culture and Adultery (1999), p. 71.

  ‘The deathpot boils … the River Thames.’ See Illustrated London News, 26 Jun 1858.

  George and Cecy Combe … Letter GC to EWL, 2 Jun 1858.

  During their stay … Jane Welsh Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle, 27 Jun 1858, Carlyle letters online, carlyleletters.dukejournals.org.

  Upon the adjournment … had placed upon them. GC’s journal, 12 Jul 1858.

  Bertie was ‘much improved … our civilisation.’ Letter GC to Sir James Clark, 12 Aug 1858.

  If the amendment to the Divorce Act … Letter J. B. Stewart to GC, 3 Jul 1858.

  ‘This is my dear Cecy’s … than the whole family.’ GC’s journal, 25 Jul–14 Aug 1858 and Charles Gibbon’s The Life of George Combe, the Author of ‘The Constitution of Man’ (1878).

  On 15 August the undertakers … See Stack’s Queen Victoria’s Skull, p. 2.

  CHAPTER 12: THE VERDICT

  Bovill resembled a benign … See print of Bovill in NPG, and The Reminiscence of Sir Henry Hawkins, Baron Brampton, Vol. II (1904), ed. Richard Harris.

  In a quick monotone … E. H. Coleridge’s The Life and Correspondence of John Duke Coleridge: Lord Chief Justice of England (1904).

  could have made him a witness. The issue of whether Lane could have appeared at the church court was the source of some confusion. In The Times, Cockburn was reported as saying he ‘could have been examined’ of his own accord, but this was a misprint: Cockburn had actually said that Lane could not volunteer to testify. Lane’s solicitors pointed this out in a letter to the paper on 29 Nov.

  ‘nonsense in a notebook’. See Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1858.

  ‘No one reading her journal …’ See Daily Telegraph, 24 Nov 1858.

  Detailed reports also appeared in the newspapers … See Nicholas Hervey’s ‘Advocacy or Folly: the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society, 1845–63’ in Medical History, Vol. 30 (1986). In Aug 1858, in a letter quoted in the British and American papers, Charles Dickens tried to restore his damaged reputation by describing his estranged wife Catherine as suffering from a ‘mental disorder’.

  A string of troubling cases … Accounts of cases from Swabey and Tristram’s Reports and from articles in The Times and Daily News.

  The Saturday Review disapproved … Saturday Review, 4 Dec 1858. Condonation and connivance remained bars to divorce for another century. In order to get a divorce, an ‘innocent’ husband or wife had to prove the guilt of his or her spouse; the evidence often consisted of staged assignations in hotel rooms. An Act of 1969 opened the way to consensual divorce.

  A week later Queen Victoria wrote … See Letters of Queen Victoria: a Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861 (1907), quoted in the Report of Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (1912).

  In a judgment that the newspapers … John Thom pointed out to The Times, 5 Mar 1859, that it had misquoted Cockburn: ‘his Lordship is made to say that Mrs Robinson wrote “to” me in the most impassioned language, saying that “passion clung to her heartstrings” &c. This is a mistake. Mrs Robinson never addressed me in such a manner. She may have written “of” me in such terms in her diary, which is a very different thing.’

  The judges had found no evidence … Forbes Winslow, in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, Vol. 12 (1859), expressed his annoyance that Cockburn had dismissed the medical testimony out of hand, and had made the unfounded assertion that sex maniacs always confessed their obsessions to others.

  Such entries could hardly be construed … After the publication of the anonymous erotic memoir My Secret Life in the 1880s, many questioned whether it was a work of fact or fantasy. Those who argued for its authenticity pointed to the frequently mundane detail in the book, and to the scenes in which the author chronicled his sexual failures and disappointments. See Marcus’s The Other Victorians.

  Bovill asked the court … allowances granted to the witnesses. IHR’s petition to House of Lords Select Committee on Appeals, 6 Jun 1861, HLA. For expenses see: A Handy Book on the New Law of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes (1860).

  ‘it is enough to state … discussion last summer.’ See the Examiner, 5 Mar 1859.

  Medical Times and Gazette … In the edition of 12 Mar 1859.

  ‘nothing could be clearer … altogether insane’. Collected in John Paget’s Par
adoxes and Puzzles (1874). Even in 1910, the barrister H. E. Fenn wrote in his memoir that the Divorce Court always looked upon a wife’s confession of adultery ‘with very grave suspicion, and does not, in any case, act upon it without full corroboration, and quite right too, otherwise who would be safe from the utterings of a hysterical woman? … There is no doubt that some women do “romance”, especially if they are of a nervous disposition, imagining things which they would not really object to happen.’

  its Sittings with closed Doors.’ By 1860 women were usually excluded from the courtroom in any case, unless they were appearing as witnesses: ‘Divorce a Vinculo’, Once a Week.

