She apologised for her bleakness: ‘dear Mr Combe, I must entreat your pardon for all this. I think you will tell me that I am ill – & am therefore, an indifferent judge of these things; – or, that other minds, better constituted, feel not as I feel.’ But she had no one else to ask for help: ‘it is from you alone that I seek information, or reproof’.
Combe wrote back promptly: ‘Is your physical health sound?’ he asked. ‘An eye under the influence of jaundice sees all objects yellow, and a low-toned organism finds all creation dark & unconsolatory. This affects the orthodox believer as well as you. You may read in their diaries how, in this state of health, they despair of salvation; & become more miserable than you, for hell then yawns for them; & its gates at least, in your case are closed.’ Combe insisted that the believer’s fear of Hell was worse than her dread of the ‘land of annihilation’. He recommended that she stop thinking so much: ‘intellect alone does not fill up the vacuum of unsatisfied desire’. Pragmatically, if piously, he recommended that she sublimate her energies in charity work. To divert herself, he said, she must do something useful – like the nuns who worked in hospitals. ‘To be happy, we must love disinterestedly, and we must act out our love in good deeds.’
Combe may have had in mind the example of Florence Nightingale, an acquaintance of his great friend Sir James Clark, who in 1853 had escaped her constrained existence by training as a nurse with the Sisters of Charity in Paris. Miss Nightingale shared Edward Lane’s philosophy on medicine: ‘Nature alone cures,’ she said; ‘what nursing has to do … is put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.’ On 10 October 1854 – the day that Isabella’s diary recorded the kisses in the carriage – Nightingale set out from home on the first leg of her mission to the Crimea, where England, France and Turkey had been at war with Russia since the spring. The fighting was intensifying, and by the time she reached Constantinople the British troops had suffered a humiliating defeat at Balaclava. News of her work among the wounded reached England in early November.
A closer acquaintance of George Combe’s, however, had given way to her amorous feelings. In July 1854, Marian Evans eloped to Germany with George Henry Lewes, a married man long estranged from his wife. She and Lewes were figureheads of secular and progressive thought in Britain, and their behaviour threatened to discredit the philosophy of their circle. Combe was ‘deeply mortified and distressed’ when he learnt of the elopement. He was also surprised, since an examination of Miss Evans’s cranium in the 1840s had not indicated an excess of Amativeness (as she had herself expected), but of Adhesiveness. In November, the same month that he replied to Isabella’s letter, Combe wrote to a mutual friend: ‘I should like to know whether there is insanity in Miss Evans’s family; for her conduct, with her brain, seems to me like morbid mental aberration.’ She and Lewes had, ‘in my opinion, by their practical conduct, inflicted a great injury on the cause of religious freedom’. Their behaviour seemed to suggest that progressive thought led to moral anarchy.
George Drysdale, meanwhile, finally completed his book Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion, on which he had been working for four years. This work not only confirmed but celebrated the connection between free thought and free love. A 450-page guide to contraception, sexual diseases and population control, it was printed in December 1854 by the radical publisher Edward Truelove. The book was welcomed in the People’s Paper as a ‘Bible of the Body’, and condemned in the mainstream press as a ‘Bible of the Brothel’. To protect his family, George kept his authorship a secret: he was billed on the title page as ‘A Student of Medicine’. Concealed within the work was a memoir of George’s own tortured youth, told in the third person and presented as a case study.
Having been crippled by shame as a young man, George had now thrown off his inhibitions. He argued that sexual desire was natural, in men and women, and ought to be satisfied. ‘Every individual,’ he wrote, ‘should make it his conscientious aim, that he or she should have sufficiency of love to satisfy the sexual demands of his nature, and that others around him should have the same.’ He said that many women became ill because they did not have enough sexual intercourse: ‘unless we can supply to the female organs their proper natural stimulus, and a healthy and natural amount of exercise, female disease will spring up on every side around us’. George argued that in women, as in men, ‘strong sexual appetites are a very great virtue … If chastity must continue to be regarded as the highest female virtue; it is impossible to give any woman real liberty.’
