Eneas Sweetland Dallas, the journalist who wrote the Times editorial defending Edward Lane, in 1866 published The Gay Science, a book that expanded on his theory of ‘the human soul as double; or at least leading a double life’, possessed of ‘a secret flow of thought which is not less energetic than the conscious flow, an absent mind which haunts us like a ghost or a dream’. In terms that anticipated Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Dallas described an intense and wayward inner world: ‘In the dark recesses of memory, in unbidden suggestions, in trains of thought unwittingly pursued, in multiplied waves and currents all at once flashing and rushing, in dreams that cannot be laid … we have glimpses of a great tide of life ebbing and flowing, rippling and rolling and beating about where we cannot see it’. Fifty or a hundred years later, Isabella might have located the source of her turbulence and desire in this wild and ungovernable secret realm, rather than in her organ of Amativeness or in uterine disease. Later still, in a return to the principles that had guided George Combe, neurologists would argue that the origins of mania and depression might be physiological after all.
Eneas Sweetland Dallas’s marriage fell apart in 1867 when his wife, Isabella Glyn Dallas, accused him of adultery after reading a letter that he had written to another woman. He denied the charge and demanded that Mrs Dallas sign a document saying that her accusations were based on insane delusions. When she refused, he left her. Seven years later she petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s desertion and adultery and was briefly interned in Holloway prison because she refused to give up documents pertaining to the case. Unlike Isabella Robinson, Isabella Dallas managed to hold on to her private papers, but she surrendered her liberty in their place. The divorce was none the less granted.
Two of the female authors who had frequented Moor Park went on to write novels about diaries. Georgiana Craik, with whom Darwin had sparred, published My First Journal in 1860. The novel opens with the eleven-year-old narrator’s uncle giving her a diary bound in scarlet, an initiation into the adult world. Having encouraged her to record her thoughts and feelings, he attempts to read what she has written. ‘Uncle Robert … tried to peep over my shoulder, and see what I was saying, but I wouldn’t let him, and shut up the book, and then he tried to steal it away from me, and I held it so tight he couldn’t get it, and we had such laughing about it.’ Dinah Mulock (who later married Miss Craik’s cousin George Lillie Craik, a man fifteen years her junior) wrote A Life for a Life (1859), a ‘double diary’ that alternated the narratives of a woman and the doctor with whom she falls in love. At the end of the novel, the female diarist’s new husband urges her to throw her journal into the sea, but she is reluctant: ‘It would feel something like dropping a little child into this “wild and wandering grave”.’
Wilkie Collins had already used secret diaries as vehicles for his stories, and in The Woman in White (1860) he included a scene of a diary’s discovery: when Marian Halcombe succumbs to a delirious fever, Count Fosco opens her journal and reads of her hatred of him. In Armadale (1866), Collins took up the question of why a woman would preserve a record of her dark deeds. ‘Why do I keep a diary at all?’ asks his villainous heroine Lydia Gwilt. ‘Why did the clever thief the other day (in the English newspaper) keep the very thing to convict him in the shape of a record of everything he stole? Why are we not perfectly reasonable in all that we do? Why am I not always on my guard and never inconsistent with myself, like a wicked character in a novel? Why? Why? Why? I don’t care why! … There’s a reason that nobody can answer – myself included.’
The brooding, dreaming, dissatisfied wife became a mainstay of the ‘sensation novels’ of the 1860s. ‘It is curious,’ observed Eneas Sweetland Dallas in 1866, ‘that one of the earliest results of an increased feminine influence in our literature should be a display of what in women is most unfeminine.’ Dinah Mulock defended books about ‘lost women’: it was better to read such stories, she contended, than ‘be swaddled up for ever in the folds of silken falsehood’.