  CHAPTER 13: IN DREAMS THAT CANNOT BE LAID

  ‘I am glad to say … pretty regularly.’ Letter CD to William Fox, 12 Feb 1859.

  Hydropathy; or, the Natural System of Medical Treatment: an Explanatory Essay. The work was dismissed in the establishment medical journal The Lancet as containing ‘nothing particularly new or clever’, being merely an example of a hydropathist ‘puffing his own wares’; but greeted in the Living Age as ‘luminous and able … by far the clearest and most rational exposition [of the water cure] that has yet been given’. Both Combe and Darwin recommended the work to friends: it was ‘rational & scientific’, said Combe; Darwin declared it ‘very good & worth reading’. Lane sent a copy to Dickens, who, less enthusiastically, replied with a letter of thanks for ‘your little book’.

  ‘the Love of my youth … being in the body.’ Letter from Catherine Crowe to Helen Brown, 25 Jan 1861, Crowe Collection, F191822.

  to migrate to Australia himself. Letter from Mary Butler to CD, Dec 1862.

  sailed for Queensland in 1863. Letter from J. P. Thom to CD, 14 Jan 1863.

  for ‘certain family considerations’. Probate of Elizabeth Drysdale (dated 14 May 1887), Edward Wickstead Lane (30 Oct 1889) and Margaret Mary Lane, née Drysdale (15 Aug 1891). Lady Drysdale died in Harley St, Edward in Boulogne, and Mary in Connaught Square, near Hyde Park.

  Charles became the spokesman … He was a witness for the defence when Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were prosecuted for obscene libel after publishing a book on birth control in 1877. In spite of his efforts, the pair were convicted of circulating material ‘liable to deprave and corrupt’, a test of obscenity devised by Sir Alexander Cockburn in 1868 and still in use today.

  Charles had two sons with Alice Vickery … Their sons were Charles Vickery Drysdale and George Vickery Drysdale.

  George shared a house … died three years later. Wills of George Drysdale (proved 10 Dec 1904) and George Drysdale (proved 21 Dec 1907). Both died in the same house in West Dulwich, Surrey. Susannah Hamilton Spring in census returns of 1891 and 1901.

  By the time that he died in July 1863 … See Joshua S. Getzler’s entry in ODNB.

  ‘one of the greatest social revolutions …’ The Times, 28 May 1867.

  Queen Victoria believed … an actress in Ireland. See Christopher Hibbert’s Queen Victoria: a Personal History (2000), p. 299.

  might be physiological after all. In 1854, the French alienist Jean-Pierre Falret had described a form of mania that he named ‘la folie circulaire’; it was the first identification of the illness now known as manic depression or bipolar disorder. When manic, the sufferers could experience a heightened sexual drive, wrote Falret, accompanied by the delusion that the objects of their lust reciprocated their feelings; they sometimes sought out sex with reckless abandon. When depressed, they were subject to profoundly melancholic, even suicidal feelings. Falret pointed out that victims of this circular madness often appeared normal: they did not experience thought disorder, and their extreme moods were often interrupted by lucid intervals. These symptoms corresponded to the sensations of being ‘crazed’ and then ‘crushed’ that Isabella recorded in her diary. Though the doctors who testified in the Robinson trial probably knew of Falret’s findings (they were reported in the British medical press in 1854), his theory did not support the case for Isabella’s madness: a victim of la folie circulaire might misinterpret sexual intentions, but she was not likely to hallucinate sexual acts.

  Dinah Mulock … A Life for a Life. A Life for a Life and George Eliot’s Adam Bede were the most borrowed library books of 1859, according to Sally Mitchell’s Dinah Mulock Craik (1983). Dinah Mulock married Georgiana Craik’s cousin, George Lillie Craik, in 1865, when she was forty and he twenty-five.

  ‘sensation novels’ of the 1860s. The narrator of The Serpent on the Hearth: a Mystery of the New Divorce Court (1860), for instance, cannot help ‘dwelling on the past … though there is an agony in that past, there is still for me an exquisite delight, and a pleasure, which I can, in writing this mystery only, again and again recall’.

  ‘It is curious … most unfeminine.’ See E. S. Dallas’s The Gay Science (1866).

  books about ‘lost women’ … silken falsehood’. Dinah Mulock’s ‘To Novelists – and a Novelist’, a review of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in Macmillan’s Magazine, 1861.

  ‘an adulteress in her heart’. HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

  he appealed to the House of Lords … Minutes of the Appeal Committee of the House of Lords, 25 Jun 1860, and HOR’s petition to withdraw appeal, 3 Jun 1861, HLA.

  When ordered to pay … North America. HOR’s rejoinder of 14 Apr 1862, in NA, J77/44/R4.

  ‘little Children & their kind …’ Letter from Bridget Curwen Walker to her grandson Thomas Walker, 3 Jan 1859, private collection (Ruth Walker).