Masturbation, George said, was as common among women as men, and as harmful. He noted the ‘pernicious effect’ of keeping the natural passions ‘pent up in the gloomy caverns of the mind’. He urged his readers to adopt contraceptive techniques, so that they could enjoy frequent intercourse instead of resorting to onanism. To prevent pregnancy, he recommended having intercourse eight days after menstruation (here he accidentally identified a highly fertile phase); or withdrawing the penis before ejaculation (though he warned that this method entailed the same health risks as masturbation); or rinsing out the vagina with warm water immediately after intercourse; or (his favoured procedure) blocking the neck of the womb with a sponge beforehand. He also advocated the sheep-gut condom, ‘an artificial sheath for the penis, made of very delicate membrane’.
To use any such device was to defy the Christian teaching that procreation, rather than pleasure, was the primary purpose of sex. George Drysdale defended contraception by reference to An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), an influential work by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, which warned that only positive checks on reproduction would avert a disastrous overpopulation of the Earth. Contraceptives, George argued, could eradicate poverty and venereal disease as well as erotic frustration. Malthus had recommended abstention from intercourse, but many Victorian liberals adapted his arguments to justify contraception. Among the neo-Malthusians who gathered at Moor Park in the 1850s were George Combe, the psychologist Alexander Bain and James Stuart Laurie, a schools inspector who had recommended John Thom to the Robinsons.
George Drysdale had composed an astonishingly frank and joyful manifesto for sexual freedom, unparalleled in Victorian literature, even if its premise was the evil of onanism. But it was of limited use to a middle-class married woman such as Isabella: she could not do as George had done, and pay others to satisfy her sexual needs.
Isabella rose at eight on 29 January 1855, ‘not very well’, having had an unsettling dream in which she found herself walking in a garden as a child with her mother, her father and one of her brothers. The dream reminded her that she was now ‘in middle life myself, my mother old and broken, my father in the grave, my own children growing up, it was my turn to go next, a few more suns would see me decrepit and dying’. She would ‘never fathom life’s great mystery’, she feared, but would only ‘become as though I had never been – my thoughts, my love, my dreamings, turned to clay! O God! What hollow mockery seemed the gift of life – how I wished that my work were done and that I could lay it down; it had not been to me a blessing.’
She blamed others for her bad start – ‘my youth was blighted by the bigotry and ignorance and want of thought of those who had the charge of my bringing up’ – but admitted that her own conduct had sealed her fate: ‘alas! Late in the day, I mourn over errors that I am unable to overcome; my soul is clouded by remorse and bitterness. I strive with but faint hopes of success to bring up my three sons, who (with all my love for them) ought to be in better hands.’ The diary could lure Isabella into morbid self-absorption, draw her into its dark reflections, so that she could see nothing but emptiness ahead and behind: ‘The past a desert, the present thorny, the future horrible; eternity a blank.’
Isabella’s birthdays often brought on maudlin thoughts. ‘Youth is well nigh gone,’ she had written as she turned thirty-nine: ‘I shudder at old age, which I must face!’ On 28 February 1855, the day after her forty-second birthday, she ‘dreamt very painfully of a f
inal walk with Dr Lane, of an anguished parting, of a discovery and wandering in shame and wretchedness in the world’. This was the first diary entry in which she alluded to the fear of being discovered – she imagined herself cast out from her home to wander the Earth as a fallen woman. ‘Woke (1st of March) alarmed and miserable,’ she added, ‘and had headache all day.’