Many of the unhappy heroines of these novels merely dreamt of escape, but Mrs Henry Wood’s bestseller East Lynne, serialised between 1860 and 1861, gave an unsettlingly sympathetic portrait of a wife who acted upon her adulterous wishes. Lady Isabel Carlyle, having married a country solicitor, becomes increasingly infatuated with a ‘fascinating’ young man, for whom she can no more suppress her desire ‘than she could suppress her own sense of being’. When separated from the object of her obsession, ‘a miserable feeling of apathy stole over her: a feeling as if all whom she loved in the world had died, leaving her living and alone. It was a painful depression, this vacuum in her heart which was making itself felt in its keen intensity.’ Lady Isabel is tormented by her dreams: ‘Oh, those dreams! They were painful to awake from; painful from the contrast they presented to reality; and equally painful to her conscience, in its striving after what was right.’ She betrays her husband in Boulogne-sur-mer. When he learns of her infidelity, he divorces her. She is haunted for the rest of her life by her longing for her children.
Henry Robinson was enraged by the Divorce Court’s verdict: the trial had left him out of pocket, humiliated, and saddled with a wife who, as the world now knew, despised him. The impression that the diaries had made upon him, he said, could never be eradicated: he would always believe that Isabella was an adulteress or at the very least ‘an adulteress in her heart’. Still pursuing his claims to the point of obsession, he appealed to the House of Lords in 1859 to overturn the verdict, but after two years was forced to back down because he was unable to afford the expense – a projected £400–£500 – of copying the legal proceedings and the journal afresh. When ordered to pay Isabella’s costs in the aborted case, he resisted. His position, he told the appeals committee, was one of ‘great hardship’, his business with the West Indies having incurred heavy losses during the civil war in North America.
The scandal had left Isabella estranged from her mother as well as her friends. Shortly after the discovery of the diary in 1856, Bridget Walker made a will in which she left her small personal estate (of less than £2,000) to her sons Frederick and Christian and her younger daughter Julia, the wife of Albert Robinson. The will made no mention of Isabella. Early in 1859, Bridget wrote a letter to Christian’s infant son in which she emphasised the importance of shoring up intellectual endeavour with faith: ‘little Children & their kind Teachers must take all the pains they can to teach & to learn; but they must not forget to pray to their Father in Heaven, to bless their labours’. When Bridget died in May that year, the Ashford Court estate passed to Frederick. It afterwards fell to him, as Isabella’s trustee and legal representative, to fight Henry on her behalf. Frederick filed a Bill in the Court of Chancery for the return of the railway stock that Henry had bought with Isabella’s money. Henry responded by insisting that Isabella had agreed that he purchase the stock and hold it in trust for their sons.
In her small rented cottage in Reigate, Isabella took two lodgers: Joseph Humphrey, a local carpenter in his thirties; and Emily Lucretia Wright, a four-year-old girl whose parents and brothers lived next door. Through this arrangement, Isabella gained a little extra income, as well as the company of a younger man and a child. In reply to the queries of the census-taker in 1861, she gave her marital status as ‘widow’ and knocked five years off her age. She continued to support Alfred, though he was often away from home – in the early 1860s he was apprenticed to marine engineers, first in Liverpool and then in Bolton, Lancashire. Her income rose by £30 in 1860, when she agreed to let Henry keep the railway stock that he had bought with her money on condition that he pay her the dividends; but by 1861 she had managed to pay only £100 of the £636 that she owed for the divorce trial.
Henry sold Balmore House in 1861, and rented two properties in London: a house in Talbot Square, Marylebone, where Otway and Stanley stayed with him in the holidays; and an office in Park Street, near Hyde Park, in which he employed a nephew, Tom Waters.
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Otway left Tonbridge School in 1861, aged sixteen, and promptly fled his father’s house to move in to his mother’s cottage in Reigate. Henry was furious: ‘contrary and in defiance’ of his wishes, he said, Isabella had ‘secretly exercised an influence’ on Otway, and ‘induced’ the boy to run away. Alfred, said Henry, had connived in Otway’s escape. When Otway turned seventeen in March 1862, he was entitled by law to choose where he lived. He remained with his mother.
In 1863, seven years after he began hiring agents to gather evidence against his wife, Henry at last obtained the proof of adultery that he required. A lawyer’s clerk called Louis Philip Vincent and a man called William Lines witnessed her sharing a room with a man at the Victoria Hotel in London on 19 and 20 June 1863; and another room, with the same man, at the Grosvenor Hotel on 27 June. The splendid Victoria Hotel, built in 1839, flanked the great Doric arch in front of Euston Square railway station; the Grosvenor, which dated from 1861, was a more modern and equally opulent establishment near Victoria station, equipped with a hydraulic elevator, or ‘rising room’. Isabella denied adultery, but Justice James Wilde, who, after Cresswell’s death, had become Judge Ordinary of the Divorce Court, decreed in June 1864 that the case was sufficiently proved. With no press coverage at all, the Robinsons’ marriage was dissolved on 3 November 1864.
