The next day, the doctor sat by her in the house, ‘and at length brought a book of old songs and sat very near me looking them over’. They went out to walk together, and in ‘our private bower’ they read a song by the radical and licentious French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger. Edward ‘talked of his health and prospects’, wrote Isabella, ‘but he was cold and mentally sad. It was the shrine of the idol I had once worshiped that was left to me.’ None the less, she claimed, ‘it was enough for my woman’s heart’. They walked until dark and then looked at some prints in his study. Here, at last, some of the old feeling was rekindled. After ‘one long, passionate, clinging embrace’, Isabella went late to bed. She was ‘much excited’, she wrote. ‘Dreamed of him all night, and longed and mused and glowed.’
In a further, undated entry, Edward was remote again. He ‘smoked a cigar’, Isabella recorded, ‘and we talked of man’s destiny in the future and the pre-Adamite world’. This was a contemporary debate about how to reconcile the claims of geology and of Christianity: if there had once been a world without human inhabitants, as geological findings indicated, there was reason to expect that the race would one day die out. But as Isabella talked to Edward of an empty past and an empty future, she noticed that he was erasing her from his past and future too. ‘There was romance in the circumstances in which we walked,’ she wrote, ‘but none in his manner. Never had he been colder. He forgot times and places in which I had been with him. He talked coldly, jestingly, almost selfishly; and the evening, that might have almost crazed me with its sweetness, that might have made me dream on for months on one image, was fated to chill at once, and I believe for ever, every lingering thought of my having in the least the power to interest him. I walked on by his side tired and crushed in spirit, but he knew it not.’
Isabella left Moor Park in early July. Two months later she visited again to take the Lanes’ three boys to the coast with her own children. Atty was ‘painfully delicate’ with a chest complaint, she wrote, and Edward and Mary were too busy with their guests to take him to the seaside themselves. Isabella returned the Lane children to their parents on 10 October, Edward’s thirty-third birthday, and stayed on at the spa for a few days. Mary had just given birth to a fourth son, Walter Temple, presumably named after Sir William Temple of Moor Park.
When Isabella caught Edward by himself in the evening of 10 October, she apologised for having written him an indiscreet letter. ‘I begged a thousand pardons and said how much I regretted it; I must have written it in a perverse mood, I said.’ He was forgiving: ‘It was all over now, he replied, and we parted with one of those long, caressing kisses that shake my very soul, and make me dream and long for hours.’
On the fourth day of Isabella’s visit – 14 October – she and Edward chatted in the drawing room until eleven in the evening. An elderly female patient sat behind them on the sofa, ‘too deaf’ to hear their conversation but loath to leave. Finally the old lady took herself up to bed. Edward, said Isabella, ‘after talking some little time appeared to return to his former kind feeling for me, caressed me, and tempted me, and finally, after some delay, we adjourned to the next room and spent a quarter of an hour in blissful excitement’. The experience – which again took place in the doctor’s study – was so intense, so pleasurable and unsettling, that Isabella came close to collapse. ‘I became nearly helpless with the effects of his presence, could hardly let him depart, wept when he bade me try to obviate consequences, and finally bade him a passionate farewell. I was alone, passion wasted and sorrowful, sleep was far from me that night; I tossed and dreamed and burned till morning, too weary and weak to rise.’
Isabella’s abject submission to Edward that evening, her delirious excitement in his arms and the exhausted melancholy that ensued, suggested that something new had happened between them – perhaps that they had for the first time consummated their relationship. By urging Isabella to ‘obviate consequences’, Edward seemed to be telling her to take steps to prevent a pregnancy; the most common post-coital safeguard, as described in George Drysdale’s manual, among others, was to douche the vagina with a syringe.
The next day, as if suddenly awakened to the dangers of his situation, Edward told Isabella that their sexual relationship was over. ‘The Dr came to my room,’ she wrote, ‘and sat a long while talking coldly of life, reputation, chances, caution, and my partner.’ She tried to appeal to his romanticism. ‘I cut a lock off his fine hair, said how much I had always loved him, spoke of his love-telling eyes and fine face and mouth; still he moved not; the interview closed without even a kiss.’ It was a humiliating scene, in which Isabella wooed the doctor as a man might a woman, and failed to win him. She concluded, with wounded pride, that Edward cared more for comfort and respectability than he cared for her. ‘I saw that, though I might have caused momentary passion, I was not wholly beloved, but that regard for reputation and ease were the moving springs of his conduct.’ Her words betrayed how much she had wanted from him: not just an affair, but all of his love.