Ten years earlier, a sexual scandal had threatened to disgrace the Curwen branch of Isabella’s family. Isabella’s first cousin Isabella Curwen, also named after their rich and beautiful grandmother, was married in 1830 to the Rev. John Wordsworth, rector of Moresby, Cumberland, and the eldest son of the poet William Wordsworth. She was ‘a treasure, pure-minded and amiable’, according to her new aunt Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘painfully shy … and always remarkably modest’. In 1843, after giving birth to her sixth child, Isabella Wordsworth fell ill and, on the advice of two obstetricians, she repaired to Rome. She asked her husband to bring their children to her, which he did in the summer of 1845. In December that year their four-year-old son contracted a fever and died. John accused his wife of causing the boy’s death, and removed the remaining children from her. She wrote in despair to her parents in Cumberland, revealing to them that her husband had been sharing a house in Rome with a sixteen-year-old Italian girl. John had given the girl a pledge, in writing, that he would marry her upon the death of his sick wife, and that he would settle his estate on her and their future children.
Henry Curwen was appalled by the ‘brutal manner’ in which his daughter was being treated. He wrote to his son-in-law insisting that he restore the children to their mother and return at once to Cumberland. If not, he threatened, he would expose the story of John’s sexual delinquency to his bishop. Curwen also wrote to William Wordsworth – ‘the poor old poet’, as he described him – to tell him of his son’s infamous behaviour. Both Henry Curwen and William Wordsworth altered their wills to settle their money directly on their grandchildren instead of on the errant John, and Curwen made arrangements to buy from the Italian girl the pledge of marriage that John had given her. In effect, he was paying off the woman who had it in her power to bring shame on the family, while blackmailing his son-in-law into behaving himself. John Wordsworth complied with most of Curwen’s demands and not a whisper of the scandal reached the public. Isabella Wordsworth stayed in Italy, while her children were dispersed to various schools. She died at Bagni di Lucca in 1848. John Wordsworth remarried three times. His misconduct remained a secret: he has been remembered, by his father’s biographers, as a dutiful dullard.
The containment of adultery – for the sake of the adulterer’s children, spouse, parents and wider family – was standard practice among the gentry. Within circles such as these, where reputation counted for so much, the families of a betrayed wife and her husband would work furiously to hush up any misdemeanours. The standards were different when the transgressor was the wife, but the principle remained: if the story was kept within the family, the crime could be overcome. Only an overt sign of sin – a written pledge or confession – might prove impossible to hide.
Isabella continued to correspond with John Thom and with Edward Lane. Though she endured a long period of silence from the doctor, she told her diary that a ‘sweet, mournful little note’ in April ‘quite made amends’ for his neglect. She replied to this note with a ‘nice, long, but rather sad letter’. She imagined that she and he were confiding, in muted messages, how much they missed each other.
She told Combe that she was following his advice by occupying herself with her children’s education. ‘I have found more employment in actively superintending the progress & conduct of my sons than when they were at school in England,’ she wrote; ‘& I am much more cheerful in consequence. They have several masters during leisure hours, for whom I assist them to prepare.’ Among these new masters was a young French tutor called Eugene Le Petit. Despite his indifferent looks, Isabella found him beguiling. She arranged to take lessons from him herself.
In the morning of 9 April, Monsieur Le Petit corrected some translations that he had set Isabella. He ‘did not leave me till 12,’ she wrote; ‘there was something very gentle and almost cheerful in his manner, and he said they had enjoyed yesterday afternoon. He looked better than usual, and I found that with my usual clingingness of disposition I was beginning to think more of his presence and approbation than conduced to my peace.’ She tried to knock some sense into herself: ‘Foolish heart, ever thus giving away its interest and regard for those who care not one iota about thee further than their interest is concerned.’
Two months later, shortly before the Robinsons were due to return to England, Le Petit gave a lesson to the boys and then helped Isabella with a translation. He stayed late to finish it, she noted on 9 June, and ‘the time flew by’ as they had so much to say about religion, music and a new book by Frederick Gretton, a translator of Latin. Le Petit ‘was very gay and friendly’, wrote Isabella, ‘and owned that he should miss us sadly’. She added, ‘I felt this was more likely to be my case than his. The utter frigidity of his conduct rather surprises me: others (handsomer than he is) have found attraction in my company, and where I have shown so much and unvarying kindness as I have to him, and where gratitude is evidently felt, it is a marvel that a warmer feeling does not sometimes come uppermost.’ Unknown to Henry, Isabella had presented Le Petit with a piano worth £30, among other gifts. She told herself that the tutor’s coolness was for the best: ‘Temperaments most widely differ,’ she wrote, ‘and after all it is happy every way that he has got the moderation.’