  When Bridget died … Bridget Christian Walker’s will, proved 28 May 1859.

  estate passed to Frederick. When Frederick died in 1880, aged fifty-seven, the estate was valued at £41,000. It passed to John Walker, Isabella’s eldest brother, and his son, who subsequently barred the entail and sold it. Frederick left a widow, Henrietta, their two children, Isabella and Frederick, having predeceased him.

  Henry responded by insisting … HOR’s reply of 17 Apr 1858 in the Court of Chancery and his response of 1 Feb 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

  She continued to support Alfred … Papers in NA, J77/44/R4 and census return of 1861.

  on condition that he pay her the dividends … HOR’s response of 1 Feb 1862 and IHR’s reply of 4 Mar 1862 in NA, J77/44/R4.

  but by 1861 she had managed to pay … IHR’s petition to the House of Lords Select Committee on Appeals, 6 Jun 1861, HLA.

  Henry sold Balmore House … HOR’s rejoinder of 14 Apr 1862, in NA, J77/44/R4. Henry described the Talbot Square property – a four-storey terraced building – as a ‘small house’, which he was about to give up because of his business losses. In the spring of 1861, according to the census returns, he was resident there with Otway, Stanley, three servants, and two of his nieces. The house in Park Street cost £84 a year, according to the rejoinder.

  Otway left Tonbridge School … See Register of Tonbridge School (1893).

  ‘contrary and in defiance’ … HOR’s rejoinder of 14 Apr 1862, in NA, J77/44/R4.

  In 1863, seven years … Hotel on 27 June. HOR’s petition to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 2 Nov 1863, sworn in Paris before the British Consul and resworn in London a week later before being filed on 10 Nov, Court minutes, Robinson v Robinson & Le Petit. Both documents in NA, J77/44/R4.

  The splendid Victoria Hotel … See John Henry Sherburne’s The Tourist’s Guide; or Pencillings in England and on the Continent (1847).

  ‘rising room’. T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, A History of London Transport (1963).

  dissolved on 3 November 1864. Court minutes, Robinson v Robinson & Le Petit, NA, J77/44/R4.

  Her paramour in the hotel rooms … HOR’s petition to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 2 Nov 1863, in NA, J77/44/R4.

  son of an Irish nobleman … Lord Rossmore’s Things I Can Tell (1912).

  a survey of local primary schools. See Memoires de la Société academique de l’arrondissement de Boulogne-sur-Mer (1880).

  In Dublin in May 18
65 he married … Marriage reported in the Belfast News-letter, 4 May 1865. The ceremony took place at St Stephen’s Church.

  men to remarry that year. See Annual Reports of the Register-General of the Births, Deaths and Marriages in England (HMSO, 1878–1902).

  Having set up and sold on … Details of steam-packet venture in J. Forbes Munro’s Maritime Enterprise and Empire (2003).

  Henry reneged on a promise … In a letter from Tom’s sister, Amy Waters, to their sister Lucy on 19 Jun 1864, which describes Henry as behaving ‘most shamefully’, WG 9/6. This and all subsequent correspondence between members of the Waters family from Williams/Gray Papers at the Tairawhiti Museum and Art Gallery, Gisborne, New Zealand.

  Unlike the kindly Albert … When the census of 1871 was taken, Albert was staying in Westbourne Park with his eighty-nine-year-old widowed father. In 1881, Albert’s wife Julia, with her children Alice and Hubert, was taking the waters at Great Malvern.

  ‘HOR will not trouble …’ Letter from Helena Waters (née Robinson) to her daughter Lucy, 19 Jun 1864, WG 9/6.

  privately as ‘the Turk’. In letters from Helena to her daughter Lucy Waters, 31 Dec 1868, and from Carry Cowan to her sister Lucy Waters early in 1864. Carry added that Henry had just come back from a trip to the East, ‘very oleaginous minded … & very grey & mysterious old donkey’, WG 9/6. Albert, by contrast, was referred to lovingly by his nieces as ‘dear Albert’. He and his sister Helena were members of the Plymouth Brethren, an evangelical Christian sect founded in Dublin in the 1820s, and Albert was the chief negotiator when the Robinson firm agreed to build a flour mill, at cost price, for the paupers of Hereford (see Jean O’Donnell, John Venn and the Friends of the Hereford Poor, 2007).

  Stanley ‘seems very anxious …’. Letter from Helena Waters to Lucy Waters, 23 Nov 1863, WG 9/6.

  ‘Stanley has gone … unmanageable.’ Letter from Helena Waters to Lucy Waters, 25 Dec 1863, WG 9/6.

  Henry transferred Stanley … See Register of Tonbridge School (1893) and the Edinburgh Academy Register, which records Stanley’s attendance from 1864 to 1866.