In November 1855 the Robinsons again decamped to Boulogne, handing over Balmore House to the decorators for the winter. ‘It is very far from being finished, not being yet painted or papered; so that we must again leave it, to have it completed,’ Isabella explained to Combe; ‘indeed we shd have removed much sooner, but that Mr Robinson was anxious to get some necessary planting done, & that has delayed us till now.’
The fourteen-year-old Alfred had started to board at Queenwood School, Hampshire, a progressive college that specialised in the practical teaching of science. ‘We have every reason to be satisfied with it, on his account,’ reported Isabella to Combe, who had recommended the school. ‘He is much interested in Chemistry, & in several branches of physical science; & is learning singing & gymnastics; besides being permitted to amuse himself in the workshop, with carpenters’ tools, at leisure hours.’ The headmaster, she said, ‘speaks well of our boy’s general conduct; tho’ he is by no means forward in booklearning’. Otway and Stanley continued to be educated in Boulogne.
The Robinsons were together in France for the Christmas of 1855, during another winter of heavy rain and snow. As much as Isabella still thought of Edward, her dreams of him were no longer a refuge. For years he had allowed an air of ambiguity to attend their relationship, but now it was clear that he would always put his wife and family before her. The spell had been broken.
Isabella resumed her flirtation with Eugene Le Petit. This time she received more encouragement from the young tutor, and their closeness caught Henry’s attention. On 30 December he confronted her. ‘After tea Henry commenced a most unpleasant discussion,’ she recorded; ‘accused me of some intimacy with the Le P— family, of which he could not ascertain the extent; said he was aware of my writing and posting and receiving letters that he knew nothing about.’ He showed such ‘suspicion and ill-feeling’, she wrote, ‘that I was alarmed and truly distressed’. She admitted to her diary that the blame was ‘deserved, as I could not help feeling it’, and yet she believed that her wrongdoing was ‘excused by the harsh, narrow spirit of my partner’. She said what she could to disarm her husband’s suspicions, and tried to stand firm in the face of his accusations. They continued to argue until after midnight, by which time Isabella ‘had headache and nervous agitation’. Henry ‘seemed sorry at the consequence of this stormy altercation,’ she wrote, ‘and said many conciliatory things’.
Fleetingly, Isabella portrayed Henry as a vulnerable figure: worried, regretful, capable of compassion. She closed the diary entry on a note of defensive certainty: ‘It was too late then. Love, respect, complacency, friendship, patience, were all gone; nothing on my part remained but dread, weariness, disgust, and constraint. It is my children alone that keep me; once they leave the parental roof, and I will quit him.’
Isabella’s desire to escape had grown stronger over the years. She and Henry had ‘long been on the worst of terms’, she later told Combe in a letter, and she often pleaded with
her husband to release her, ‘to let the frequent separations between us become a permanent one’ and to let her live with her sons elsewhere. But he ‘would not hear me’, she said, ‘because he would have thereby lost my income’. On questions of property and self-interest, Henry was ‘utterly without probity’, Isabella said; he was ‘not what may be called sane’. She felt paralysed, caught between her attachment to her sons and her longing for freedom.
Isabella had come to believe that the institution of marriage was arbitrary and unjust, and early in 1856 she sent Combe a letter in which she described the marital bond as a ‘superstition’. Marriage was the subject of much contemporary debate. A Royal Commission had been set up to investigate divorce law in 1850, and reformists such as Caroline Norton were campaigning to improve the lot of married women. Mrs Norton set out the injustices of wedlock in a ‘Letter to the Queen’ in 1855. ‘A married woman in England has no legal existence,’ she reminded the sovereign: ‘her being is absorbed in that of her husband.’ A wife could not undertake legal proceedings, or keep her own earnings, or spend her own money as she wished. She ‘has no legal right even to her clothes or ornaments; her husband may take them and sell them if he pleases’. A wife’s identity was subsumed in that of her husband, even when the couple were in truth ‘about as much “one” as those ingenious twisted groups of animal death we sometimes see in sculpture; one creature wild to resist, and the other fierce to destroy’. Caroline Norton spoke from experience: when she had left her unfaithful, bullying, profligate husband in 1836, he had kept her children from her and had confiscated the money that she earned through her writing. ‘I exist and I suffer,’ she said; ‘but the law denies my existence.’