The events of the past few years had not stopped Isabella from pursuing her desires, but they may have encouraged her to choose her partners more carefully. Her paramour in the hotel rooms in 1863 was Eugene Le Petit, the tutor with whom she had been besotted in Boulogne. Le Petit had no reputation to lose in England, and after the assignations in London was able to return to France and resume his life as a teacher. He played no part in the divorce proceedings. In Boulogne in the 1860s, he tutored the son of an Irish nobleman and in the 1870s conducted a survey of local primary schools.
At fifty-eight, Henry Robinson was at last free to take another wife. In Dublin in May 1865 he married Maria Arabella Long, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a former registrar of the Irish Court of Chancery. He was one of forty-eight divorced men to remarry that year. Having set up and sold on a company to run steam packets in Singapore and Batavia in the early 1860s, he continued to negotiate the sale of sugar mills from his office in London. His nieces, the daughters of a sister who lived in Brighton, recalled that their brother Tom had a ‘horror’ of working at Uncle Henry’s office, ‘and no wonder’. Henry reneged on a promise to help fund Tom’s passage to the Far East, where Albert Robinson was establishing an iron works (in Shanghai) and a dockyard (in Yokohama, Japan). He showed little loyalty even to his ailing and forgetful father. Unlike the kindly Albert, one of the nieces noted, ‘HOR will not trouble to do anything for the poor old man’. Henry’s sister Helena and her daughters referred to him privately as ‘the Turk’.
Stanley, the youngest of Henry and Isabella’s children, was permitted little contact with his mother. He had a difficult adolescence. He often stayed with his widowed aunt, Helena Waters, in Brighton in the early 1860s, but she and her daughters found him a burden. On a visit to their house during the school holidays, he was said to have propositioned one of the female lodgers. In November 1863, when Henry had just filed his second divorce petition, Helena wrote to one of her daughters that Stanley ‘seems very anxious to come back to us, poor child, and I shall not like to refuse to take him – but would much rather he was safe with someone else as he is a great care and trouble to me’. A month later she reported: ‘Stanley has gone to his Pater to London, and I hope will not return to me – latterly I have found him very unmanageable.’ Henry transferred Stanley from Tonbridge School to the Edinburgh Academy the next year. He disappears from the record after his graduation in 1866 – he may have left England to join one of the several Robinson enterprises overseas.
In the late 1860s, Henry moved back to Edinburgh with his new wife, and took over a yard in Glasgow on the River Clyde, which was replacing the Thames as the centre of iron shipbuilding. In 1869 he patented a design to improve the operation of dredgers, boats that used a revolving ladder of buckets to heave mud and silt off the riverbed.
Isabella left Reigate in the late 1860s and moved into a rented house on the village green in Frant, Kent. Henry’s sister Helena was living a few miles away, having moved with her family from Brighton to Tunbridge Wells. Despite all the disclosures of the diary and the court, Helena and her children seemed to think more highly of Isabella than of Henry. In April, one of Helena’s daughters wrote in the family journal that she had received a letter from Isabella: ‘a splendid letter writer!’ she reported, ‘and whatever her faults may be [she] is a good mother to her sons. I cannot but feel much interested for her.’ Helena invited Isabella to call on them. On 4 April, Helena’s son Ernest wrote in the family journal: ‘Mrs Robinson (Stanley’s Mother) came at Mother’s invitation to see us on Saturday and stayed to tea, having walked in from Frant a distance of about three and a half miles. I went down to the Station with her in the evening.’ On a return visit to her house in Frant, Ernest met Alfred, who had now qualified as a marine engineer.