Isabella and the boys returned to England in June to move in to Balmore House, the huge white villa that Henry had built at Caversham. The name ‘Balmore’ carried a tinge of grandeur by association with Balmoral, Aberdeenshire, where the castle that Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort had commissioned in 1853 was still under construction. Henry’s house was Italianate in design, and equipped with a greenhouse, an ornate conservatory, wrought-iron balconies and terraces, a coach house and stables. It was bedded on a foundation of concrete on chalk rock, with internal double walls and a ventilating shaft. The ground floor contained three reception rooms, as well as a study and a boudoir (a private room for Isabella); on the upper floors were eight bedrooms, two dressing rooms and a bathroom; in the basement the servants’ hall and a kitchen.
As soon as Isabella reached the house, Henry went to see Edward Lane at Moor Park to arrange for her to visit the spa as a patient. Perhaps she was suffering from a recurrence of the ‘uterine disease’ with which she had been diagnosed in Blackheath in 1849; or was claiming as much in order to see Edward again. Henry paid the doctor £10 10 shillings to give Isabella a fortnight’s water therapy.
Isabella and her eldest son, Alfred, arrived at Moor Park in time for tea on Thursday 21 June, and were warmly welcomed by Lady Drysdale and Mary Lane. Edward got home later. He ‘looked pleased to see me’, said Isabella, but she noticed that he seemed uneasy in her company, only half-heartedly taking up where they had left off the previous autumn. ‘I went with him to see sunset, and reached the hill in time to see it. How often had I wished to see it with him, but now he was ill, cold, low, and sad, and could not enjoy it; into garden, sat in bower, renewed the love of old times, but not so excitingly.’ Back at the house, they conversed sedately in his study until ten.
‘I value his beauty and prize his accomplishments,’ she wrote in an undated entry. ‘Yet, having none of those gifts myself, I must be content to be disregarded – overlooked, if not disliked. I should do the same in the case of a plain or unattractive person who might be even fond of me. ‘Tis only human nature to do so.’
As ever, Isabella could not control herself in sleep: ‘the night in happy dreams united me to my soul’s idol. I was with him as of old, and even more tenderly united, for my love was in great measure returned. I had sacrificed everything for him, and could so have died. Hour after hour I thus dreamed, and, on awaking, I lay in a delicious state of
semi-consciousness, half-realising all that I wished to enjoy, and with the latter lines of Shelley’s Epipsychidion floating in my ears – true and false – my hopes, wishes, and the past half-realised bliss, blended in one sweet picture. Ah! Why not wholly realised?’
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s notorious poem culminated in a fusion between the poet and his mistress – ‘Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,/ And our veins beat together’ – but Isabella’s enigmatic reference to her ‘half-realised’, or half-enacted, bliss seemed to indicate an incompleteness in her physical union with the doctor: something short of orgasm, perhaps, or consummation. Although her diary entries of October 1854 had implied that she and Edward had intercourse – in the glade, the study, the carriage – they could equally well have described intense kisses and caresses. ‘All day,’ she wrote, ‘this dream haunted my brain. “I never loved any one as I did thee, both mind and body,” I had said in my dream, and in my waking moments the same idea was breathed still in my ear.’
On Sunday 24 June, Isabella and Edward took a walk to Mother Ludlam’s Cave, and sat talking on a bench near the well. ‘At length,’ she wrote, he ‘took me alone up the very valley where we had first enjoyed the happiness of loving’, but the landscape was ‘changed now and so was he’. They ‘talked only commonplace’.