George Drysdale considered marriage ‘one of the chief instruments for the degradation of women’, as well as an unhealthy curb on sexual exercise. ‘A great proportion of the marriages we see around us,’ he wrote, ‘did not take place from love at all, but from some interested motive, such as wealth, social position, or other advantages … Such marriages are in reality cases of legalised prostitution.’
That spring Isabella fell seriously ill. She may have been suffering from diphtheria, which was rife in Boulogne between 1855 and 1857. The longest and gravest diphtheria epidemic on record, the disease took the lives of 366 people in the town, 341 of them children. The Lancet reported that English visitors to Boulogne were particularly affected by the outbreak of the mid-1850s, to the extent that the disease became known in England as ‘Boulogne sore throat’. Its symptoms were intensely swollen airways and high fever.
One day in May, Henry looked in on Isabella in her sickroom to find that she had become delirious. As she lay in her bed, restless and raving, he heard her muttering the names of other men. His suspicions again aroused, he went to her desk and lifted out the journal that she had brought with her from England. She had always kept her diary ‘private’ from him, he said later. Perhaps in her feverish distraction she had left her desk unlocked; perhaps she half-wanted him to find her secrets and blow their life apart. Henry opened her journal and read.
Henry read of his wife’s infatuations with John Thom and Eugene Le Petit. He read of the bliss that she experienced in the arms of Edward Lane. He read that in his own company she felt only contempt, disgust and dread, and that when Otway and Stanley were of age she would leave him.
The scene echoed the moment in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in which Arthur Huntingdon discovers his wife’s diary. The dissolute, unfaithful Mr Huntingdon wrests Helen’s journal from her: ‘I HATE him!’ he reads. ‘The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession but it is true: I hate him – I hate him!’ Huntingdon responds with glee to the evidence of his wife’s unhappiness and hatred. Having learnt from the journal that she plans to flee with their son and make a living as an artist, he confiscates her jewels and burns her paintbrushes and easels. ‘It’s well you couldn’t keep your own secret – ha, ha!’ he sneers. ‘It’s well these women must be blabbing – if they haven’t a friend to talk to, they must whisper their secrets to the fishes, or write them on the sand or something.’
Henry Robinson was horrorstruck by the diary’s revelations, but his shock swiftly resolved into an icy rage. As soon as Isabella was in a state to understand what was said to her, he informed her that he had taken possession of her diaries and letters. He was also removing Otway and Stanley from her, he said, and returning with them to England. He sailed for Folkestone with his sons, leaving Alfred in France with his mother. In Isabella’s desk at Balmore House, Henry found further diaries and other papers: essays, letters, notes and poems. He took them all.
See Notes on Chapter 6
BOOK II
OUT FLEW THE WEB
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott
From Alfred Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (1842)
7
IMPURE PROCEEDINGS
Westminster Hall, 14 June 1858
Henry’s counsel was the first to address the bench. ‘The Robinsons married in 1844,’ said Montagu Chambers QC, ‘Mrs Robinson being then the widow of a Mr Dansey, and possessed of between £400 and £500 a year, which was settled upon her to her separate use. After their marriage the Robinsons resided at Blackheath, Edinburgh, Boulogne, and in the neighbourhood of Reading. During their residence at Edinburgh in 1850 they became acquainted with Mr Lane, then studying for the law, who afterwards married a daughter of Lady Drysdale. He set up a hydropathic establishment at Moor Park, which is probably well known to your Lordships as having formerly been the residence of Sir William Temple.’