In 1874, Alfred, at thirty-three, married the eighteen-year-old Rosine Cooper, the daughter of a silversmith. Two years after that he went into partnership with his younger half-brother Otway who, after dabbling in the cotton business in the 1860s, had joined the Merchant Navy. Otway and Alfred bought and sailed iron cargo ships: they purchased the Trocadero, the Frascati, the Alcazar and the Valentino in South Shields in the 1870s, and the Harley in Glasgow in the 1880s. Otway sometimes acted as master of the vessels, and Alfred as first engineer.
Henry moved back down to England, and by 1876 was living in Norwood, Surrey. ‘He has become quite an old broken down man,’ reported a niece. ‘He has almost lost his memory.’ Henry’s business, too, was faltering – ‘the firm is not making a penny just now’ – and in 1877, Tom Waters broke with his uncle: ‘He could not stand his idiotic interferences any longer.’ The second Mrs Robinson, to whom Henry’s sister Helena referred as ‘poor little “Marie”,’ bore her husband three sons.
Isabella, restless as ever and perhaps pursued by her reputation, moved from Frant to St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, and then to a house called Fairlight in Bromley, Kent.
Each of the famous fictional adulteresses of the nineteenth century – Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin – died at her own hand, her sins having engulfed her in grief and shame. Isabella too was killed by her own hand, though in less sensational circumstances. At her house in Bromley on 20 September 1887 she discovered an infected abscess on one of her thumbs. Three days later she died of septicemia, with Otway at her side. On the death certificate, he gave her age as seventy, and her marital status as widow. That December, Henry died in Dublin aged eighty.
Isabella left everything to Otway – she had made her will in 1864, soon after he alienated himself from his father by running away to join her. Otway did not marry. When he died in the seaside town of Whitstable, Kent, in 1930, aged eighty-five, he bequeathed his land and cottages and furniture (worth about £6,000) to a friend and neighbour called Alfred Harvey. He stated in his will that he wished to leave the remainder of his estate – about £7,000 – to the German conscripts wounded in the First World War; and, if that proved impossible, to those soldiers injured by British forces in the Boer War. He told Harvey that he was ‘fed up with England’, a phrase that Time magazine used as a headline when it ran a short article about Captain Robinson’s unusual bequest. Otway’s sympathies lay with the soldiers of countries defeated by the British Empire: men who, like him, had been dragged into wars of others’ making and left hurt and humiliated by fights that they had not started.
The original diaries and the copies made of them were, as far as we know, destroyed.
See Notes on Chapter 13
CODA
DO YOU ALSO PAUSE TO PITY?
In a court of law, the value of Isabella’s diary was du
bious. Like any book of its kind, it was a work of anticipation as much as memory – it was provisional and unsteady, existing at the edge of thought and act, wish and deed. But as a piece of raw emotional testimony, it was a startling work, an awakening or an alarm. The diary gave its Victorian readers a flash of the future, as it gives us a flicker of our own world taking shape in the past. It may not tell us, for certain, what happened in Isabella’s life, but it tells us what she wanted.
Isabella’s journal offered a glimpse of the freedoms to which women might aspire if they gave up their belief in God and in marriage – rights to possessions and money, to the custody of children, to sexual and intellectual adventure. It also hinted at the pain and confusion that such freedoms would entail. In the decade in which the Church relinquished its control over marriage and Darwin threw into deeper doubt the spiritual origins of mankind, her journal was a sign of the tumult to come.
In an undated diary entry, Isabella explicitly addressed a future reader. ‘One week of a new year already gone,’ she began. ‘Ah! If I had the hope of another life of which my mother speaks (she and my brother wrote kindly this day), and which Mr B urged us to secure, all would be bright and well with me. But, alas! I have it not, nor can possibly obtain that; and as to this life, anger, sensuality, helplessness, hopelessness, overpower and rend my soul, and fill me with remorse and foreboding.’
‘Reader,’ she wrote, ‘you see my inmost soul. You must despise and hate me. Do you also pause to pity? No; for when you read these pages all will be over with one who was “too flexible for virtue; too virtuous to make a proud, successful villain”.’ Isabella was quoting loosely from Hannah More’s play The Fatal Falsehood (1779), in which a young Italian count – a ‘compound of strange, contradicting parts’ – falls desperately in love with a woman promised to his best friend.