The three judges in the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes sat on a raised platform beneath a canopy hung with red curtains. Sir Cresswell Cresswell, a spindly sixty-four-year-old bachelor who wielded a lorgnette, was the Judge Ordinary, the official in charge of the court. Sir Alexander Cockburn, a short man of fifty-five with sharp, pouchy blue eyes, was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, the third highest-ranking judge in the land; he too was a bachelor but, as was widely known among his peers, he had two children (aged twelve and nineteen) by an unmarried woman. Though he cut a dignified figure at the bench, Cockburn was a renowned socialite who often scrambled into court just in time for the start of the proceedings at eleven. Sir William Wightman was the least senior of the three in the court but the most experienced in law and in wedlock: at seventy-two, he had served as a judge for twenty-seven years and been married for thirty-nine. The judges had decided to hear the Robinson case without a jury: they would arrive at a verdict themselves. They wore horsehair wigs and red robes trimmed with ermine, heavy in the heat.
The sun funnelled in to the courtroom through a glass turret and a ring of round skylights in its dome, bathing the long desks and benches below. The stench of the city was pushing in, too. In the heat wave that laid siege to London that June, a ‘Great Stink’ of sewage lifted off the fat banks of the Thames and sifted into the Houses of Parliament and the adjoining courts at Westminster Hall. The temperature climbed, to eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit by noon and ninety degrees by three o’clock.
Mr Chambers – a former Grenadier Guardsman and parliamentarian of fifty-eight, with thick, dark eyebrows and a genial, knowing manner – continued: ‘Mr Robinson was a civil engineer, and necessarily a good deal from town. He had commenced building a house for himself in the neighbourhood of Reading. When they went thither they renewed their acquaintanceship with the Lanes, and they used often to visit Moor Park together. Still more frequently Mrs Robinson went there alone; and it will be proved that the intimacy between the respondents attracted the attention of some of the patients and servants of the establishment. Mr Robinson, however, remained perfectly convinced of the fidelity of his wife, until at last, in the year 1857, during an illness of Mrs Robinson, he made an accidental discovery of an extraordinary n
arrative that at once opened his eyes to the impurity and infidelity of Mrs Robinson.’
Chambers and the other Queen’s Counsel wore black silk gowns, white shirts, white collar-bands, and bristly white wigs that lapped over their sideburns. They sat facing the judges’ bench, with their juniors behind them in gowns of coarse black cloth. A crowd of spectators filled the rest of the courtroom and the gallery that ran round the inside of the dome, the men in jackets, waistcoats and cravats, hats in their hands; the women in lace collars and wide, sprung skirts, their hair parted beneath flaring bonnets. Henry may have been among the spectators, though it is unlikely that either Isabella or Edward attended the trial; they would be kept informed by their lawyers of how the case unfolded. None of the chief protagonists was allowed to appear as a witness.
‘Mrs Robinson had been unwell,’ said Chambers, ‘and her husband then found several diaries in her handwriting which gave a most extravagant narrative of his wife’s impure proceeding. It would seem after Mrs Robinson became acquainted with Mr Lane at Edinburgh she, according to the diary, did not like him very much at first, but in a short time she admired him greatly. She even went into a detailed statement as to how he looked and how he was dressed. There were certain accounts of subsequent meetings at Moor Park, in 1854, which led to the conclusive inference that adultery had been committed.’
A few of the facts in Chambers’s synopsis were wrong. Edward Lane was already married when the Robinsons met him in 1850, and he was by then studying medicine, having qualified as a lawyer three years earlier. Isabella was attracted to him immediately, according to the diary; only later, in pique, did she write sharply about him. And Henry read Isabella’s diary in 1856, not 1857. Mistakes were often introduced in the relay of information before a trial – Henry had given his story to his solicitor, who had then instructed the barristers – but the error about the date on which he read the diary may have been deliberate. A husband was expected to act swiftly on discovering his wife’s infidelity, and a delay in seeking legal redress could count against him. ‘The first thing which the Court looks to when a charge of adultery is preferred,’ advised a divorce guide of 1860, ‘is the date of the charge relatively to the date of the criminal fact charged, and the date of its becoming known by the party alleging it.’ Any lapse of time would give rise to the possibility that Henry had condoned Isabella’s adultery, or connived with her to undo their marriage. Either would be a bar to divorce.